Media played an important role in framing the 2015 European refugee situation as a crisis. For example, the Council of Europe report (DG1(2017)03) documents a sharp reorientation in media reporting from ‘careful tolerance’ to ‘fear and securitisation’. Following institutional theory, corporations’ reply to the refugee situation is embedded in a given societal context, that is most actually encapsulated by media sentiment: while what is (and could be) done is imposed and options are limited, there is still some room for different corporate strategies.

We identify four major communication strategies corporations use to deal with the refugee issue: i) taking into account the social dimension (employment, integration, donation, encouragement), ii) considering the refugee issue in terms of business forecasting (opportunity, threat, neutral), iii) doing both, or iv) ignoring the issue altogether. Assuming a link between media coverage and CSR response, the European 2015 refugee situation provides a unique case. Based on content analysis of the 2015 and 2016 annual reports for the largest German and Swedish listed corporations, we analyze patterns in the reporting strategies of the corporations.

The tentative findings of the paper indicate that - in response to the changed media sentiment - German as well as Swedish corporations to a lesser extent reported on the business case of the refugee situation, many restoring to avoidance. However, to complicate things, the findings also indicate an increase in altruistic charitable response the the refugee situation in both Germany and Sweden. Moreover, our findings indicate that patterns vary between German and Swedish corporations to some extent.