The communication of the ethical position of an organization

Citation

Elving, W.J.L. (2011), "The communication of the ethical position of an organization", Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 16 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ccij.2011.16816aaa.002

The communication of the ethical position of an organization

Article Type: Editorial From: Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Volume 16, Issue 1

The corporate landscape changed again last year. The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico showed the vulnerability of organizations claiming a green strategy, like BP did at the beginning of this century. With their Beyond Petroleum program, BP claimed that doing business had changed dramatically and that they wanted to be the alternative energy supplier. The strategy revealed on their web site (18 October 2010) read: “BP’s strategy is to create value for shareholders by producing energy in a way that is affordable, secure and doesn’t damage the environment”. With the knowledge we have on the crisis of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, we can conclude that this is not quite true, or cannot be true. Should BP have this removed from their web site? Or maybe a more devastating conclusion is that their strategy is not in line with their operations.

Many organizations struggle with the demands that society is putting on them. In Carroll’s and Buchholtz (1999) view, organizations have economic, legal, ethical and discretionary or philanthropic obligations to society. In a globalized, connected and critical society, isolated issues can become a reputational risk, and all actions of organizations – above all their corporate communication – is at stake.

In a recent conference paper, we listed all kinds of identity washing techniques used to promote a sustainable and green image of a brand and organization. Visually, flowers coming from factory chimneys or an automobile fueled from a tree are the only two examples of identity washing (Elving and van Vuuren, 2010). Terms like biodegradable, free-range, recyclable and cruelty-free are used to create the image of being responsible. Yet without proper legislation, certification or control these words are meaningless, as many web sites already imply (www.stopgreenwashing.org; www.greenwashingindex.com; www.greenwashing.net).

In western countries, NGOs very effectively force organizations to adopt sustainable ways of doing business. For instance, Greenpeace in The Netherlands is focusing on two energy companies who plan to build a new power plant using coal as fuel on the shore of the Wadden Sea – a UNESCO World Heritage site (http://whc.unesco.org). In the anti-campaign, Greenpeace used adjusted commercials of the two companies to raise questions about their intentions and their commitment to sustainability. Similar campaigns around other issues have led (for example) to promises that only sustainable chocolate will be sold, or that low-priced meat offers will not be used in an advertising campaign. In this interconnected world, these anti-campaigns can be not only very successful, but also make organizations very vulnerable.

If an organization (as so many do these days) has an extended program on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and is helping society, then it wants to tell its stakeholders. CCIJ has already published a variety of articles on this subject, in which web sites and other corporate communication materials are analysed (Nielsen and Thomsen, 2009; Sones et al., 2009; Birth et al., 2008; Podnar and Golob, 2007; Schultz and Wehmeier, 2010). Given the activist NGOs and skeptical consumers, it seems that firms need to carefully communicate with their stakeholders about how corporate responsibilities should be handled. Many organizations claim that sustainability and responsibility is at the heart of their business principles. This claim can be made easily, but if the reality is not in line with it, the damage might be enormous, since reputation is based on the fundamentals of transparency, trustworthiness, reliability and credibility (Fombrun and Gardberg, 2000).

Within the CSR literature, a sound, developed, engaging and careful CSR communication is often regarded as being supportive for the reputation of the organization, whereas communicating CSR issues without integrating them into the organizational identity is seen as delegitimizing. Additionally, from an inter-organizational perspective, CSR communication and the ethical positioning of organizations bear not only opportunities, but also risk and numerous challenges.

This is the theme of a unique event on CSR communication in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and call for papers for a special issue of Corporate Communications: An International Journal. A group of six European scholars organize this event in the vibrant city of Amsterdam. By combining a PhD course, a conference and a special issue, we hope to attract many researchers working within this field, to highlight empirical and theoretical foundations on the ethical positioning of organizations, and also provide practitioners’ perspectives. In this issue, you will find the first call for papers for this event, which will take place in October 2011.

More generally, CCIJ is increasing in reputation. Recently, the journal was ranked in the highest category in the Danish journal rankings, and in this, we hope that the Danes set the scene for the rest of the world to follow! Furthermore, CCIJ has appointed its first book editor, Chiara Valentini of the Corporate Communication Centre of the University of Aarhus, Denmark. Valentini is taking the responsibilities of managing the new book review section of the journal, which we aim to include in every issue. So, if you have recently published a book within our field, please do get in contact with Valentini to have your book reviewed in CCIJ (chv@asb.dk).

In this new issue, we have a variety of papers, starting with Ansgar Thiessen and Diana Ingenhof who developed an integrative model of crisis communication based on the theory of structuration which adds to the debate on communication during crisis situations.

Subodh Bhat and Camilla Jane Burg’s paper is on the corporate parent brand’s heritage in the form of the name, slogan or other reference, which helps a corporate spin-off increase its stock market value. They found that using a parent brand’s name, a more direct reference to parent brand heritage, did not result in higher spin-off than using other parent identifiers such as tag lines or slogans. Shareholders and investors may not be considering a corporate parent’s brand equity in evaluating the investment value of a spin-off, in contrast to repeated findings of the importance of a parent brand’s equity in a consumer’s evaluation of a brand extension.

The third paper is on the disclosure of capital intellectual of Portuguese companies. Manuel Castelo Branco, Catarina Delgado, Cristina Sousa and Manuel Sá examine annual reports and web sites on intellectual capital disclosure. They did not find large difference of disclosure between the annual reports and web sites, contrary to findings of others.

Roland H. Bartholmé and T.C. Melewar present a remodeled corporate visual identity construct that takes a holistic sensory perspective and proposes the corporate sensory identity construct as a more adequate and flexible reflection of current business reality. This paper contributes to the further understanding of the complexity of corporate identity management by addressing additional sensory dimensions apart from visual identity management. Moreover, by stressing the particular relevance of music and sound, this paper stimulates the integration of the auditory dimension as additional facet of a communication tool kit.

The last paper within this issue is a paper by Renata Fox, in which she analyses companies’ naming practices as a sociolinguistic process. In the paper, Fox explains how (socio)linguistics can help naming practices as interacting with cognition, society and social knowledge, and as a product of defined social circumstances. Once perceived as accredited within organizational studies, (socio)linguistics, as the paper suggests, will become an integral part of theorizing both organizational discourse, with corporate naming as a part of that discourse.

I hope you will enjoy reading these papers and that you benefit from the conclusions and insights these authors present.

Wim J.L. Elving