Search results

This study contributes to the literature on hypocrisy in corporate social responsibility by investigating how organizations adapt their nonfinancial disclosure after a social, environmental or governance scandal.

The present research employs content analysis of nonfinancial disclosures by 11 organizations during a 3-year timespan to investigate how they responded to major scandals in terms of social, environmental and sustainability reporting and a content analysis of independent counter accounts to detect the presence of views that contrast with the corporate disclosure and suggest hypocritical behaviors.

Four patterns in the adaptation of reporting – genuine, allusive, evasive, indifferent – emerge from information collected on scandals and socially responsible actions. The type of scandal and cultural factors can influence the response to a scandal, as environmental and social scandal can attract more scrutiny than financial scandals. Companies exposed to environmental and social scandals are more likely to disclose information about the scandal and receive more coverage by external parties in the form of counter accounts.

Using a theoretical framework based on legitimacy theory and organizational hypocrisy, the present research contributes to the investigation of the adaptation of reporting when a scandal occurs and during its aftermath.

Society is asking for a humanized business strategy. In this paradigm-shifting, the first change is in companies’ discourses. This paper aims to analyze an organization’s discourse involved in a scandal (environmental crime) from the perspective of corporate social responsibility and organizational spirituality.

This study conducted an interpretive qualitative study using discourse analysis encompassing Samarco, a joint venture between Vale S.A. and BHP Billiton. The collapse of the Fundão dam in Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil, caused the spillage of approximately 56 million cubic meters of iron ore and silica tailings, among other particles affecting 41 cities and three indigenous reserves degrading 240.88 hectares of Atlantic Forest, until reaching the Atlantic Ocean. This paper analyzed the company website and all public documents available, both before and after the crime, Code of Conduct (2014), Annual Sustainability Report (2014) and Actions Report (2016), Biennial Report (2015–2016 and 2018–2019) and the Transaction and Conduct Adjustment Term (2016). This study chose the data considering the series of judicial processes in course, environmental crime’s delicacy, and its consequences for Samarco employees, stakeholders, affected communities and families.

The spiritual elements underlined in organizational discourses are different from the corporate practice in their everyday interactions with their stakeholders. As a result, the organizations’ identity seems problematic. The company has failed to provide an environment that encourages spirituality.

This is the first article to analyze a company’s discourse involved in a scandal through the lenses of corporate social responsibility and organizational spirituality. It contributes to the research concerning irresponsible management and the rhetorical use of spirituality in management.

With the investigation of the US stock market response to the Volkswagen Dieselgate, this paper aims to empirically demonstrate a case of dissemination of corporate scandals and events through industries and supply chains (i.e. inertial effect).

Individual event studies were conducted in the analysis of the market value fluctuations of 33 companies of the American automotive industry upon the disclosure of the scandal.

Results show that the fraud held by the German automaker spread to surrounding companies within the industry and supply chain levels of analysis, contaminating market values and costing around 6.44 billion dollars to American firms.

Building on the efficient market hypothesis and on the literature on supply chain management, empirical evidences support the conceptualization of the inertial effect as a valid rationale to address the dissemination of events through companies not directly involved. In that sense, the study contributes to an emerging and promising research field within the supply chain management literature. Beyond that, its interdisciplinary approach may inspire future research in the applicability of the event study methodology in similar contexts, as well as of alternative forms to empirically test other theoretical constructs.

The authors study the effect of increasing environmental awareness on shareholders' activism. Specificallly, this study aims to examine whether growing environmental awareness is reflected in more aggressive environmental shareholder proposals.

This study uses the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster as an exogenous event that increased shareholders' environmental awareness. This study analyzes the spill’s effect on the tone of proposals about environmental issues and nonenvironmental topics.

After the disaster, the tone of environmental proposals (i.e. the treatment group) is significantly more negative. In contrast, the tone of nonenvironmental proposals (i.e. the control group) is unaffected. This study interprets this finding as direct evidence that the oil spill led to increased shareholder environmental activism through proposals that targeted the environmental risks surrounding the business more aggressively. By contrast, this study finds no effect of the oil spill on the tone of managers' responses to the proposals, consistent with managers refraining from emphasizing environmental threats.

Anecdotal evidence and recent studies suggest a link between environmental disasters and shareholder pressure for corporate change. However, no prior research has investigated the channel through which shareholders could have exerted such pressure or has looked for direct evidence of it in the negotiations between shareholders and managers. By finding such evidence in shareholder proposals, this study fills in this gap.

The purpose of this paper is to get a deeper understanding how not-for-profit organizations (NPOs) discursively legitimize their corporate engagement through cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) in general, and particularly how they construct legitimacy for partnering with firms involved in the commodification of water. The paper seeks to shed light on the values embedded in these discursive accounts and the kind of societal effects and power relations they generate, and the authors are particularly interested in understanding the role of modernity in shaping their responsibilities (or lack of them) via various technologies and practices

Drawing on critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995), the authors analyze the discursive accounts of three water-related CSPs involving the three biggest bottled water producers in the world (Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Danone) and three major non-profits (The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the World Wildlife Foundation and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

The NPO’s legitimate their corporate engagement in the water CSPs through the use of two global discourses: global governance discourse and the global climate crisis discourse. Relief from responsibility is achieved through three processes: replacement of moral with technical responsibility, denial of proximity and the usage of intermediaries to whom responsibility is outsourced.

This paper explores the processes of legitimizing accounts for CSPs, particularly focusing on NPO discourse and their use of CSR elements and the consequences of such discursive constructs, and this has received little to no attention in previous research.

This paper investigates the legitimacy tactics used in the annual reports of UK listed companies in the aftermath of major corporate scandals.

We carried out a content analysis of annual reports of 19 companies that have been involved in corporate scandals with a view to understand how firms communicate negative scandals affecting them.

The findings reveal that firms use a wide range of legitimisation strategies in the manner that contribute to shape disclosure communications concerning negative incidents. For instance, some firms may offset the negativity linked to an incident by rendering such explanations amidst positive information.

Contrary to earlier studies conducted on accounting scandals, the authors incorporated extensive corporate scandals such as human rights violations, controversies concerning child labour, environmental scandals, corruption, financial embezzlement and tax evasion.

This study aims to explore how corporate discourses enact legitimation strategies aimed at repairing pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimacy types (Suchman, 1995) after a scandal involving sustainability, namely, the Volkswagen’s 2015 diesel scandal.

By drawing on the discursive nature of legitimacy, this study conducts a critical discourse analysis to identify how the scandal is depicted and which semantic, grammatical and lexical features characterise discourses. It then relates discourses and their features to legitimation strategies that help repair diverse types of legitimacy.

To repair pragmatic legitimacy, discourses on a few actors and processes enact strategies of creating monitors and avoiding panic. Such discourses include grammatical features only. Discourses on the event, actors, processes and topics of apology, trust and integrity aim to repair moral legitimacy. Enriched with grammatical and lexical features, they mobilise disassociation, excuse, justify and restructure strategies. Discourses on the event, actors, processes and topics of corporate qualities, history and future strategy help repair cognitive legitimacy by enacting an avoiding panic strategy. Grammatical, lexical and semantic features characterise such discourses.

The study reveals the potentials of critical discourse analysis to bring out from texts practical modes of communicating, and specifically those discourses and features of discourses that serve legitimacy purposes.

This study offers insights into the connection among discourses, relegitimation strategies and legitimacy types by combining the discursive nature of legitimacy with critical discourse analysis. It also contributes to the growing literature on how organisations face the legitimacy challenges raised by scandals involving sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the corporate behavior of Volkswagen in its emissions scandal. It describes and analyzes a complex ethics dilemma within the purview of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate sustainability (CS) and examines how this dilemma impacts critical stakeholders, thus offering several “opportunities to learn” for professionals.

The case takes a stakeholder perspective, applying Cavanagh et al. (1981) and Gao’s (2008) ethical judgement framework. It is situated within a qualitative approach to textual analysis. Social actors, topics and evaluative statements were identified and grouped into broader categories.

Six major stakeholders were directly affected by Volkswagen’s behavior: customers, investors and shareholders, the US Environmental Protection Agency, German authorities, European institutions and society-at-large. Stakeholder concerns were condensed into three dominant themes: economic, legal and environmental. According to the ethical judgment framework, Volkswagen corporate behavior showed ethical problems, theoretically demonstrating that under no ethical principle was Volkswagen’s actions justifiable, even under instrumental justifications.

The analysis was primarily based on corporate material and news media reporting. Consequently, diverse managers’ prospectives and opinions are not entirely captured.

This paper offers several “opportunities to learn” for corporate communication professionals.

The focus on stakeholder perspectives allows professionals to take an outside-in approach when evaluating the impact of corporate actions on stakeholders’ interests. The case analysis through Cavanagh et al. (1981) and Gao’s (2008) ethical judgment framework provides a practical theoretical instrument to assess corporate behaviors that can be used both as pre- and post-evaluations of corporate actions on CSR and CS issues.

This paper aims to examine whether Twitter messaging can help mitigate the harm corporations suffer in the aftermath of ethical scandals.

This paper applies Web Application Programming Interfaces (API) on the Guardian and New York Times news archives to find corporations that suffered scandals between 2014 and 2019, revealing 92 publicly listed companies in the UK. Using Twitter API and the Python library, Getoldtweets, this paper extracts historical, pre-scandal – i.e. pre-2014 – tweets of the 92 firms. The paper topic-models the tweets data using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). This paper then subjects the topics to multidimensional scaling (MDS) to examine commonalities among them.

LDA reveals 10 topics, which group under 5 themes; these are product marketing, urgent signalling of “greenness”, customer relationship management, corporate strategy and news feeds. MDS suggests that the topics further congregate into two meta-themes of future-oriented versus immediate and individual versus global.

Provided they are sincere and legitimate, corporations’ tweets on global issues with a green agenda should help cushion the impact of ethical scandals. Overall, however, the findings suggest that Twitter messaging could be a double-edged sword, and underscore the importance of strategy.

The paper offers a first exploration of the relevance of corporate Twitter messaging in mitigating ethical scandals.

This paper aims to outline and discuss how to incorporate a practical‐focused rules approach to guide strategic processes to enhance competitiveness and growth, while improving performance measurement and accountability of green organization initiatives.

An examination of theoretical perspectives was undertaken to determine the relevance of the theory to guide business flexibility and decision making to enhance competitiveness and growth, while enabling the implementation of a green agenda, in a changing business environment.

Understanding the importance of flexibility, strategic processes would enable individuals and organizations to better respond to green factors associated with changing business opportunities and customer demands.

The paper advocates that an understanding of the focused rules concept can enable business leaders to create green yet practical business strategies to build organizational flexibility, which in turn will lead to enhanced competitiveness and growth opportunities.

The paper presents an overview of the literature which enhances both personal knowledge and understanding at the theoretical and practical levels, enabling business leaders to gain insight into the inherent factors that may be influenced to advance organizational environmental goals and objectives.