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This paper aims to investigate the informativeness of rhetorical impression management patterns of CEO letters and examines whether these rhetorical features affect financial analysts’ forecasting behaviour.

The authors use textual analysis on a sample of 526 CEO letters of US firms and apply factor analysis on individual linguistic style measures to identify co-occurrence patterns of style features.

The authors identify three holistic style patterns (assertive acclaiming, cautious plausibility-based framing and logic-based rationalizing) and find that assertive rhetorical feature in CEO letters is negatively related with the dispersion of financial analysts’ earnings forecasts and positively associated with earnings forecast accuracy. CEOs’ use of a rationalizing rhetorical pattern tends to decrease the dispersion of financial analysts’ earnings, whereas a cautious plausibility-based rhetorical position is only marginally instrumental in getting more accurate earnings predictions.

Whilst impression management communication is often theorized as manipulative and void of real information content, the findings suggest that impression management serves both self-presentation and information-sharing purposes.

This paper elaborates on the co-occurrence of style characteristics in management communication and is a first attempt to validate the external ramifications of holistic style profiles of corporate narratives by focusing on an economic target audience.

Using composite style measures of the letter to shareholders, the purpose of this paper is to elaborate dominant rhetorical profiles and qualify them from an impression management (IM) perspective. In addition, the paper examines how institutional differences affect rhetorical profiles by comparing intensity and contingencies of rhetorical profiles of UK and US companies.

The authors use automated text analysis to capture linguistic style characteristics of a panel of UK and US companies and employ factor analysis to determine rhetorical profiles. Next, the authors investigate company-level and country-level determinants of a company’s rhetorical stance.

The authors document three prominent rhetorical profiles: an emphatic acclaiming stance, a cautious plausibility-based framing position, and a logic-based rationalizing orientation. The profiles represent distinct self-presentational logics and have different readability effects. Rhetorical IM is stronger in US companies, but higher expected scrutiny in the US institutional environment affects sensitivity of rhetorical postures to message credibility and litigation risk, while marginally increasing the less litigation-sensitive defensive framing style in US letters.

The authors develop replicable archival-based measures of prominent rhetorical IM traits of the shareholder letter, based on composite style features. The authors argue that they are qualitatively different from content-based IM proxies. The authors investigate their institutional and organizational relevance by examining how company features and country-level differences affect incentives and constraints for style-based rhetorical IM.

The authors unpack the critical role of rhetoric in developing and justifying the New Zealand (NZ) government's coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown strategy.

Using Green's (2004) theory of rhetorical diffusion, the authors analysed government documents and media releases before, during and after the lockdown to reconstruct the government's rationale.

The blending of kairos (sense of urgency and “right” time to act), ethos (emphasis on “saving lives”), pathos (fear of disruption and death) and selective use of health-based logos (shrinking infection rates), prompted fast initial adoption of the lockdown. However, support for the rhetoric wavered post-lockdown as absence of robust logos became apparent to the public.

The authors implicate the role of rhetoric in decision-makers’ ability to successfully elicit support for a new practice under urgency and the right moment to act using emotionalisation and moralisation. The assessment of the NZ government's response strategy provides insights decision-makers could glean in developing policies to tame the virus.

This study’s analysis demonstrates the unsustainability of rhetoric in the absence of reliable information.

The authors demonstrate the consequences of limited (intermittent) evidence and disregard for accounting/accountability data in public policy decisions under a rhetorical strategy.

Many charismatic leaders are renowned for their exemplary rhetorical skills and powers of persuasion and their sense of drama. Interpreting the charismatic relationship as a drama invokes a cast of characters, with the charismatic leader and followers as main protagonist and co‐protagonists, respectively, and competitors and opponents as antagonists. Viewing the charismatic relationship from this perspective also suggests tensions and dilemmas that the leader, in particular, must resolve for the drama to have an outcome mutually acceptable to the actors and their audience. This paper describes the kinds of impression management techniques used by Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, a well‐known charismatic leader, to resolve the dilemmas and tensions resulting from the dramatic nature of the charismatic relationship.

In the UK, major IT public procurement projects regularly fail at significant cost to the taxpayer. The prevalence of these failures presents scholars with a challenge; to both understand their genesis and to facilitate learning and prevention. Functional approaches have revealed numerous determinants of failure ranging from procurement specifications to risk escalation, but true and definitive causes remain elusive. However, since failure is not itself an absolute truth, but rather a concept which is reached when support is withdrawn, the survival of a project depends on there being sufficient belief in its legitimacy. We use critical hermeneutic methods and the conceptual lens of legitimacy to reveal powerful legitimating influences that enable and constrain action, but which are not analysed in the retrospective government inquiries that determine lessons learned.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how energy companies discursively construct climate change when integrating it into their overall business strategy.

This linguistic study uses a quantitative/qualitative approach to investigate three instances of recent climate disclosure, climate strategy reports, by the energy majors Statoil (now Equinor), Suncor Energy and Total. The qualitative analysis focuses on how keywords and expressions function in their immediate linguistic context. The discussion takes the socio-political and business context of the companies into account.

The paper finds that the reports discursively construct climate change in different ways. Total presents climate change primarily as a responsibility the company is ready to take on; Suncor Energy presents it primarily as a business risk; and Statoil as a business opportunity. In the material as a whole, however, the risk representation is the most prevalent.

The material is relatively modest; however, the three reports represent the first comprehensive accounts of how energy players fit climate considerations into their overall strategy. The analysis is based on three search terms (responsibility, risk and opportunity). Further studies should include a broader range of words that may be semantically related to each approach.

The study can inform corporate strategy discussions and indicate the rhetorical implications of discourse-related choices in climate disclosure.

The study deals with very recent corporate disclosure involving an emerging discourse, climate strategy reporting. As the reports represent responses to investor engagement, the findings should also be relevant for studies involving stakeholder perceptions.

It is commonly recognized that nowadays social and environmental aspects, and more in general stakeholder‐linked issues, are becoming important corporate value drivers. It is also rather clear that there is a strong relationship between the stakeholder perspective, and a number of concepts and practices which stress non‐financial aspects of company behavior, such as corporate social responsibility (CSR), sustainability (including environmental respect) and corporate governance. Accordingly, these emerging company ideas and attitudes are here collectively referred to as “stakeholder responsible (or oriented) approaches”. Current literature underlines especially the importance and difficulty of the implementation phase of these approaches into concrete company actions, but it seems to largely overlook the impact which the reporting process has on both concepts and company actions. On the basis of an ad hoc theoretical model, the paper aims to provide insights into the “active role” subtly played by stakeholder oriented reporting (e.g. social and sustainability statements) in constructing and reconstructing the underlying ideas and notions, as well as company behaviors in this field. Far from being a neutral and “passive” mirror of the stakeholder responsible approach implemented, reporting carries out the decisive and constitutive role to concretize abstract concepts, and to visualize company activities, thus substantially contributing to make the “stakeholder philosophy” viable and reliable.

A perceived misalignment between socially responsible fans and football club management has recently led to a major crisis during the annual meeting in 2021 of Bayern Munich, one of the largest professional football teams in Europe. In an unprecedented scenario, Bayern Munich fans demanded that management drop one of its largest sponsors due to alleged violation of human rights. The goal of this paper is to examine this particular phenomenon, as it not only demonstrates a discrepancy between the social organizational identity and its image, but more importantly, how it impacts legitimation strategies and the fans' loyalty attitudes towards the club.

Using the underlying concepts of legitimacy and loyalty, this conceptual model paper proposes two frameworks for social responsibility in professional football clubs: (1) analyzing how the (mis-)alignment between organizational identity and image impacts fan loyalty and (2) depicting four different types of social responsibility strategies to align organizational identity and image.

The authors identify various theoretical concepts that influence organizational identity and image in and for social responsibility and combine the two critical concepts of legitimacy and loyalty to categorize the social responsibility strategies for professional football clubs.

Both frameworks advance the understanding of the decision-making behind social responsibility strategies and also synthesize the current literature to offer conceptual clarity regarding the varied implications and outcomes linked to the misalignment between organizational identity and image.

This study aims to examine personal factors that drive the initiation of an online firestorm, an online collaborative attack against a brand that usually occurs when a brand fails or engages in misconduct.

A structured questionnaire is used for data collection. Via an online panel, 303 questionnaires are completed. Hypotheses are tested using structural equation modelling.

Civic engagement and, to a lesser extent, narcissism explain intentions to initiate online firestorms. Individuals’ inherent concern for others and for ethical issues prompts them to punish a brand publicly, with the expectation that other individuals will follow and that the brand will feel compelled to react. Misconduct-related appraisal factors, such as severity, proximity, moral inequity and outrage, can amplify the effect of civic engagement.

Future research should investigate whether the findings hold for different types of misconduct, cultures and other forms of narcissism.

By providing managers with a better understanding of the motivations for launching an attack, this study offers guidance on managing a brand when an online firestorm occurs.

Whereas previous research has focused on external drivers of online firestorms, this study builds on the prosocial behaviour literature to analyse the individual characteristics prompting the initiation of an online firestorm.

This systematic literature review (SLR) aims to examine the extent of academic knowledge of sustainability materiality research. There is no academic review of this field; therefore, this study aims to close this research gap.

The paper systematically reviews the existing literature on sustainability materiality research. Papers were qualitatively classified and analysed in accordance with the theoretical underpinning, research methods and academic themes of sustainability materiality research.

The findings of the review show that scholarly work on sustainability materiality has increased exponentially since the 2010s. In terms of research methods, scholars have examined sustainability using content analysis techniques and qualitative approaches. A common theoretical foundation was missing, but an increasing number of articles have been anchored to stakeholder theory. The academic themes have progressively enriched empirical evidence on the evaluation of materiality in sustainability information.

This review can be useful as an academic basis to open avenues for strengthening theoretical and empirical research on new emerging issues regarding double materiality and dynamic materiality.

This paper conducts the first SLR of academic knowledge on sustainability materiality research. Eight academic themes are proposed to classify sustainability materiality. Thus, it is an aid to future research in this area.