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The purpose of this paper is to longitudinally explore the symbolic and substantive ideological strategies located in ENGIE’s environmental discourse while considering the specific negative media context surrounding the company’s environmental activities.

Thompson’s (2007) and Eagleton’s (2007) theorizations are used to build an extended ideological framework to analyze ENGIE’s environmental talk from 2001 to 2015.

ENGIE drew extensively on a combination of symbolic and substantive ideological strategies in its annual and sustainability reports while ignoring several major issues raised in the press. Its substantive ideological mode of operation included actions for the environment, innovation, partnerships and educating stakeholders/staff, while its symbolic ideological mode of operation used issue identification, legal compliance, rationalization, stakeholders’ responsibilization and unification. Both ideological modes of operation worked synergistically to cast a positive light on ENGIE’s environmental activities, sustaining the ideology of a company that reconciles the irreconcilable despite negative press coverage.

This paper develops the notion of environmentally friendly ideology to analyze the environmental discourse of a polluting company. It is the first to use both Thompson’s and Eagleton’s ideological frameworks to make sense of corporate environmental discourse. Linking corporate discourse with media coverage, it further contributes to the burgeoning literature that interpretively distinguishes between symbolic and substantive ideological strategies by highlighting the company’s progressive shift from symbolic to more substantive disclosure.

This paper aims to explore how a Malaysian palm oil company responded to the pressure for change towards sustainability in their sustainability reporting of negative incidents and in actual sustainability practices.

The study used qualitative methodology through an interpretive case study of a palm company. The study gathered primary and secondary data via semi-structured interviews with key organisational members and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), informal conversations, focus groups, document/annual report content analyses and observations. Symbolic and substantive management was used as the theoretical lens to explain the findings.

After experiencing a series of negative events regarding their social and environmental performance, the case company responded by using selective disclosure and a symbolic/legitimising strategy to address the majority of recurring negative events. In actual practice, the company changed structurally but policy-implementation gaps remain despite these changes. Strategically, the company changed in terms of its expansion policy but remained unchanged in traceability issues. The increased awareness of sustainability in the company’s culture appeared to suffer in favour of profit and cost/efficiency considerations that remain prominent. Both substantive and symbolic changes were found in both reports and practice but were more inclined to be symbolic.

The study provides guidelines for companies changing towards sustainability in both practice and reporting, in their effort to contribute to sustainable development goals.

The study provides evidence of symbolic and substantive changes as complementing activities instead of a dichotomy, which was mostly assumed in previous literature and suggests companies adopt a combination of these depending on the severity of sustainability-related issues, level of scrutiny and cost/efficiency considerations.

Companies' voices on social justice issues, such as racial justice, gender equality and LGBTQ rights, have become increasingly prevalent. To contribute to current knowledge around corporate communication on social justice, this study aims to understand the differential effects of three types of corporate social justice statements – symbolic statements, substantive statements on external actions and substantive statements on internal actions.

A between-subjects experiment was conducted (N = 502), with different types of statements as the independent variable and corporate reputation and perceived corporate relationship-building efforts as outcomes. The three dimensions of perceived authenticity (i.e. perceived benevolence, transparency and commitment) were included as parallel mediators.

This study found that compared to symbolic statements, substantive statements on external or internal actions generated higher perceived authenticity on at least one of the three dimensions, which in turn, led to a more positive corporate reputation and perceived relationship-building efforts. Substantive statements on external actions and on internal actions also had differential indirect effects on the outcomes through different dimensions of perceived authenticity. Partisanship did not have a moderating effect on the mediating effects of perceived authenticity.

This study highlights the importance of authenticity in corporate social justice communication and reveals practical implications about how businesses should communicate with publics when engaging in social justice issues.

This study is among the earliest efforts to examine the effects of different corporate social justice statements. It contributes to the existing literature by demonstrating the impacts of perceived authenticity on publics' evaluation of companies and opens up an avenue for future research to further examine various authenticity dimensions.

This study aims to address how the ISO 14001 standardisation and certification process improves substantive performance in small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through the development of an environmental management control system (EMCS).

A qualitative cross-case interview design with those responsible for the implementation of an environmental management system (certified to ISO 14001) in SMEs is adopted to inductively “theorise” the EMCS.

The design and monitoring of environmental controls are often beyond the scope of the SMEs’ top management team and include extra-organisational dimensions such as the external audit and institutional requirements. This suggests more complex control pathways for SMEs to produce EMCS that primarily function as packages and are broader than the analytical level of the firm. Here, controlling for environmental performance exists at strategic and operational levels, as well as beyond the SMEs’ boundaries.

Various internal controls are put forward for SME owner-managers to meet environmental targets (e.g. gamification and interpersonal communication strategies). This builds upon a broader accountability perspective wherein formalised hierarchical control is only one route for ensuring sustainable action within the ISO 14001-certified SMEs.

This study contributes to a more sustainable society through developing an understanding of how environmental sustainability is substantively managed by SMEs to improve performance for current and future generations.

This paper, to the best of the author’s knowledge, is one of the first to establish how SMEs control for environmental sustainability from empirically derived evidence. In doing so, it provides an example of the EMCS for the SME context.

Firms are increasingly accountable for their suppliers' social and environmental practices. Nonmarket stakeholders nowadays do not hesitate to confront buying firms for their suppliers' misconducts by mobilizing demonstrations, social media campaigns and boycotts. This paper aims to develop a typology of response strategies by targeted firms when they face such contentions and to empirically investigate why these strategies vary among those firms.

Drawing on social movement and stakeholder salience theories, the authors develop a set of hypotheses linking their typology of four response strategies to three key contextual factors – nonmarket stakeholder salience, nonmarket stakeholder ideology and the target firm reputation – and examine them using a vignette-based experiment methodology.

The results suggest that nonmarket stakeholder salience significantly impacts the nature of response (reject or concede), whereas the nonmarket stakeholder ideology is significantly related to the intensity of response (trivial or vigorous). Interestingly, the firms' reputation was found to have no significant effect on their response strategy when they faced stakeholder contentions.

This paper adds both theoretical and methodological value to the existing literature. Theoretically, the study develops and tests a comprehensive typology of response strategies to nonmarket stakeholder contentions. Methodologically, this study is original in leveraging a vignette-based experiment that allows establishing causal factors of response strategies following a supplier sustainability misconduct.

Interest in developing institutional explanations of political and economic behavior has blossomed among social scientists since the early 1980s. Three intellectual perspectives are now prevalent: rational choice theory, historical institutionalism and a new school of organizational analysis. This paper summarizes, compares and contrasts these views and suggests ways in which cross‐fertilization may be achieved. Particular attention is paid to how the insights of organizational analysis and historical institutionalism can be blended to provide fruitful avenues of research and theorizing, especially with regard to the production, adoption, and mobilization of ideas by decision makers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of ownership of community pharmacies on the perception of organizational identity and its relationships with organizational performance.

A survey was carried out on a sample of pharmacists working in community pharmacies in Portugal. The sample comprised 1,369 pharmacists, of whom 51 percent were owner-managers. Measures of pharmacies’ normative (community health oriented) and utilitarian (business oriented) identities, identity strength (clear and unifying), substantive (stockholder focused) and symbolic (society focused) performance were included.

Both owners and employed pharmacists rated the normative identity of pharmacies higher than the utilitarian identity. Compared with employed pharmacists, owners perceive a lower level of utilitarian identity, the same level of normative identity, and higher levels of identity strength. Normative identity and identity strength predicted symbolic performance. Normative and utilitarian identities and identity strength predicted substantive performance. The relationship between utilitarian identity and substantive performance was significant among owner pharmacists but not among employed pharmacists.

The limitations include the use of perceptive measures and the focus on the individual level of analysis.

In order to improve pharmacies’ performance, pharmacists who manage community pharmacies are challenged to reconcile tensions arising from the co-existence of business and community health identities and from their own agency (self-serving) and stewardship (altruistic) motives.

This study draws on institutional, identity and stewardship theories to understand how pharmacists, owners and employees, view the identity of community pharmacies and how identity relates to organizational performance.

This chapter reviews three analytical perspectives – ‘structural’, ‘network’ and ‘cultural’ – on the study of power and their implications for theorizing elites. It builds on this initial theoretical review by developing a critical realist approach to the study of organizational elites out of the structurally based perspective identified in the first section of the chapter. The explanatory potential of this critical realist approach is then illustrated through two case studies of ruling elites embedded in contrasting historical, political and social contexts. The final section of the chapter provides a discussion of the wider implications of these case study analyses for understanding and explaining the ‘new feudalism’ which is emerging in advanced political economies and societies.

The sociological and socio-legal literatures on social movements have identified three main types of “legal framing” in contemporary social movement discourse: collective rights framing, individual rights framing, and nationalistic legal framing. However, it is unclear from the current research how movement actors decide which of these framing strategies to use, under what circumstances, and to what effect. In this article, I offer a model for future empirical research on legal framing, which (1) distinguishes legal framing by its argumentative structure, ideological content, and remedy; and (2) analyzes how a social movement’s internal culture and institutional environment constrain the symbolic utility of particular legal frames and shape the movement’s legal framing strategy. I argue that the alternative approach offered here will help theorize how social movements strike a balance between the institutional pressure to reproduce dominant ideologies and the internal pressure to reform those ideologies. This perspective thus helps build socio-legal theory on the relationship between legal framing and social subordination, and on the conditions under which movements will be able to inflect legal language with insurgent social movement values.

What is the place for personal agency and a morally legitimate civic order in a world of technical calculation? The historically recent opposition between systems management and personal agency and dignity is placed in context. “Technicism” is defined as an ideological extension of technical thinking to inappropriate domains and discussed in relation to positivism. The implications for social planning are discussed in detail.