No abstract

PurposeThe paper aims to understand what kinds of internal messages concerning a company's environment‐related corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities would be most effective in engaging employees in implementing an organization's environmental strategy. Furthermore, the paper explores how environmentally active employees could be utilized as internal communicators to spread environmental activity internally.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reports on findings from interviews (n=12) conducted within a multinational case company that has recently adopted an active approach to communicating its environmental policy internally.FindingsEmployees whose work does not have a clear environmental impact can find corporate environmental policies distant, and would rather see simple, practical messages about what they can do for the environment in their jobs. Furthermore, employees might ignore environmental considerations if they are too busy at work. To encourage environmentally active employees to share their ideas, it might be useful to assign clear environmental contact persons to each department, because employees may be unwilling to approach colleagues directly with environment‐related suggestions.Practical implicationsAt a time when most companies are striving to be greener, the findings help organizations understand how they can communicate effectively to encourage all employees to consider the environment in their jobs. In addition, the results point to how organizations can better utilize environmentally active employees for internal promotion of environmental strategies.Originality/valueThe paper extends research on CSR communication to consider internal communication within an organization. In addition, it adopts the perspective of employees to bring new insight into their role in CSR‐related activities.

This paper extends the scope of environmental communication studies from the public sphere to the organizational context with two main aims: first, to understand what barriers there are to individual environmental behavior and second, to suggest how these barriers can be overcome. The findings, based on 13 interviews in Finnish organizations that have implemented an environmental advocacy campaign, the WWF Green Office, support previous findings on individual and societal barriers and, in addition, suggest four barriers specific to the organizational context. To overcome different individual, organizational, and societal barriers, the findings suggest that environmental communication efforts in organizations should, for example, focus on small issues, concretize how action matters, and involve employees at all times. The paper concludes by arguing that while campaigns such as the Green Office can increase environmental awareness in organizations, they are largely ineffective in addressing the serious environmental challenges we face.

No abstract

Climate change is one of the main contemporary challenges, and it has been argued that there is a need for strong environmental leadership to achieve global climate deals. Few studies, however, have questioned how 'environmental leadership' is demonstrated in political and media discourse. To fi ll this gap, this paper adopts a critical discourse analytical (CDA) perspective to explore how the EU and newspapers in six European countries discursively construct environmental leadership in relation to the EU climate package that was introduced and ratifi ed in 2008. The fi ndings suggest that environmental leadership is a struggle for meaning that shifts over time, from fi rst, aiming at emissions reduction targets that are higher than others' versus targets that would be stringent enough to effectively fi ght climate change to second, the means used to reach the reduction targets versus the ends that are reached. This shift over the period of year 2008 seems largely due to signifi cant changes in the social context.