Business and Climate Change: The Climate Response of the World's 30 Largest Corporations

Ihlen, Øyvind

doi:10.1080/17524030902916632

Cited by 97 publications

(101 citation statements)

References 30 publications

(28 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…The incongruence between the companies' public statements on climate change and their real actions has already been highlighted in the literature (Domenec 2012;Ihlen 2009;Jones and Levy 2007). However, the communication strategies underlying these public statements have not been studied in depth.…”

Section: Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Companies' efforts to legitimize their activities and improve their image on climate change issues may be similar to greenwashing, i.e., the transmission of erroneous information on climate practices and performance in order to positively influence the stakeholders' perceptions and the company's relationships with them (Laufer 2003;Boiral 2013). Ihlen (2009) has described a certain inconsistency in the official environmental discourse of the 30 largest corporations in the Global Fortune 500. His analysis of the use frequency of a number of keywords (climate, global warming, Kyoto\IPCC, GHG emissions\carbon\CO 2 ) demonstrates that the four companies (Ford, BP, Chevron, and General Motors) which use these concepts the most often also figure on the list of America's worst greenwashers (Ihlen 2009).…”

Section: Corporate Disclosure On Climate Changementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ihlen (2009) has described a certain inconsistency in the official environmental discourse of the 30 largest corporations in the Global Fortune 500. His analysis of the use frequency of a number of keywords (climate, global warming, Kyoto\IPCC, GHG emissions\carbon\CO 2 ) demonstrates that the four companies (Ford, BP, Chevron, and General Motors) which use these concepts the most often also figure on the list of America's worst greenwashers (Ihlen 2009). Domenec (2012) has also observed such a tendency in his analysis of the letters that Exxon, Chevron, and BP sent to their investors and stakeholders each year between 2003 and 2009.…”

Section: Corporate Disclosure On Climate Changementioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Strategies for Climate Change and Impression Management: A Case Study Among Canada’s Large Industrial Emitters

2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper explores the justifications and impression management strategies that industrial companies use to rationalize their impacts on climate change. These strategies influence the perceptions of stakeholders through the use of techniques of neutralization intended to legitimize the impacts of corporate operations in the area of climate change. Based on a qualitative and inductive approach, 10 case studies were conducted of large Canadian industrial emitters. Interviews were conducted with managers and environmental specialists (n = 32). Public documentation was also collected when available. This study identifies six main neutralization techniques that industrial emitters use to rationalize their impacts: self-proclaimed excellence, promotion of a systemic view, denial and minimization, denouncing unfair treatment and deceptive appearances, economic and technological blackmail, and blaming others. The paper develops a better understanding of corporate arguments and strategies aimed at influencing the perceptions of stakeholders, including policymakers. The study also contributes to the literature on impression management by shedding light on new strategies and techniques of neutralization used by managers to shape the perceptions of stakeholders on socially sensitive issues.

show abstract

Section: Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Corporate Disclosure On Climate Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Corporate Disclosure On Climate Changementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Strategies for Climate Change and Impression Management: A Case Study Among Canada’s Large Industrial Emitters

2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A macro analysis examines organization in terms of common stages (Bhatia, 2008;Mason & Mason, 2012) or topics (Ihlen, 2009;Kohut & Segars, 1992). Similar stages and topics are often proposed, which implies a convention for the register.…”

Section: Studies About Csr Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disclosing Compliant and Responsible Corporations: CSR Performance in Malaysian CEO Statements

Rajandran

Taib

2014

GEMA Online

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In Malaysia, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is relatively new but corporations are required to engage in and disclose CSR. CSR reports are a common register for disclosure and their CEO Statements provide an overview of CSR performance in these reports. This article studies how language features in Malaysian CEO Statements disclose CSR performance. A corpus containing 27 CEO Statements from 2009 to 2011 from 10 Malaysian corporations was analyzed. The analysis was grounded in critical discourse analysis (CDA), which employed Social Actors and ATTITUDE from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and interviews with corporate representatives to understand the ideology of CEO Statements. The analysis proposes three strategies of categorization, evaluation and chronology to disclose CSR performance because performance is oriented to four categories (community, environment, marketplace, workplace) and a positive evaluation, which are centered on the past. The disclosure reflects the ideology of CEO Statements, which promotes corporations as agents of positive social change. Through CEO Statements, corporations disclose compliance to the government and stock exchange and responsibility to their other stakeholders. CSR disclosure in CEO Statements helps to strengthen economic legitimacy through social legitimacy. This study is useful for people practicing and teaching corporate communication because it encourages them to consider the meaning implied by language features (evaluative and non-evaluative lexis, modifiers, tenses and prepositional phrases, besides exact numbers) in corporate registers. Yet, the corpus was limited to 27 CEO Statements and future research should expand the corpus to represent CEO Statements from other years, countries and languages.

show abstract

“…From an organizational communication perspective, climate change is the object of inquiry along three broad fronts. First, scholars have noted how climate change is framed by corporate discourse, such as annual reports and advertising campaigns, often to reiterate corporate legitimacy in the context of rapidly changing environmental conditions (Ihlen, 2009). Livesey (2002a), for instance, offers competing methodological tools of rhetorical criticism and Foucauldian discourse analysis to trace how oil giant ExxonMobil's discourse on climate change is designed to preserve the primacy of economic values and the mythical "free market," rather than broad based regulation, and subtly discourages radical grassroots organizing.…”

Section: Sustainability As Corporate Communication Of Environmental Imentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainability and Sustainable Development

Mitra

2016

The International Encyclopedia of Organizational Communication

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Sustainable development is defined as development that meets the needs of the present without jeopardizing future generations' growth and prosperity, and involves the consideration of social, environmental, and economic resources (Brundtland, 1987). By extension, sustainability may be conceived of as ongoing processes of organizing across government, nonprofit, and for-profit entities to enable sustainable development. Conceptually, then, sustainability and sustainable development are concerned with the long-term management of human and nonhuman resources, rather than short-term priorities (e.g., shareholder returns), and provide an alternative organizing framework to mainstream capitalism. Whereas "soft" versions of sustainability envision an inclusion of long-term logics in mainstream capitalism, more "radical" versions argue that extant political economic systems of organizing are severely flawed and need to be revised entirely.The issue of sustainability is both old and new in organizational communication scholarship. On the one hand, the field has long centered the complex relations between organizations and their impacted societies as one of its key problematics. Over the years, organization-society relationships have been probed in different ways, such as through corporate social responsibility (CSR), employee/labor relations, worker participation, and work-life balance issues. Nevertheless, organizational communication research has rarely embraced the term "sustainability" itself, even when studying the management of scarce resources for organizing systems. Recently, however, as interdisciplinary attention has settled on the issue of sustainable development with some fervor -given the ongoing complexities of climate change, global pollution, and population shifts, among others -the role of communication (and organizational communication in particular) has reached center stage in the meaningful implementation of sustainability. Sustainability in organizational communication researchFour broad areas of organizational communication research highlight sustainability: long-term organizational viability given the existence of multiple tensions, environmental CSR practices, corporate communication on broader environmental impacts, and resilience of complex adaptive systems. Research in these areas is published not just by communication scholars in the field's traditional journals (e.g., Management

show abstract

Business and Climate Change: The Climate Response of the World's 30 Largest Corporations

Cited by 97 publications

References 30 publications

Strategies for Climate Change and Impression Management: A Case Study Among Canada’s Large Industrial Emitters

Strategies for Climate Change and Impression Management: A Case Study Among Canada’s Large Industrial Emitters

Disclosing Compliant and Responsible Corporations: CSR Performance in Malaysian CEO Statements

Sustainability and Sustainable Development

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About