Conclusions: Living with Consequences

Tafoya, Dennis W.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37074-9_8

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Second, these intentionally induced corporate misconducts are very similar in nature, as both MNCs deliberately manipulated their products to boost growth, profit and shareholder value. Third, both companies were convicted for their wrongdoing and agreed to at least partial admission of culpability (Coffee Jr, 2020; Tafoya, 2020).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Antecedents of corporate misconduct: A linguistic content analysis of decoupling tendencies in sustainability reporting

Conrad

Holtbrügge

2021

Business Ethics Env & Resp

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Corporate social irresponsibility and corporate misconducts are a severe threat to the endeavours to establish more responsible business practices. Therefore, academia and practice alike try to find ways to anticipate these behaviors. In this regard, linguistic analysis can provide an approach to detect decoupling tendencies of firms, that is to identify firms that fail to walk the talk. This paper examines how the sustainability reports of eight manufacturing firms in the automotive and aircraft industries differ in regard to their linguistic composition. By applying the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software, we emphasize how sustainability reports of decouplers and implementors differ in morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. The analysis reveals that decouplers, among other factors, communicate in a less cognitively complex way. As they use shorter sentences, more informal language, less past and future references, and fewer conjunctions, we derive that decouplers are characterized by a lower linguistic sophistication. Moreover, decouplers’ reports can be classified by their linguistic hubris, which is defined by fewer emotional references, more self‐references, less references to risk and anxiety, and heavy reliance on male language. The paper contributes to the debate on decoupling and corporate social irresponsibility, identifies linguistic antecedents of corporate misconduct, and enriches the domain of CSR reporting with a linguistic perspective. It supports the understanding of managers, policymakers and stakeholders of firms to evaluate whether a firm may fail to walk the talk.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%