Business ethics or greenwashing?
-
-
[1] Esic University
-
- Localización: Marketing y comunicación en ética empresarial. XXIX edición del Congreso EBEN España: libro de actas / coord. por Abel Monfort, Susana Fernández Lores, 2022, ISBN 978-84-18944-79-6
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
-
Resumen
In recent years, many authors have tried to define corporate governance, especially, as the complex environment and uncertainty have influenced business decision-making (Abdullah & Valentine, 2009). Of the different existing theories, Agency Theory argued that the provision of resources enhances organizational functioning, firm's performance, and its survival (Daily et al., 2003); the Transaction Cost Theory, attempts to view the firm as an organization comprising people with different views and objectives (Williamson, 1996) and Political Theory brings the approach of developing voting support from shareholders (Pound, 1988). We will focus on theories related to ethics, Business ethics is a study of business activities, decisions, and situations where the right and wrongs are addressed (Crane et al., 2019). The attitude of companies towards society conditions the perception that consumers have of them and this is related to the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), as a fundamental component in the relationship between company and stakeholders (Servera-Francés & Piqueras-Tomás, 2019). Two possible strategies can be used in CSR, proactive and reactive. Proactive strategies have an objective based on reputational capital (Fombrun et al., 2000) and brand positioning. The reactive approach is used to compensate and shift the focus of attention in times of business malpractice (Du, 2015) to recover from wrong behaviours (Koehn & Ueng, 2010) or reputational crises (Williams & Barrett, 2000). But both proactive and reactive strategies have not been free from criticism, as they may involve the use of greenwashing actions (Atkinson & Kim, 2015) (Seele & Gatti, 2017), which are heavily criticised by stakeholders. Reactive ones for cleaning up negative impacts and proactive ones for involving excessive corporate communication. Greenwash involves the additional step of selectively choosing to report positive information (Lyon et al., 2006) and turns on three elements of deception: confusion, fronting, and posturing. (Beder & Beder, 2002).
Examples of this practice include: Promote image that assumes ethical leadership in the field, unveil projects that have negligible value but appear on surface to be significant, promote image of a committed corporate culture, publicly align firm with NGOs that are sympathetic to cause or issue, publicly align firm with NGOs that offer certification, accreditation, or award, without provisions for accountability or verification, manage expectations of stakeholder groups. The aim of our research is to analyse the concepts of business ethics and greenwashing as applied to human resources in organisations. Companies that are ranked or have a reputation as ideal places to work. Are they really? Are their behaviours ethical?
