مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Using a spying scandal at Deutsche Telekom (DT), this study analyzes the company’s image repair discourse (Benoit, 2014) based on Hofstede’s (2011) dimensions of uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation. It provides an insight into the cultural implications of applying the image repair discourse to the German business environment. For a better understanding of the analysis, the paper starts by describing the crisis.

Headquartered in Bonn, Germany, Deutsche Telekom (DT) is currently Europe’s biggest telecommunication giant and one of the most important providers of mobile/landline telephony, digital television and internet worldwide (Deutsche Telekom, 2015a). In 2008 the company was shaken by a spying scandal which was defined by a DT senior leader as “an absurd concoction of economic spying, power-hungry megalomania, paranoia, and a complete disregard for the freedom of press” (Spiegel Staff, 2008a, para. 1). Specifically, in April 2008, the leading German newspaper magazine, Spiegel, published a fax it received at its headquarters from the chief of a consulting firm in Berlin, Desa, which DT had allegedly hired to spy on its senior executive board, shareholders, and journalists that covered Deutsche Telekom (Spiegel Staff, 2008a, para. 3). The fax mentioned that DT failed to pay for the spying services Desda had provided among which snooping services that had been “unusually broad and sophisticated” even by the standards of intelligence agencies (Spiegel Staff, 2008a, para. 5). Further, the fax mentioned that DT’s top management and the chair of the supervisory board had requested the spying services, which Desa ultimately performed between 2005 and 2008 (Spiegel Staff, 2008a, para. 6). These services involved monitoring and analyzing “hundred thousand landline and mobile connection data sets of key German journalists reporting on Telekom and their private contacts” (Spiegel Staff, 2008a, para. 4) and surveilling one of DT’s shareholders, a company located in New York City (Spiegel Staff, 2008a, para. 5). Finally, the fax specified that the spying operations were performed to ascertain the sources that had leaked information about the company’s financial plans to the media (Dowling, 2008; para. 2)

DT’s image of a reliable telecommunications provider was further threatened a few months after the spying scandal had erupted when, the same newsmagazine, Spiegel, revealed that the personal data of over 17 DT million customers was available for sale on the black market. The data represented phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses of German celebrities, politicians and business leaders who were subscribers of DT’s mobile subsidiary, T-Mobile (Bryant, 2008; para. 2). The public prosecutor’s office in Bonn conducted an investigation during which eight of DT’s (ex) employees among which the former DT chairman and a past supervisory board chairman (Balzi et al., 2008; para. 14) were considered suspects. DT’s crisis came to an end in 2010, when the court decided to sentence DT’s head of the Group Security department to three and a half years in prison (Deutsche Telekom, 2015b; para. 10).