مقاله سال ۲۰۱۷

Deceptive communication, often labelled as greenwashing, has become a recurrent practice in the context of marketing and corporate communication strategies, aimed at hiding the most controversial aspects related to corporate sustainability (Delmas & Burbano, 2011; Seele & Gatti, 2015). There are several possible reasons for this emerging trend, such as the increasing pressure on companies from different stakeholder groups (Aras & Crowther, 2009; Testa, Boiral, & Iraldo, 2015), and the potential benefits that can be gained by a company in terms of financial performance (Jonsen, Galunic, Weeks, & Braga, 2015) and reputational capital (Aras & Crowther, 2011). All of these encourage companies to present themselves as sustainable entities, despite not being “green” firms.

Greenwashing has usually been defined as a gap between symbolic and substantive actions. Substantive actions are those initiatives that are in line with the sustainability approach (Prasad & Holzinger, 2013; Walker & Wan, 2012). Thus, greenwashing has been exclusively associated in the literature with symbolic actions, which tend to deflect attention to minor issues or lead to create “green talk” through statements aimed at satisfying stakeholder requirements in terms of sustainability, but without any concrete action (decoupling).

Besides these two known types of greenwashing (attention deflection and decoupling), in this paper we explore another type of greenwashing in which communication plays a primary role in influencing how some types of irresponsible behaviours might happen. Through the lenses of the “communicative constitution of organizations” (CCO) (McPhee & Zaug, 2000; Putnam & Nicotera, 2009), a “novel” form of greenwashing is analyzed in which unsustainable behaviours might have been instigated by the difficulty in fulfilling communication promises. In line with the postmodern tradition in organizational communication studies, CCO considers the organization as a dynamic process of communication that is capable of changing the organizational reality rather than simply describing it (Christensen, Mette, & Ole, 2013).