The use of performance enhancing drugs continues to be an ethical concern in North American collegiate sporting environments (Yusko, Buckman, White, & Pandina, 2008). The non-medical use of anabolic steroids has been shown to be associated with student-level characteristics including being male and participating in intercollegiate athletics (McCabe, Browner, West, & Nelson, 2007). This case study presents the story of a highly publicized doping scandal through the lens of an acting director of athletics. The aim of this case study is to challenge students to think critically about the importance of creating ethical team and organizational cultures. Students will engage relevant theory to offer explanations of the incident, as well as use theory to develop effective interventions and preventative measures that can be applied to team sports environments. The theoretical explanations offered in this case study are combined with the results of the independent review of the incident, which included interviews with coaches, athletes, support staff, administrators, and subject matter experts. After completing this case study, it is expected that students will have a better understanding of the multifaceted and complex nature of the problem of banned PEDs use among elite, university-level athletes.

مقاله سال 2016

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).

مقاله سال 2017

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).