Abstract
In recent years, two Swedish companies have been a focus of substantial media attention: TeliaSonera and Lundin Petroleum. The defensive strategies employed by these two businesses to deal with allegations of crime will be analysed on the basis of Stanley Cohen’s theoretical work on processes of denial and neutralisation techniques. This paper will focus on a particular form of denial, namely the appeal to higher loyalties, whereby the businesses try to explain why they have been doing business despite the risks that this has involved. The paper links together the companies’ communications with the contexts in which they occur and the structures that might be expected to influence how the companies choose to frame their communications. The presence of the corporations in areas where crimes have been committed is not denied, but implicatory denials are employed to justify the corporations’ operations by referring to the societal benefits of their business activities. When the corporations frame their businesses as contributing to development, democracy and peace in the countries in which they operate, the corporations use well-known discourses that underline Swedish or Nordic generosity, helpfulness and decency. Thus, the analysis also draws on post-colonial theory and the image of the Nordic countries as being particularly “good” in relation to the rest of the world.
Highlights
Over recent years, a number of Swedish businesses have been accused of engaging in criminal activities both in the media and via legal proceedings
The analysis of the accounts employed by TeliaSonera and Lundin Petroleum when defending themselves against allegations of crime indicates a certain form of appeal to higher loyalties
Their underlying arguments focus on creating good profitability and returns for the company’s owners on the basis of the premises of the free market economy, Bbusiness as usual^. They focus on contributing to wealth creation and encouraging democracy in the countries in which they operate, which we have labelled the quasi-philanthropic argument. By closing their eyes to the potential conflict that these arguments contain, they succeeded in producing a causal chain whereby the inherent dynamics of the market, with their demands for profitability, in principle automatically result in producing wealth and improving democracy, along with respect for human rights and civil liberties
Summary
A number of Swedish businesses have been accused of engaging in criminal activities both in the media and via legal proceedings. Building further on the foundations laid by these studies, this paper works to develop a more detailed understanding of the strategies employed by businesses to defend themselves against allegations of crime by studying and comparing the defence mechanisms that the two companies in focus have employed in a number of different. The second form of denial, interpretative denials, occurs when the media and human rights organisations show that the event really has taken place In these situations, those responsible must retreat and admit that the event has happened, but they defend their actions by attempting to reformulate the description of the problem in various ways and by denying the extent of what has happened. The relevance of the post-colonial perspective emerged during our analysis of the data and is employed as a complement to Cohen’s theory on denial in order to better explain the framing of the corporate defensive discourse
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