Greenwashing in Corporate Environmentalism Research and Practice

Abstract

Barely a month goes by without another high-profile firm being accused of misleading communications about environmental activities or performance. Already in 2014, Nestle has been called to account for promoting its customized recycling program for Nespresso disposable coffee pods, which has only a negligible overall waste reduction impact. Unilever has been subjected to a Twitter campaign alleging that its partnership with The Guardian newspaper to host a sustainable living online engagement platform did not accurately reflect the firm’s true environmental impacts. The frequency of similar problems, the high profile of the organizations involved, and the potentially damaging implications for the credibility of managers and researchers of organizations and natural environment motivated us to devote this collaborative editorial to the research frontiers and implications of corporate greenwashing, illustrating some of our ideas with the articles in this issue. Greenwashing is the selective disclosure of positive information without full disclosure of negative information so as to create an overly positive corporate image (Lyon & Maxwell, 2011). Greenwashing is a central empirical phenomenon within organizations’ interactions with the natural environment because it is hard for stakeholders to directly evaluate firms’ environmental performance. This leads to a reliance on firms to signal their environmental quality through environmental reports, advertising, corporate websites, or eco-certification schemes. Increased environmental disclosure without obvious substantive improvements in environmental impacts has fed justifiable skepticism about the gap between what firms say and do on environmental issues (e.g., Dauvergne & Lister 2010; Forbes & Jermier, 2012; Konefal, 2013). Increased environmental disclosure has also provided research questions and empirical data for scholars to analyze greenwashing behavior, its drivers, and its consequences (e.g., Delmas & Burbano, 2011; Du, 2014; Walker & Wan, 2012). In her book After Greenwashing: Symbolic Corporate Environmentalism and Society, Frances Bowen (2014) argues that the less sophisticated forms of greenwashing may be declining due to a combination of increased stakeholder vigilance and the flattening of information symmetries through new data and monitoring technologies, while the broader symbolic dimensions of corporate environmentalism are becoming even more pervasive. Activists have launched inventive ways to expose greenwash, such as posting and rating examples of greenwash (see www.greenwashingindex.com) or categorizing it into different types of “corporate sins” (TerraChoice,