| dc.description.abstract | Greenwashing is misleading communication from firms to appear more environmentally friendly than they are. The term was coined by Jay Westerveld in 1986 and consists of several ways of performing greenwashing, including vague or irrelevant green claims and misleading labels and imagery without evidence. Greenwashing negatively affects firms, their internal and external stakeholders, and the environment, as it hampers real environmental progress.
Prior literature has mostly focused on the consequences of greenwashing on external stakeholders such as consumers, meanwhile, research on the impact on internal stakeholders such as employees is limited. In addition, there is insufficient analysis of underlying processes on internal and external levels, and a deficiency in critically analyzing motives, consequences, and mitigation strategies from different stakeholder perspectives and contexts. Lastly, prior literature is complex and does not provide a comprehensive overview of the motives, consequences, and mitigation strategies of greenwashing.
Therefore, the current study's purpose was to re-conceptualize greenwashing by identifying these components from stakeholders' perspectives and contexts. To accomplish this, a media discourse analysis was utilized by collecting news articles, YouTube videos, blogs, and reports to analyze the communication from media discourses. The articles used in the study comprised 444,913 words and 25 hours of video content.
The findings showed that the components of greenwashing can be explained at the micro-, and macro-levels, involving various stakeholder groups, such as firms, employees, consumers, investors, non-governmental organizations, and regulatory bodies. To explain the findings, three theoretical lenses were utilized: legitimacy theory, stakeholder theory, and institutional theory, where a framework for future research was proposed.
This study significantly contributes to the prior greenwashing literature in the form of knowledge and understanding of greenwashing and offers practical implications for several stakeholder groups. The study builds upon existing knowledge by providing new insight from media discourses and presents a theoretical framework to re-conceptualize greenwashing, its motives, consequences, and how to mitigate it. | |
