 DO COMPANIES ENGAGE IN MORAL GRANDSTANDING?Cristina Voinea and Radu Uszkai Proceedings of the INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE, 2020, vol. 14, issue 1, 1033-1039 Abstract: The main claim of our paper is that, if we agree that companies are (even in a loose sense) moral agents, then we can say that not only individuals engage in moral grandstanding. We will begin with a short introduction on what moral grandstanding means and the different ways in which we, as individuals, engage (both offline and online) in using moral talk for self-promotion. Afterwards, we will analyze what we consider to be the two of the most compelling cases of moral grandstanding by companies, greenwashing and ethics washing, highlighting their negative ethical consequences. The paper will end with a discussion of an additional reason which might explain why companies engage in moral talk through CSR campaigns: they do it not only because it pays off for them to look moral in front of their customers, but also due to the fact that grandstanding allows them to select better employees who might be willing to work more productively for lower wages. Keywords: moral grandstanding; greenwashing; ethics washing; Corporate Social Responsibility. (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rom:mancon:v:14:y:2020:i:1:p:1033-1039 Access Statistics for this article Proceedings of the INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE is currently edited by Ciocoiu Nadia Carmen More articles in Proceedings of the INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE from Faculty of Management, Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania Contact information at EDIRC. |
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