EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Persuasions by Corporate and Activist NGO Strategic Website Communications: Impacts on Perceptions of Sustainability Messages and Greenwashing

Ronald J. Ferguson (), Kaspar Schattke () and Michèle Paulin ()
Additional contact information
Ronald J. Ferguson: Concordia University
Kaspar Schattke: Université du Québec à Montréal
Michèle Paulin: Concordia University

Humanistic Management Journal, 2021, vol. 6, issue 1, No 8, 117-131

Abstract: Abstract The present research was guided by the important need for a diversion from an economistic to a humanistic management perspective of sustainability. It concentrates on the current importance of digital strategic communication, particularly regarding the concept of corporate sustainability in the context of the conflict arena of the oil industry. The focus is on the comparison of the persuasive effectiveness of the framings of corporate versus activist NGO website communications and their impacts on the perception of the triple pillars of sustainability and, corporate greenwashing with respect to a proposed bituminous oil pipeline in Canada. The results of these pro and con messages were analyzed within the Elaboration Likelihood Model demonstrating a “non expert” peripheral route to a positive persuasion from exposure to the corporate communication versus an “expert” central route to a negative persuasion from the activist NGO communication. Subsequent exposure to the opposite website communication further emphasized the predominance of a negative persuasion based on both groups now being motivated as “expert” viewers of these strategic communications, leading to an important perception of greenwashing by participants resulting from vague claims, visual and linguistic contents of the corporate communication versus the mainly verifiable factual ones in that of the activist NGO.

Keywords: Humanistic management; Corporate sustainability; Elaboration likelihood model; Business education; Millennials; Greenwashing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s41463-019-00072-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:humman:v:6:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s41463-019-00072-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/41463

DOI: 10.1007/s41463-019-00072-8

Access Statistics for this article

Humanistic Management Journal is currently edited by Michael Pirson

More articles in Humanistic Management Journal from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:spr:humman:v:6:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s41463-019-00072-8