Managing Impressions in the Face of Rising Stakeholder Pressures: Examining Oil Companies' Shifting Stances in the Climate Change Debate

Mignon D. Halderen, Mamta Bhatt, Guido A. J. M. Berens, Tom J. Brown and Cees B. M. Riel
Additional contact information
Mamta Bhatt: LEM - Lille - Economie et Management - Université de Lille, Sciences et Technologies - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, IÉSEG School Of Management [Puteaux]

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: In this paper, we examine how organizations' impression management (IM) evolves in response to rising stakeholder pressures regarding organizations' corporate responsibility initiatives. We conducted a comparative case study analysis over a period of 13 years (1997–2009) for two organizations—Exxon and BP—that took extreme (but different) initial stances on climate change. We found that as stakeholder pressures rose, their IM tactics unfolded in four phases: (i) advocating the initial stance, (ii) sensegiving to clarify the initial stance, (iii) image repairing, and (iv) adjusting the stance. Taken together, our analysis of IM over these four phases provides three key insights about the evolution of IM in the face of rising pressures. First, when faced with stakeholder pressures, it seems that organizations do not immediately resort to conforming but tend to give in gradually when pressures increase and start to come from relatively powerful stakeholders. Second, evolution of IM seems to be characterized by path dependence, i.e., even as organizations' positions evolve, they continue to show their conviction in their initial positions and try to convey that their subsequent positions flow logically from the previous ones. Finally, IM involves navigation between symbolism and substance, and companies tend to strive toward harmonizing their symbolic and substantive actions as stakeholder pressure increases.

Keywords: Comparative case study analysis; Impression management; Process model; Qualitative; Rising stakeholder pressures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Journal of Business Ethics, 2014, 133 (3), pp.567--582. ⟨10.1007/s10551-014-2400-8⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:hal:journl:hal-01563060

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-014-2400-8

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().