Impressions management: lessons from the oil industry

In the late 1990s, after over a century of extracting hydrocarbons, the petroleum industry faced a growing scientific consensus that pollution from fossil fuels is a major cause of global warming. Operationally and in terms of their global image, oil and gas companies faced a serious dilemma. Two major players, Exxon and British Petroleum, took very different approaches in their corporate communications strategies, the outcomes of which offer valuable lessons in impressions management

Drilling their own graves:How the European oil and gas supermajors avoid sustainability tensions through mythmaking

This study explores how paradoxical tensions between economic growth and environmental protection are avoided through organizational mythmaking. By examining the European oil and gas supermajors’ ‘‘CEOspeak’’ about climate change, we show how mythmaking facilitates the disregarding, diverting, and/or displacing of sustainability tensions. In doing so, our findings further illustrate how certain defensive responses are employed: (1) regression, or retreating to the comforts of past familiarities, (2) fantasy, or escaping the harsh reality that fossil fuels and climate change are indeed irreconcilable, and (3) projecting, or shifting blame to external actors for failing to address climate change. By highlighting the discursive effects of enacting these responses, we illustrate how the European oil and gas supermajors self-determine their inability to substantively address the complexities of climate change. We thus argue that defensive responses are not merely a form of mismanagement as the paradox and corporate sustainability literature commonly suggests, but a strategic resource that poses serious ethical concerns given the imminent danger of issues such as climate change

The agenda-setting power of stakeholder media

Media controlled by stakeholder communities and groups, or “stakeholder media,” can exercise powerful influence on the strategic agendas of firms. Stakeholder media can be different and in some ways stronger than the influence of traditional news media. This article identifies strategies through which stakeholder groups use their own media to achieve desired outcomes, as support for or extensions of strategies known from the literature on social movements. These strategies rely on specific characteristics of stakeholder media that differ from mainstream media. These communication tools have altered the dynamics of stakeholder influence: on the one hand, allowing them greater independence from and influential collaboration with mainstream media as well as with other stakeholders; and on the other, augmenting the scope and momentum of their adversarial campaigns. There are important risks and opportunities posed to organizations by stakeholder media