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

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 organizati...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc 2016-02, Vol.133 (3), p.567-582
Main Authors: van Halderen, Mignon D., Bhatt, Mamta, Berens, Guido A. J. M., Brown, Tom J., van Riel, Cees B. M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Annual reports
BP PLC
Business administration
Business and Management
Business entities
Business Ethics
Case studies
Climate change
Companies
Corporate responsibility
Education
Energy resources
Environmental management
Ethics
Exxon Mobil Corp
Harmonization
Humanities and Social Sciences
Impression management
Interest groups
Legitimacy
Management
Oil companies
Oil industry
Path dependence
Petroleum
Petroleum industry
Philosophy
Public image management
Quality of Life Research
Renewable energy
Shareholders
Social responsibility
Stakeholder
Stakeholders
Symbolism
United Kingdom
United States
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0167-4544
1573-0697
DOI:10.1007/s10551-014-2400-8