Corporate Ethics, Reputation Management J Sandberg, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

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Glossary Corporate social reporting The process of

communicating the social and environmental effects of

corporations’ economic actions to particular interest

groups in society or to society at large.

Corporate social responsibility The voluntary

consideration of certain non-economic, particularly

social or environmental, values in corporate decision

making.

Reputation management The practices employed by

corporations aimed at improving the public perception

of the corporation.

Stakeholder A person, group, organization, or system

that affects or can be affected by a corporation’s actions.

Reputation management can be taken to refer to all the published on ‘successful brand building’ and ‘how to

practices employed by corporations aimed at improving the public perception of the corporation or, specifically, at making key stakeholders (e.g., customers, employees, investors, communities, or potential business partners) perceive the corporation in a more positive light. Although the kind of practices most commonly associated with this obviously are certain communicative activities, such as marketing campaigns, the organizing of public relations (PR) events, and other examples of corporate ‘spin,’ a whole array of further activities on the part of modern corporations can probably be described as parts of their reputation management. Corporations typically want to be associated with quality and value and to be perceived as credible, reliable, and trustworthy; the ben­efits they stand to gain from this include greater loyalty from consumers, being able to charge higher prices for their products, and being able to attract and retain high-quality employees. The latest trend is that corporations also want to be perceived as responsible and caring – a trend sometimes referred to as the ‘corporate citizenship’ or ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) movement.

Although enjoying a good public reputation probably always has been important for the commercial success of certain kinds of commercial enterprises, recent years have seen a massive focus on and interest in active reputation management from corporations. Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the social and environmental dimensions of various kinds of commercial activities, and with the innovation of modern information technol­ogies these dimensions of corporate activity have also become much more visible. Meanwhile, ever-increasing competition in the global economy has created a need for companies to compete more aggressively for the support of consumers, investors, and communities alike. These developments have created a market for a new kind of high-profile employee, the reputation manager, who has been given increasingly more power over how corpora­tions are run. An endless stream of books are being

manage your reputational capital’ by management gurus, and one of the most fashionable research topics at business schools today is measuring exactly how much money a company can make from having a good reputation.

It is not difficult to understand why certain ethical issues are often discussed in relation to the reputation management practices of modern corporations. When just about all commercial companies suddenly emphasize social responsibility and boast about how much they are doing to strengthen the local community or to save the rain forests, it is easy to become cynical and have doubts about their honesty and credibility. A series of reports in the media have also revealed some of the darker side to corporate reputation management, including reports about how multinational pharmaceutical companies have tried to suppress publications about the negative side effects or lack of potency of their drugs, how very high-profile investment firms apparently have tampered with their financial accounts to give a more successful appearance, and how investment funds marketed as ‘ethi­cal’ or ‘socially responsible’ actually have been found to hold considerable investments in the tobacco and arma­ments industries.

Many stakeholders have reacted negatively to these events, but not all of them have stood passively by and done nothing. Both consumer and shareholder advocacy groups are starting to engage more actively with corpora­tions in efforts designed to exploit their increased focus on reputations and with the aim of persuading them to endorse more progressive social and environmental poli­cies. The corporate reputation has thus become a central battleground for contemporary business ethics.

This article outlines the main features of some of the most common points of discussion pertaining to the ethics of reputation management. The first section elaborates further on the scope of activities that reputation manage­ment could be said to consist of, the second section

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introduces the discussion on the ethics of corporate com­munication, and the third section addresses the more general issue of business motives in relation to contem­porary CSR management. The final section considers the involvement by stakeholder activists in the battle over corporate reputations and some of the discussion this has given rise to.

Scope of Activities

The kinds of practices most commonly associated with corporate reputation management, as noted previously, are mainly communicative activities such as marketing campaigns, the sending out of press releases, and the organizing of PR events. According to the popular view, then, reputation management is mainly about how cor­porations put a ‘spin’ on various kinds of events or activities or how they, through effective communication and ‘countercommunication,’ try to make stakeholders perceive events in a way that is favorable to their corpo­rate bottom line. There is really no end to the ethical controversies surrounding reputation management in this sense. We may refer to this as the narrow conception of reputation management in what follows. Because I believe this narrow conception of reputation management raises a number of interesting ethical issues on its own, I deal with these in the following section.

According to most contemporary management scientists, however, effective corporate reputation man­agement both can and should be much more than clever communication management. Contemporary manage­ment scientists typically stress the need to build reputations ‘from the inside out’ – that is, to start by building a strong corporate identity or culture and to make reputation management an essential part of the strategic management of the company at all levels. We may call this the wide conception of reputation manage­ment. In this view, reputation management could be said to encompass just about all kinds of strategic operations of corporations – for instance, product development, pri­cing, accounting practices, the hiring and firing of employees, and payments to suppliers – as well as com­municative activities. Contemporary cases of ‘stakeholder management’ and so-called ‘triple bottom line manage­ment,’ both central parts of the CSR movement, may be examples of reputation management in this wide sense. For obvious reasons, reputation management in this wide sense raises a whole range of further ethical issues and I cannot discuss all of them in this context. However, later I will discuss the quite general issue of the ethics of the profit motive specifically in relation to this wide concep­tion of reputation management.

Perhaps the full span of types of activity in reputa­tion management which there may be ethical reasons

to keep track of is most easily brought out by con­sidering the ways in which corporations can combine narrow and wide reputation management – that is, how they can combine different kinds of communica­tive activities (what they say that they do) with different kinds of underlying or noncommunicative activities (what they actually do). We may distinguish between at least four types of activity here that, at least prima facie, seem to differ somewhat in their ethical features. One type is where corporations sim­ply cater to the needs of stakeholders, or do what they think that social responsibility requires of them, with­out making too big of a point of this either in advertisement or in the popular press. Another is where corporations cater to the needs of stakeholders but indeed make a big point of this; perhaps they even exaggerate their true dedication to stakeholders’ needs. A suggestion regarding how these two types of activity may differ in ethical features is given later.

A third type of activity is where corporations make themselves out as responsible or caring but in reality do nothing, or at least very little, to further the needs of stakeholders: we may call these cases of straightforward PR coups. Finally, a fourth type of activity is where companies portray themselves as responsible or caring while actually violating the needs of their stakeholders or failing to defend these against conspicuous external threats. We may refer to this last kind of activity as cover-up cases. A suggestion regarding how these last two kinds of cases may differ in ethical features is given in the following section.

The characteristics of these kinds of activities will be further elaborated on throughout the article. The topic of the debates introduced here is obviously what to think of the ethics of the different activities in reputation manage­ment, and whether there indeed are any interesting differences in the ethical features of the kinds of activities just mentioned.

The Ethics of Corporate Communication

Reputation management in the narrow sense – or corporations’ active use of communication and counter-communication in attempts to influence public perceptions, either through an in-house PR department or through the retainment of external communication consultants – is quite often a target of ethical criticism. According to many people, both academics and members of the general public, reputation management in the nar­row sense basically seems to be the business of lying and deceiving as effectively as possible, and corporate ‘spin doctors’ (the derogatory term used for corporate PR agents or press secretaries) are often portrayed as a fancier kind of conmen in different popular literature

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and TV series. Interestingly, then, the public perception of the group of professionals who are supposed to be experts on influencing public perception is strikingly poor. However, exactly why is corporate spin-doctoring considered unethical, and is this common view warranted?

Debates on the ethics of corporate communication tend to be between proponents of two rather extreme positions. On the one hand, some writers argue that only full and accurate disclosure of all kinds of social and environmental effects of corporate activities can be accep­

table on the part of corporations, basically because the public has a right to know what corporations are doing and what they are not doing. On the other hand, others seem to suggest that just about all kinds of communicative activities by corporations can be ethically acceptable as long as they are legal and they are warranted in relation to strategic corporate purposes. To understand why the debate tends to push commentators to these extremes, consider the seemingly straightforward intuition that con­

sciously and actively lying about, for example, the risks associated with going into a certain line of business activ­

ity is morally wrong on the part of a corporation. Representatives of both of the preceding camps would typically claim adherence to this intuition – the latter camp because lying about such things quite often is illegal. However, where does lying stop and more elusive forms of deception start?

Despite the public perception of corporate spin doc­tors, it is probably not so common that corporations spread outright lies in advertisements or to the media. Some more common practices may be ‘budging the truth only so slightly’ or what could be called puffery (i.e., the exaggeration or magnification of events or activities). Corporate advertisements are obviously full of exaggera­

tions about the ‘miracle effects’ or ‘bargain price’ of this or that product and also of quite contorted uses of statistics that are supposed to show how a certain product or service is cheaper, more effective, or more widely pre­

ferred than other products and services (‘9 out of 10 prefer our brand of cola’ – 9 out of 10 what? Based on what evidence?). Now, are these practices as morally proble­

matic as outright lying? Proponents of the laissez-faire view (as we may call the latter view outlined previously) often suggest that members of the general public can be expected to know that corporations sometimes exaggerate or budge the truth a bit – after all, examples such as the preceding ones should indeed be very familiar to most us – so similar practices may really be rather innocuous. But then again, some people, including some journalists, may arguably be more naive and may therefore still be deceived by such types of communication. Most people probably think that there indeed is something morally problematic about such kinds of activity.

Another practice sometimes employed by corporations is the spreading of misleading information, or ‘disinfor­mation’ – that is, information that technically may be true but is irrelevant or simply taken out of its proper context. Examples of this may range from the fairly innocuous and common use of sports celebrities in TV ads for all kinds of non-sports-related products to the more malicious case of corporations spreading vast amounts of irrelevant facts and figures as ‘smoke screens’ designed to divert attention away from some public scandal or a corporate practice not well received by members of the press. Is the spreading of misleading information just as wrong as lying? Some may once again argue that members of the general public, and especially members of the press, should be able to see through similar stunts. However, most people would probably consider at least the spreading of smoke screens as a fairly conspicuous form of corporate deception.

A final kind of practice sometimes employed by corporations is the deliberate absence of communicative activities. In many circumstances, corporations may actively choose to be silent about a certain set of events – for example, they may simply refrain from commenting on certain allegations from consumers or communities – even though one may think that some form of comment or statement is ethically called for. A familiar scene from the evening news is a corporate spokesperson simply saying ‘No comment’ or perhaps rambling on about something completely different in an effort to try to change the topic of conversation. This may indeed be a quite cost-efficient communicative strategy for corporations in many cases. In other cases, which have received much public scrutiny, corporations may suggest that they have nothing to report but this may simply be because they have not taken the time to find out about, for example, the effects of their activities on a certain local community or the environment. Although such scenarios clearly do not involve lying, many commentators suggest that these scenarios actually are the worst from an ethical standpoint. According to these com­mentators, then, it seems plausible to suggest that corporations not only have the responsibility to disclose what information they already possess but also sometimes have an obligation to actively collect certain kinds of information and then disclose it.

The distinctions between the various examples of corporate spin discussed here are obviously quite elusive, and this is probably part of the reason why many com­mentators have been tempted to suggest that corporations simply have a positive obligation of full and accurate disclosure – that is, to tell ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’ Although the elusiveness of the forms that corporate deception can take may make it a difficult target for direct legal regulation, the safest and most straightforward ethical route seems to be to admit no gray areas. However, this position is indeed rather extreme, and it invites certain obvious counterarguments.

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According to proponents of the Laissez-Faire view, the preceding position fails to take into account the plausible difference in obligations between the public and the pri­vate spheres. If the general public has a right to know about certain things, it is argued, this should be an obliga­tion on the part of governments or the media rather than on the part of commercial companies. Corporations can­not be treated like public service organizations – after all, requiring constant dedication to both the gathering and the dissemination of all information that may be relevant to people’s choices would impose enormous costs on private companies and could therefore dampen economic growth. Furthermore, as already noted, proponents of this view suggest that members of the general public plausibly have an obligation to find out about certain thing for themselves.

Proponents of the Laissez-Faire view often note that the media and the general public could be seen as accom­plices in the growth and success of corporate spin: It is partly because of ‘how we are,’ or how the general public and the media behave, that the simple rumor spreads more easily, and often also is viewed as more interesting, than the complicated truth. It is simply because we are so easily persuaded by certain kinds of messages, then, and because we seldom take the time to engage more actively and critically with the flow of information that is out there, that we are easily seduced by fairly obvious PR stunts on the part of corporations. However, if some people are seriously misled by the commercial activities of certain companies, then this is at least to some degree their own fault. As far as corporations act within the boundaries set by law, and act prudently, they are acting within their ethical rights.

Are both of these positions too extreme? Is it possible to find some middle ground between the two? Perhaps it is. Perhaps greater attention should be given to possible differences in ethical features between the different types of activities in reputation management outlined in the previous section. Calls for full and accurate disclosure are particularly commonly expressed in relation to cor­porations involved in public scandals – for example, when piles of toxic waste are discovered near a certain corpora­tion’s facilities or rumors are spreading about several accounts of gross misconduct among a certain company’s employees. This may be taken as an indication that cover-up cases – that is, cases in which companies try to keep up appearances although they are involved in violations of stakeholders’ needs (or they are negligent of conspicuous external threats to those needs) – are the most serious in this context. In cases in which members of the general public have a justified fear that gross violations of stake­holders’ needs may be taking (or have taken) place, corporations have an obligation of full and accurate dis­closure simply because the stakes are so high. In other cases, however, when the stakes are not as high, it could

perhaps be permissible to budge the truth a bit, or exag­gerate, or cite some facts and figures outside of their true context. Most straightforward PR coups, for instance, are probably rather innocuous and also easy for the general public to see through.

Whether this middle position indeed makes sense, and whether it is more plausible than the two extremes out­lined previously, is an issue I leave to the reader to decide.

‘Doing Well by Doing Good’

In the contemporary management literature, as I have noted, it is quite generally agreed that effective corporate reputation management both can and should be much more than clever communication management. Contemporary management scientists typically stress the need to strengthen the ‘culture’ of corporations or build a strong corporate ‘identity.’ Both of these concepts are generally taken to refer to a set of core values of an organization that shape both how it acts and how it communicates with the outside world. In short, then, management scientists stress the need to build reputations ‘from the inside out,’ or to make reputation management an essential part of the strategic management of the company at all levels.

There are many examples of corporations embracing this wider view of reputation management, and some of them are indeed quite interesting from an ethical stand­point. One example may be so-called ‘stakeholder management,’ a management style based on the belief that the success of a corporation ultimately depends on to what extent the different stakeholders (e.g., customers, employees, investors, and surrounding communities) are ready to interact with and support the corporation. Under a stakeholder management model, then, corporations will typically have far-reaching interaction with representa­tives of different stakeholder groups and negotiate business strategies that are as close as possible to their needs. Another contemporary example may be so-called triple bottom line management, which builds on the idea that the social and environmental dimensions of commer­cial activity are just as essential for the success of corporations as the economic dimension. Triple bottom line companies thus profess themselves to not just one but, rather, three ‘bottom lines’ (i.e., three ultimate objectives of the corporation) – one economic, one social, and one environmental.

Many commentators suggest that the rise of these new sorts of management styles and other developments of the CSR movement are examples of clear advances in the way in which commercial companies react to contempor­ary social and environmental problems. However, is this really correct? Has the world really become a better place with these developments? Interestingly, some commenta­tors suggest that these developments are simply new ways

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in which corporations can re-describe – and thus to some extent obfuscate – what they are doing, and that they have not really solved the underlying problem. The point of corporate appeals to CSR is obviously to make money – that is, to create an aura of social responsibility in order to be able to reap the economic benefits that are associated with having a good public reputation. According to critics, then, although appeals to ‘the needs of stakeholders’ and ‘triple bottom line’ may look good on paper, they are generally just window dressing. A fundamental problem with reputation management in general, according to these critics, is that everything is done from the motive of looking good instead of from the motive of doing good for its own sake.

The critics are probably correct in that most companies adopt these new CSR management styles mainly for the sake of reaping the economic benefits associated with having a good public reputation. The main arguments given in the management literature for why corporations need to focus on corporate identity and culture are notably instrumental. It is suggested that making CSR a fundamental part of the strategic management of the corporation lends increased credibility to the corporation’s attempts at making itself out as a socially responsible company; that is, it simply seems easier to be perceived as responsible or caring if one actually does what a respon­

sible or caring corporation is expected to do. Furthermore, it is often argued that violations of the needs of stake­

holders most often will become known, as several scandals have shown. The adage of the day – a motto used in, for example, both academic and practitioner-oriented confer­

ences on CSR throughout the world – is ‘doing well by doing good’ (i.e., exactly making money out of attention to stakeholder needs). In summary, most corporations prob­

ably adopt these new CSR management styles mainly for the sake of economic benefits. But why should this be problematic from an ethical standpoint?

One interpretation of the critics’ argument is that ‘doing well by doing good’ is thought to be self-defeating as a business strategy. Some commentators have argued that most stakeholders are fully aware of the fact that corporations only integrate social and environmental con­

siderations into their management decisions in order to create an aura of respectability, and so they see through insincere corporate appeals to CSR and further values. Many commentators talk about the risk of increased cyni­

cism about corporate social responsibility, both on the part of the general public and on the part of corporate executives themselves. In this view, then, corporations employing CSR management styles for material reasons are basically wasting a lot of money and energy on some­

thing that does not work. However, whether stakeholders indeed are averse to materially motivated CSR measures remains to be seen; in fact, the dramatically increased use

of such measures in the business world seems to contra­dict this view.

A more radical interpretation of the critics’ argument is that it simply boils down to the idea that it is unethical (or lacking in moral worth or less than fully virtuous) to act out of material interest rather than for the sake of doing good as such. This position is actually not so uncommon, neither among the general public nor among philosophers. There is a famous passage in one of Immanuel Kant’s works, for instance, in which Kant suggests that a shopkeeper who refrains from charging a small boy overprices on his goods only for the reason of safeguarding his reputation is not acting from proper moral motives, but the proper moral motive would be to refrain from doing so because this is the ethically right thing to do. Now, it should be noted that this idea is indeed quite radical. Making money is obviously a central part of what all commercial companies strive to do, even though it may not always be their only motivation for the more specific activities they engage in. If acting from a profit motive is thought to be unethical or lacking in moral worth, then most of the business world as we know it is morally corrupt.

Perhaps one may once again seek to find some middle ground between two extreme positions here – that is, between the idea that all commercial activities are morally corrupt and the idea that the CSR movement basically is God’s gift to the earth. One could once again emphasize differences in ethical features between the different types of activities in reputation management outlined previously by suggesting, for example, that there is a difference between CSR practiced more or less in silence and CSR manage­ment practiced with the aim of maximum public or media exposure. As long as corporations further the needs of their stakeholders without boasting too much about it, perhaps the issue of exactly why they do so may be less important. It is only when corporations start to boast too much about their CSR practices, and essentially dedicate resources to doing this that they instead could have used to actually do that which is in the stakeholders’ interests, that things start to become worse. Corporations should simply stop showing off about how responsible or caring they are and get back to the business of actually being responsible and caring.

The Politicization of Corporate Reputations

Quite irrespective of what one may think of the ethics of corporate reputation management, it certainly seems here to stay. This is something that different kinds of stake­holder advocacy groups are taking advantage of to an increasing extent. That is, a number of initiatives on the part of stakeholders are trying to exploit the fact that corporations want to be perceived as responsible and

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caring in efforts aimed at persuading them to endorse more progressive social and environmental policies. These advocacy campaigns can and have taken many forms: Consumers have targeted companies with protest marches and calls for public boycotts; concerned share­holders have organized rallies outside the annual general meetings of corporations; and a number of nonprofit organizations have started to publish reviews of how companies perform on social and environmental dimen­sions, designed specifically to raise awareness about these dimensions.

Many of these campaigns seem to have been highly successful. Activists have successfully lobbied corpora­tions to make them, for instance, strengthen the rights of employees, move out of regions dominated by corrupt regimes, and phase out the use of environmentally hazar­dous materials in products. Indeed, the surge of interest in CSR and stakeholder management on the part of corpora­tions is probably due in large part exactly to these kinds of campaigns organized by consumer and shareholder acti­vists. Whether and how stakeholder activists really can create systematic and far-reaching changes in corporate conduct (or ‘business as usual’) by exploiting corpora­tions’ interest in reputation management, however, and specifically whether governments need to play a role in this development, has been the subject of many debates among business ethicists in recent years.

Stakeholder activists face many difficulties in their battle over corporate reputations and the corporate agenda. One difficulty is the informational asymmetry between stakeholders and corporations. It is simply quite difficult for stakeholder advocacy groups to gather com­plete and accurate information about the social and environmental effects of all the activities of a large cor­poration and specifically to obtain solid evidence in cases of corporate misconduct and deception. A second difficulty is the lack of established and effective commu­nicative platforms on the part of stakeholders that could be used to get their message out. Few nonprofit organiza­tions have access to the same kind of PR teams or communicative networks as the large corporations do, and this problem is obviously even greater for individual stakeholder activists. Furthermore, the communicative infrastructure of Western societies actually seems to be rigged in favor the corporations; whereas corporate advertisements and messages are broadcast continuously on most TV networks, and can be found on almost every page of newspapers and tabloids, stakeholder activists have to struggle tremendously to get just a snippet of their story in the mainstream news reporting.

The general difficulty underlying most of this is obviously the salient lack of resources and power on the part of stakeholders compared to the enormous budgets and networks of influence of modern multinational cor­porations. Although stakeholder activists may be quite

dedicated individuals or organizations with considerable social and political networks, they have a difficult time competing with the enormous economic, social, and poli­tical influence of large corporations. In the battle over the corporate reputation, then, stakeholder activists are David and corporations are Goliath. It is not entirely unheard of that these corporations use their financial clout to put pressure on activists directly: Many stakeholder advocacy groups complain about threats of litigation, for instance, and some companies have indeed sued activists for libel and defamation as a reaction to publicly made allegations about the social and environmental effects of their activities.

Some commentators argue that these all are good rea­sons for government regulation of corporate reputation management or at least the active involvement of public authorities in this area. Public authorities could play a number of roles: They could perhaps provide the commu­nicative platforms that stakeholder advocacy groups need, publish independent and official reviews of the social and environmental dimensions of corporate activities, or issue recommendations on standards for corporate social and environmental reporting. Opponents of government invol­vement in these matters, however, argue that many of these suggestions would only lead to increased bureaucratization in society and also could impede competition and innova­tion. Furthermore, it has been suggested that corporations can always find ways of working around, or actually exploiting, similar regulations or recommendations.

Of the previous suggestions, the idea of common stan­dards on corporate social and environmental reporting seems to have the most widespread support among com­mentators, and this is probably because it combines the idea of independent standards controlled by public autho­rities with the idea that it is entirely up to corporations whether or not they wish to adhere to these standards. Indeed, some such standards on social and environmental reporting have been issued by certain governments and powerful suprastate actors such as the United Nations and the European Union. Most widely adhered to are prob­ably the recommendations of the Global Reporting Initiative, an industry initiative on guidelines for corpo­rate environmental reporting affiliated with the United Nations.

However, critics question the progressive nature of these voluntary standards. For instance, stakeholder acti­vists have coined the terms ‘greenwashing’ for certain corporations’ attempts to boost sales by disingenuously portraying their products as ‘green’ or environmentally friendly (while they in fact often may contain environ­mentally hazardous materials) and ‘bluewashing’ for similar attempts by corporations to create an aura of respectability by disingenuously stressing their adherence to the recommendations of the United Nations. Whether these developments indeed will lead to a better balance

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between corporations and stakeholders in the battle over corporate reputations remains to be seen.

Conclusion

The practices of contemporary reputation management by corporations certainly raise many serious ethical issues. This article has simply been a brief elaboration on some of the most common points of discussion in relation to such practices and thus does not give the final word on any of these issues. To the extent that the reader agrees with the positions described here as the less extreme alternatives, however, an interesting conclusion seems to be that most of what is ethically problematic about reputation manage­ment lies in what it is not rather than in what it is. That is, perhaps both corporate spin-doctoring and the contem­porary use of integrated management models (although the former certainly is more problematic than the latter) are really relatively innocuous in and of themselves. What is most problematic about corporate reputation management is the amount of energy and resources devoted to it, which simply could have been spent on activities that benefited stakeholders more.

It is obviously difficult to predict what the future holds for corporate reputation management. As I have noted, however, some stakeholders have become very active par­ticipants in the battle over the corporate reputation; that is, stakeholder activists are starting to exploit the fact that corporations want to be perceived as responsible and caring in efforts designed to persuade them to change their ways. Irrespective of whether support from governments is needed to improve the situation, these activists certainly seem to have been rather successful so far. At least many important ethical and political issues pertaining to corpo­rate reputation management are now being discussed.

See also: Accounting and Business Ethics; Advertising; Business Ethics, Overview; Communication Ethics; Corporations, Ethics in; Corporate Responsibility; Environmental Compliance by Industry.

Further Reading

Beal A and Strauss J (2008) Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley.

Cooper SM and Owen DL (2007) Corporate social reporting and stakeholder accountability: The missing link. Accounting, Organizations and Society 32: 649–667.

Doorley J and Garcia HF (2006) Reputation Management: The Key to Successful Public Relations and Corporate Communication. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Fombrum CJ (1996) Reputation: Realizing Value from the Corporate Image. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Henriques A (2007) Corporate Truth: The Limits to Transparency. London: Earthscan.

King D (2000) Stakeholders and Spin Doctors: The Politicisation of Corporate Reputations, Hawke Institute Working Paper Series no. 5. Adelaide: University of South Australia.

Laufer WS (2003) Social accountability and corporate greenwashing. Journal of Business Ethics 43: 253–261.

L’Etang J and Pieczka M (eds.) (2006) Public Relations: Critical Debates and Contemporary Practice. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Parsons PJ (2004) Ethics in Public Relations: A Guide to Best Practice. London: Kogan Page.

Schlegelmilch BB and Pollach I (2005) The perils and opportunities of communicating corporate ethics. Journal of Marketing Management 21: 267–290.

Seib P and Fitzpatrick K (1995) Public Relations Ethics. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace.

Standlea DM (2006) Oil, Globalization, and the War of the Arctic Refuge. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Stuart H (2004) Risky business: Communicating corporate social responsibility. In: Wiley J (ed.) Proceedings of the Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference, CD-Rom. Wellington, NZ: Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy.

Biographical Sketch

Joakim Sandberg is a Research Fellow in Philosophy at University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His main academic interests are moral philosophy and applied ethics, especially business ethics. Joakim’s Ph.D. dissertation critically examined concep­tions of so-called socially responsible investing, and he has more recently been involved in international research projects on investment regulation and microfinance. During 2009, Joakim was a Visiting Research Fellow in Global Ethics at University of Birmingham, UK. Joakim is president of the Philosophy Society at University of Gothenburg and a member of the Gothenburg Animal Research Ethics Committee.