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Using Discourse to Restore Organisational Legitimacy: ‘CEO-speak’ After an Incident in a German Nuclear Power Plant

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Abstract

We analyse managerial discourse in corporate communication (‘CEO-speak’) during a 6-month period following a legitimacy-threatening event in the form of an incident in a German nuclear power plant. As discourses express specific stances expressed by a group of people who share particular beliefs and values, they constitute an important means of restoring organisational legitimacy when social rules and norms have been violated. Using an analytical framework based on legitimacy as a process of reciprocal sense-making and consisting of three levels of analysis which capture the relationship between text and context, we investigate the discourse used by CEOs in their initial and subsequent accounts of the incident. We find that CEOs aim to negotiate a resolution between their initial account and organisational audiences’ incongruent interpretations of the event by adopting an ad hoc normative attitude to stakeholders. This manifests itself in the strategic use of the discourse of stakeholder engagement as a means of signalling change, yet maintaining the status quo. It suggests that CEOs strategically use discourse to manufacture organisational audiences’ consent regarding the continued operation of the nuclear power plant affected by the incident. Our findings contribute to the critical corporate communication literature which regards corporate narrative reporting as a means of consolidating the private interests of corporations, rather than increasing transparency and accountability.

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Notes

  1. The financial year-end is on 31 December 2007. The annual report and the Corporate Social Responsibility Report are published on 28 March 2008 and are included in our analysis.

  2. The nine CEO texts are authored by four different CEOs. Goffman (1981) differentiates between (1) the principal, whose position the text reflects, (2) the author, who performs the writing task, and (3) the animator, who articulates the text. In our case, it is difficult to know whether Vattenfall’s CEOs are authors in the Goffmanian (1981) sense. However, they can be considered both principals and animators of the texts under investigation. However, discourses, which are the focus of analysis in this paper, represent aspects of the social world from a particular perspective and are thus concerned with the views of the principal, rather than that of the author or animator.

  3. INES was introduced by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the 1990s. It is used for facilitating fast communication to the media and the public regarding the safety significance of events at any nuclear installation associated with the civil nuclear industry, including events involving the use of radiation sources and the transport of radioactive materials. Events are classified on the scale at seven levels. Events without safety significance are classified below scale at level 0. For comparison, the accident at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was rated 5 on the INES scale and Chernobyl was rated 7 on the INES scale (Borglin et al. 2008).

  4. On its German website, Greenpeace aims to expose Vattenfall’s campaign entitled ‘Klimaunterschrift’ (signatures for the environment) as greenwashing. Vattenfall launches this campaign in 2007 in the aftermath of the incident at Krümmel as a means of restoring organisational legitimacy. Vattenfall portrays the campaign as a change in structures and processes and institutional conformity in terms of social and environmental responsibility (isomorphism), whereas Greenpeace argues that it constitutes espousing socially acceptable goals (decoupling).

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the helpful comments of the participants of the research seminar at the University of Exeter Business School on 1st April 2011, the participants of the Irish Accounting & Finance Association Conference at the University College Cork on 28 April 2011, Niamh Brennan from University College Dublin, and the two anonymous reviewers.

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Correspondence to Doris M. Merkl-Davies.

Appendix

Appendix

Appendix illustrates our text analysis approach by means of quotes from the nine CEO texts. For each area the left-hand column represents the instrumental dimension of stakeholder orientation and the right-hand column the normative dimension of stakeholder orientation (Table 4).

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Beelitz, A., Merkl-Davies, D.M. Using Discourse to Restore Organisational Legitimacy: ‘CEO-speak’ After an Incident in a German Nuclear Power Plant. J Bus Ethics 108, 101–120 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-1065-9

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