Scrutiny, Norms, and Selective Disclosure: A Global Study of Greenwashing

By Christopher Marquis, Michael W. Toffel, Yanhua Zhou. Organ. Sci., 2016

1,185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Under increased pressure to report environmental impacts, some firms selectively disclose relatively benign impacts, creating an impression of transparency while masking their true performance. We theorize circumstances under which firms are less likely to engage in such selective disclosure , focusing on organizational and institutional factors that intensify scrutiny and expectations of transparency and that foster civil society mobilization. We test our hypotheses using a novel panel dataset of 4,750 public companies across many industries that are headquartered in 45 countries during 2004-2007. Results show that firms that are more environmentally damaging, particularly those in countries where they are more exposed to scrutiny and global norms, are less likely to engage in selective disclosure. We discuss contributions to research on institutional theory, strategic management, and information disclosure.

Subfields: Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/03e388079c7d460048570de3d589ddecf702972c

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In Strategy and Management

1. O. Hawn
2. Eunmi Mun
3. Jiwook Jung
4. Rodolphe Durand
5. Ioannis Ioannou
6. George Serafeim
7. H. Jo
8. James Simmie

Citations in the corpus

• Greenwashing and product market competition (2021, neutral): “While existing empirical works have mainly focused on firm-level or institutional determinants (Kim and Lyon, 2015; Marquis et al., 2016), no study has addressed the potential impact of product market competition (PMC, henceforth) intensity on greenwashing behavior.”
• Change above the Glass Ceiling: Corporate Social Responsibility and Gender Diversity in Japanese Firms (2018, background): “…may see this new normative pressure as irrelevant to their operations and adopt socially responsible practices to improve their public image without actually intending to implement them (Delmas and Montes-Sancho, 2010; Marquis and Qian, 2014; Kim and Lyon, 2015; Marquis, Toffel, and Zhou, 2016).”
• Willing and Able: A General Model of Organizational Responses to Normative Pressures (2017, background): “(Marquis et al., 2016)—the costs of inaction are lower (equivalently, the net benefit of”