Abstract
In the chapter, we present and discuss the concept of legitimacy as established in business literature from an ethical perspective. After a brief outline of different ethical lenses such as virtue ethics, deontology, and utilitarianism, we identify Habermasian discourse ethics as communication driven approach already established in the literature. The core of the article consists of two parts: “Legitimacy lost” and “Legitimacy gained.” Legitimacy lost addresses the various situations where companies struggle with a legitimacy deficit: We make use of the greenwashing concept to illustrate the loss of legitimacy in a communication ethics perspective. In this way, we first introduce the standard definitions of greenwashing going back to the invention of the term from “towel-reuse” in the hospitality industry, which focusses on the misleading communication of corporations. Subsequently, we present the latest research on greenwashing, redefining greenwashing from a co-constructivist perspective that incorporates not only the sender but also the receiver of a greenwashing message. The second part “Legitimacy gained” deals with the concept of credibility. The context of application chosen here is CSR reporting as an example for (potentially) participating at, and contributing to deliberative democracy – and corporate political activity aka lobbying and here more specifically astroturf lobbying as an example to proactively undermining the (idealized) political role of corporations. We, therefore, discuss in conclusion the limitations of communication driven, Habermasian Political CSR as idealized normative thinking. As a final outlook, we present future questions and possible answers to the limitations of the Habermasian approach depicting the implications of digitalization, which can lead to “data deliberation” a form of corporate legitimacy creation through bottom-up transparency, standardization, and accountability in the digital democracy of tomorrow.
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Schultz, M.D., Seele, P. (2019). Business Legitimacy and Communication Ethics: Discussing Greenwashing and Credibility Beyond Habermasian Idealism. In: Rendtorff, J. (eds) Handbook of Business Legitimacy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68845-9_8-1
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