A Comprehensive Guide to Greenwashing Phenomena, Contexts, and Trends: The Mean, Lean Washing Machine

Green communication can improve a firm’s reputation and performance, regardless of their genuine green conduct. This book investigates the greenwashing phenomenon and maps how firms mislead consumers by not delivering on their environmental promises. The book provides a comprehensive list of 39 different aspects of ‘washing’, covering significant topics such as bluewashing, ethicswashing, poorwashing, pinkwashing, wokewashing and blockchainwashing. Chapters uniquely combine a business perspective with a more philosophical outlook, considering the wider implications of organisations not fulfilling important ethical promises, like societal polarisation and change of corporate scope. New concepts like greenlash, greenwashing truthers and greenhushing provide a bigger-picture perspective on this divisive corporate practice. Academics focusing on management and marketing, particularly green marketing and corporate social responsibility, will find this book to be an insightful read. It is also invaluable to practitioners in corporate communications, and will help policymakers in understanding current washing practices.

Table of Contents:
Contents Foreword from Jean-Patrick Villeneuve (USI Lugano) 1 Introduction to greenwashing 2 Academic accounts of greenwashing 3 All sorts of *washings: a comprehensive overview 4 The washing machine and counting: outlook Appendix: a short dictionary of *washing phenomena (alphabetic order, only primary definitions) Reference list

About the Author :
Lucia Gatti, Senior Assistant Professor, Department of Economics and Management (DEM), Università di Trento, Trento, Italy, Ludovico Giacomo Conti, PhD candidate, Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society, University of Italian Switzerland (USI), Lugano, Switzerland and Peter Seele, Full Professor of Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics, Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society, University of Italian Switzerland (USI), Lugano, Switzerland

Review :
‘This book takes us on the journey taken by organisations in reshaping the systemic “who does what?” social question. More specifically, it provides a much-needed analysis of the too often murky, vague, imprecise and unstructured debates surrounding the logic of this journey for private actors flaunting their newly extolled social roles and contributions. It provides the definitions, evaluations and analytical grids to make sense of the dynamics. Such a solid contribution offering both breadth and depth is essential for all actors.’