Abstract
This chapter elaborates on the suggested shift of focus, from chastising greenwashing to promoting virtue. Our perspective aligns with a broader constructive turn in contemporary rhetorical studies.
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Research articles on green marketing often signify their relevance by describing how various forms of green marketing are on the rise and today constitute a significant part of commercial rhetoric. This trend is then described as an effect of an increased public awareness of the urgency of the climate crisis and the related need for transitioning our society (e.g. Delmas and Burbano 2011; Baum 2012; Chen and Chang 2012; Kim and Lyon 2015; Lyon and Wren Montgomery 2015; Gatti et al. 2019; de Freitas Netto et al. 2020). Indeed, there has been a veritable boom of commercial green promises. This development has also generated a corresponding amount of critical discussion. When scrutinizing these discussions, however, one can easily find them to be somewhat one-sided, as they tend to focus primarily on the lack of actual substance of commercial green promises. Such negative evaluations are commonplace both in the scientific literature and in public discourse.
This perceived lack of substance seems to be the impetus for the entire—enormous—discourse on greenwashing: a phenomenon which (a measure of conceptual unclarity notwithstanding, e.g. de Freitas Netto et al. 2020) has spawned discussions in many fields, both popular and academic. Greenwashing has been the subject of debate and critique in the study of rhetoric and in legal discourse, as well as in advertising, management, and organizational theory (which will all be touched upon in the following chapters). The concept has also made a significant impact on public discourse, where more and more companies are being criticized for using misleading environmental claims in their marketing, that is being accused of greenwashing. In our country Sweden, for example, the environmental group Friends of the Earth has a yearly “Greenwashing award” which is ironically awarded to an organization that excels in greenwashing. The nominations and awards receive a considerable amount of media attention and seem designed to shame and to affect the organizations’ brand negatively.
In line with this general tendency, the predominant approach within rhetorically oriented research has been to study green promises critically. This conforms to the dominant approach in rhetorical studies, as the mode of “normal science” within the field is still rhetorical criticism (cf. e.g. Kuypers 2016; Hart and Daughton 2015), often aimed at revealing hidden truths or at drawing out unflattering or counterintuitive meanings which others fail to see (e.g. Felski 2015). Current research has thus often presupposed the prevalence of non-valid and misleading green promises, viewing them as puffery or mere bluster, and as ethically questionable deception. Accordingly, rhetorical research concerned with sustainability claims has tended to be directed at exposing dishonest displays and understood as a mapping and description of manipulative greenwashing (e.g. Baum 2012; Smerecnik and Renegar 2010; Dickinson and Maugh 2004).Footnote 1 Researchers commonly frame their studies as tackling the question of whether environmental claims by commercial actors are the “real deal” or “mere rhetoric” (cf. e.g. Baum 2012; Scanlan 2017; de Freitas Netto et al. 2020 with further references). In other words, skepticism is the go-to starting point, and the analysis is based on a general distrust of the companies’ character.
To us, such critical approaches seem legitimate due to the innate problems of green marketing as a part of today’s unsustainable form of capitalism. (Note that we do not exclude the possibility of a sustainable form of market economy.) Indeed, greenwashing has been shown to be prevalent—as is illustrated by a much-discussed survey in which TerraChoice (2009) found that, out of 4744 “green” products in the US and Canada, 95% were guilty of greenwashing (cf. e.g. Baum 2012). Hence, there seems to be room for legitimate criticism. However, the focus on greenwashing can also be problematic, as it perpetuates and indeed encourages a sense of skepticism about the validity and legitimacy of green promises. This can lead to a backlash, as it fuels a general state of green skepticism, impeding environmentally beneficial behavior and possibly neutralizing sustainable motivations (Douglas 2009; Hartmann and Apaolaza-Ibáñez 2009; Chen and Chang 2013; Golob et al. 2018).
Beyond the pragmatic reasons for questioning the emphasis on skepticism in the study of green promises, one should also note that the emphasis on criticism resonates with a historically rooted criticism of rhetoric, where rhetoric is viewed as either powerful manipulation or mere flowery (on this tradition which goes back, at least, to the works of Plato, see e.g. Weaver 1953; White 1983; Vickers 1989; Kennedy 1994, or really any good textbook on the subject of rhetoric). This emphasis on the negative also resonates with the critical paradigm within the humanities more generally, which, since Ricœur, has often been referred to as or viewed as parallel to a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricœur 1965, 1969). Pursuant to this paradigm, scholars tend to question conventional truths as constructed and contingent. Rather than presenting ideas for constructive language use, they seek to reveal hidden structures of thought or power (e.g. Felski 2015; cf. Mossberg 2020). However, during the last 20 years, and gaining momentum after the debate on “post-truth” and “alternative facts”, there has been a renewed interest within the humanities in general, and within rhetoric in particular, to turn away from mere criticism (e.g. Amossy 2002; Anker and Felski 2017; McIntyre 2018; Bengtson 2019). This book is part of that movement—part of the Constructive Turn, which includes a growing interest in climate transition rhetoric and moves away from a traditional focus on revealing manipulative language and ideological presuppositions, toward exploring the constructive potential of rhetoric to facilitate sustainable development (Wolrath Söderberg 2020; Joosse et al. 2020).
As this study adopts an interdisciplinary—law and rhetoric—approach, it is worth mentioning that the pragmatic approach entailed by the constructive turn fits well with the tendency of legal discourse to address practical problems through feats of social engineering. It is commonplace for lawyers to work toward developing the regulatory frameworks. In our view, regulative development constitutes an important task, and the constructive approach we propose seems to provide both theoretically interesting and practically advantageous openings for it (see Chap. 7).
In the next chapter, however, we wish to establish some points of departure for constructively investigating the productive potential of commercial green promises. We begin by sketching out a rudimentary understanding of the concept of legitimation. In doing so, we acknowledge that green legitimation is a specific form of practice which is gaining momentum as climate change is increasingly being sedimented as an institution.
Notes
- 1.
There have been different typological attempts, sorting different kinds of greenwashing. One version (Jain and Kaur 2004; cf. Dangelico and Vocalelli 2017) claims that the most common practices are: (i) green spinning, when a company presents its own version of environmental facts; (ii) green selling, which means adding some environmental benefits in a traditional product’s campaign; and (iii) green harvesting, when a company decreases costs thanks to a sustainable practice but sells products at a premium price to earn extra profits. Greenwashing is communication, and thus it can be accomplished in many different ways. Ross and Deck (2011) list common strategies and mention: misleading with words, with visuals/graphics, with vagueness in claims, with exaggeration, and with avoidance of helpful information. Though such lists can be helpful, they are obviously not exhaustive as, in principle, anything that can be understood as bearing a significance can be considered misleading.
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Bengtson, E., Mossberg, O. (2023). A Constructive Turn: Toward Harnessing the Potential of Green Promises. In: The Virtues of Green Marketing . Rhetoric, Politics and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32979-1_2
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