| چکیده انگلیسی مقاله |
Introduction
Following environmental changes and challenges in the present century, environmental protection has become one of the concerns of consumers. While the focus of many businesses is on sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and green action, some companies make false claims about their environmental activities by making false claims as greenwashing actions, they seek to gain and maintain their legitimacy and place in the minds of consumers. The concept of greenwashing appeared in the middle of the 1980s to describe abusive practices or exaggerating sustainability claims to gain market share. on the other hand, greenwashing is defined as misleading or deceptive environmental claims and disseminating false information by organizations to promote the public image of the company's environmental responsibility. The importance of paying attention to the phenomenon of greenwashing is because it not only causes confusion and doubts among consumers, but it also potentially eliminates the need for innovation in green products. Therefore, the present study was conducted with the aim of providing a comprehensive typology of companies' greenwashing measures.
Methodology
With the aim of providing a typology of companies' greenwashing practices, this study has done an in-depth review of 11,718 articles published in the field of greenwashing between 1986 and 2022 in databases with a scoping review method.
Discussion and Results
With the conducted analysis on the existing typologies in 38 selected articles, a new and different and comprehensive typology of the greenwashing phenomenon has been presented in this study based on 4 dimensions, which include environmental reports, environmental performance, greenwashing levels, and the dimension of how to show environmental performance. Therefore, by combining the mentioned dimensions in the proposed model, 16 types of companies under the headings of green companies with executional of green strategies, green companies claiming green strategies, brown companies executional greenwash strategies, brown companies claiming greenwash strategies, green companies by executional the characteristics of green products, green companies claiming the characteristics of green products, brown companies with executional of greenwash products, brown companies claim greenwash products, green companies without executional green strategies, green companies without claiming green strategies, brown companies without executional greenwash strategies, brown companies without claiming greenwash strategies, green companies without executional the characteristics of green products, green companies without claiming the characteristics of green products, brown companies without executional greenwash products, brown companies without claiming greenwash products have been identified.
Conclusion
The first group, green companies, refer to those companies that have good environmental performance in line with the use of acceptable green strategies. These types of companies in the conducted typology seek to display their strategies in various ways, including providing positive environmental reports. Therefore, it can be said that green companies seek to gain and maintain legitimacy and competition in the market by showing their green strategies. This group of companies can be named as obvious strategic greenwashing. The second group, green companies with appropriate performance in the field of environment by presenting positive environmental reports and highlighting their environmental strategic claims are included in this group of companies. This group of companies can be named as obvious strategic greenwashing. Another group of green companies are operating, which, while having good environmental performance, want to display the green and environmentally friendly features of their products, which is done through images and association elements. Naturalization such as colors (such as green, blue) or sounds (such as the sound of the sea, birds) evoke the feeling of the naturalness of the product in people. This group of companies can be named as obvious greenwash in the product. There are also companies operating in the markets that bring the features of their products to the attention of consumers and stakeholders through making claims in environmental reports. This category of companies can be named as green companies claiming the characteristics of green products. This group of companies can be named as obvious greenwash in the product. The other group is green companies that, despite using appropriate environmental strategies and having an acceptable green performance, do not want to show their activities, they are a subset of this group of companies. This group of companies can be named as strategic silent greenwash. Similarly, considering other groups based on 4 dimensions and 16 types of companies introduced in the proposed model of this research, it is possible to distinguish the activities of companies that really have green actions from companies that have greenwashing activities, and also to prevent and deal with the greenwashing activities of the company. Therefore, took the necessary measures in various industries and also thought of a solution to the current activities of greenwash companies. The findings of this research indicate that in order to reduce the damages of greenwashing on the consumer, the environment and other groups, this phenomenon should be considered as a kind of fraud and the pressures, opportunities and rational justifications of due to the appearance of greenwashing, be reduced. It was also suggested that future researchers can use this typology to identify and prevent greenwashing practices of companies active in various industries |