Avoiding Corporate Greenwashing? Sustainability Silence Narratives in the Agri‐Food Industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to shed more light on the reasons underlying companies' under‐communication or lack of communication to stakeholders about sustainability achievements in the agri‐food sector. A qualitative study based on 34 semi‐structured interviews with respondents from this sector shows the predominance of a rationale of sustainability silence and a high level of stakeholders' mistrust concerning the information publicly available in this area. The results of the study also show that sustainability silence is closely linked to the ambiguities inherent in communication on complex issues and the resulting risks that this communication will be perceived as greenwashing. The article contributes to the emerging literature on the rationale of organizational sustainability silence and proposes an integrative model to better understand its implications. Drawing on neo‐institutional theory and the theory of ambiguity, it also contributes to the literature on the congruence of sustainability communication and on the greenwashing practices of agri‐food organizations by questioning the intentional character of companies' lack of transparency concerning their actions and performance in this area. Managerial implications and avenues for future research are also discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".