Fluent Essays

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Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale General OneFile Terms and Conditions and by using the machine generated PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the machine generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom. Efforts in Gulf of Mexico to Limit Flow of News About the Spill Author: Jeremy W. Peters Date: June 10, 2010 From: The New York Times Publisher: The New York Times Company Document Type: Article Length: 1,262 words Lexile Measure: 1430L Full Text: When the operators of Southern Seaplane in Belle Chasse, La., called the local Coast Guard-Federal Aviation Administration command center for permission to fly over restricted airspace in Gulf of Mexico, they made what they thought was a simple and routine request. A pilot wanted to take a photographer from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans to snap photographs of the oil slicks blackening the water. The response from a BP contractor who answered the phone late last month at the command center was swift and absolute: Permission denied. ''We were questioned extensively. Who was on the aircraft? Who did they work for?'' recalled Rhonda Panepinto, who owns Southern Seaplane with her husband, Lyle. ''The minute we mentioned media, the answer was: 'Not allowed.' '' Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials. To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials' filtering what images of the spill the public sees. Scientists, too, have complained about the trickle of information that has emerged from BP and government sources. Three weeks passed, for instance, from the time the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 and the first images of oil gushing from an underwater pipe were released by BP. ''I think they've been trying to limit access,'' said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts who fought BP to release more video from the underwater rovers that have been filming the oil-spewing pipe. ''It is a company that was not used to transparency. It was not used to having public scrutiny of what it did.'' Officials at BP and the government entities coordinating the response said instances of denying news media access have been anomalies, and they pointed out that the company and the government have gone to great lengths to accommodate the hundreds of journalists who have traveled to the gulf to cover the story. The F.A.A., responding to criticism following the incident with Southern Seaplane, has revised its flight restrictions over the gulf to allow for news media flights on a case-by-case basis. ''Our general approach throughout this response, which is controlled by the Unified Command and is the largest ever to an oil spill,'' said David H. Nicholas, a BP spokesman, ''has been to allow as much access as possible to media and other parties without compromising the work we are engaged on or the safety of those to whom we give access.'' Anomalies or not, reporters and photographers continue to be blocked from covering aspects of the spill. Last week, Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, tried to bring a small group of journalists with him on a trip he was taking through the gulf on a Coast Guard vessel. Mr. Nelson's office said the Coast Guard agreed to accommodate the reporters and camera operators. But at about 10 p.m. on the evening before the trip, someone from the Department of Homeland Security's legislative affairs office called the senator's office to tell them that no journalists would be allowed. ''They said it was the Department of Homeland Security's response-wide policy not to allow elected officials and media on the same 'federal asset,' '' said Bryan Gulley, a spokesman for the senator. ''No further elaboration'' was given, Mr. Gulley added. Mr. Nelson has asked the Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano, for an official explanation, the senator's office said. Capt. Ron LaBrec, a Coast Guard spokesman, said that about a week into the cleanup response, the Coast Guard started enforcing a policy that prohibits news media from accompanying candidates for public office on visits to government facilities, ''to help manage the large number of requests for media embeds and visits by elected officials.'' In a separate incident last week, a reporter and photographer from The Daily News of New York were told by a BP contractor they could not access a public beach on Grand Isle, La., one of the areas most heavily affected by the oil spill. The contractor summoned a local sheriff, who then told the reporter, Matthew Lysiak, that news media had to fill out paperwork and then be escorted by a BP official to get access to the beach. BP did not respond to requests for comment about the incident. ''I said under what authority are you telling me I have to leave?'' Mr. Lysiak recalled. ''He said he would call the sheriff.'' In the first few weeks after the oil rig explosion, BP kept a tight lid on images of the oil leaking into the gulf. Even when it released the first video of the spewing oil on May 12, it provided only a 30-second clip. The most detailed images did not become public until two weeks ago when BP gave members of Congress access to internal video feeds from its underwater rovers. Without BP's permission, some members of Congress displayed the video for news networks like CNN, which carried them live. For journalists on the ground, particularly photographers who hire their own planes, one of the major sources of frustration has been the flight restrictions over the water, where access is off limits in a vast area from the Louisiana bayous to Pensacola, Fla. Each time they fly in the area, they have to be granted permission from the F.A.A. ''Although there's a tremendous amount of oil, finding out exactly where it's washing ashore or where booming is going on is very difficult,'' said John McCusker, a photographer with The Times-Picayune. ''At 3,000 feet you're shooting through clouds, and it's difficult to tell the difference between an oil slick and a shadow from a cloud.'' A spokeswoman for the agency, Laura J. Brown, said the flight restrictions are necessary to prevent civilian air traffic from interfering with aircraft assisting the response effort. Ms. Brown also said the Coast Guard-F.A.A. command center that turned away Southern Seaplane was enforcing the essential- flights-only policy in place at the time; and she said the BP contractor who answered the phone was there because the F.A.A. operations center is in one of BP's buildings. ''That person was not making decisions about whether aircraft are allowed to enter the airspace,'' Ms. Brown said. But the incident with Southern Seaplane is not the only example of journalists being told they cannot go somewhere simply because they are journalists. CBS News reported last month that one of its news crews was threatened with arrest for trying to film a public beach where oil had washed ashore. The Coast Guard said later that it was disappointed to learn of the incident. Media access in disaster situations is always an issue. But the situation in the gulf is especially nettlesome because journalists have to depend on the government and BP to gain access to so much of the affected area. Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor at the Associated Press, likened the situation to reporters being embedded with the military in Afghanistan. ''There is a continued effort to keep control over the access,'' Mr. Oreskes said. ''And even in places where the government is cooperating with us to provide access, it's still a problem because it's still access obtained through the government.'' CAPTION(S): PHOTO: Many vessels worked to combat the spill. News photographers aboard the Mr. LeRoy shot the Transocean Discoverer Enterprise. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES) By JEREMY W. PETERS Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition) Peters, Jeremy W. "Efforts in Gulf of Mexico to Limit Flow of News About the Spill." New York Times, 10 June 2010, p. A20(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A228471542/ITOF?u=oran95108&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=49cd79e7. Accessed 1 Sept. 2021. Gale Document Number: GALE|A228471542 BBA 4751, Business Ethics 1 Course Learning Outcomes for Unit V Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to: 2. Relate ethical behavior in high-profile events. 3. Examine regulatory and sustainability market approaches to business’s environmental responsibilities. Reading Assignment In order to access the following resource(s), click the link(s) below: Matejek, S., & Gossling, T. (2014). Beyond legitimacy: A case study in BP’s “green lashing.” Journal of Business Ethics, 120(4), 571-584. Retrieved from https://libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.libraryresources.c olumbiasouthern.edu/docview/1513729827?accountid=33337 Roberts, P. S. (2006). FEMA after Katrina. Policy Review, (137), 15-33. Retrieved from https://libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direc t=true&db=bth&AN=21254699&site=ehost-live&scope=site Chapter five: Lessons learned. (2005, September 15). In The federal response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons learned. Retrieved from http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/reports/katrina-lessons- learned/chapter5.html Peters, J. W. (2010, June 10). Efforts in Gulf of Mexico to limit flow of news about the spill. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/login?auth=CAS&url=http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i. do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=oran95108&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA228471542&it=r&asid=c9f34b728871e cc3f98708adb413b757 Unit Lesson Click here to access an introduction video. Click here to access the introduction video transcript. UNIT V STUDY GUIDE Ethical Actions in Times of Business Issues Surrounding Certain Tragic Events BBA 4751, Business Ethics 2 UNIT x STUDY GUIDE Title Click here to access a video that briefly introduces topics in this unit. Click here to access the video transcript. Henry Potter is a slum lord banker in the famous seasonal movie It’s a Wonderful Life. Potter is the richest man in town, yet he charges extortionate rents. The greedy banker is motivated only by increasing his share of the banking and residential rental business in town at every opportunity. He is a majority shareholder in hero George Bailey’s Bailey Building & Loan and tries to take advantage of the residents when there is a bank run on Bailey’s Loan by offering the shareholders $0.50 on the dollar for their outstanding shares. Potter is unscrupulous, and at one point, he mistakenly receives $8,000 from Bailey’s uncle who had wrapped it in a newspaper, which he later threw at Potter in anger. Potter steals the money, and when Bailey realizes it is missing, he (on behalf of his uncle) must get a loan to cover the missing money. He ironically goes to Potter, who unethically grants him a loan on the money Potter actually stole. Potter later threatens to use the force of law to imprison Bailey on a technicality of nonpayment of the loan. Potter seemingly adheres to all of the technical legal banking requirements, while taking advantage (or trying to) of the residents in Bedford Falls without regard to the ethical nature of his decisions; he is self-interested, greedy, uncaring, dishonest, disloyal, and unscrupulous. Like Potter, some companies operate (technically) legally, yet they are unethical. Companies perform their obligations to the minimum standard required when much more is required in the situation. To paraphrase former U.S. Chief Justice Stewart, it can be said that ethics are about knowing the difference between what your rights are and what the right thing to do is (Collins, 2014). This will be the central inquiry of this unit. In one company we will study, they are alleged to have taken actions that supposedly discharge their ethical and legal obligations solely for the purpose of enhancing their reputation. If you act ethically but for the wrong reasons, is it still ethical? On the other hand, some organizations say they are “doing the best they can” in a given circumstance, yet their incompetence causes them to behave unethically, though no harm was intended. In this unit, we will delve into three case studies through the lens of ethical philosophy and decision- making by leaders. We will study the BP Oil Spill, the recent Japanese nuclear reactor meltdown, and the Hurricane Katrina disaster, respectively. In the British Petroleum (BP) Oil Spill, on April 20, 2010, a wellhead on the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico near the Louisiana coastline. It was the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. The extent of the actual oil spill is currently unknown partly because BP prevented the requests of independent scientists to measure the spill on the ocean floor given that BP stated the flow rate of the oil was irrelevant to the response effort and might even hinder it. How would knowing the flow rate actually hinder the response efforts to mitigate the damage? Would authorities not need to know how big the disaster was in order to effectively clean it up? Media was largely excluded from the site by President Obama and BP; therefore, relevant and accurate information was not disseminated. BP was obligated to clean-up the spill, but U.S. legal protections for wildlife in the Gulf are nearly nonexistent. Do we have ethical responsibilities to the wildlife that surrounds us? There was no penalty to BP for killing thousands of animals and negatively affecting the food chain in far-reaching areas. Technically, BP remediated the damage to the environment, but should it have done more given the extreme harm it caused though no legal violation occurred? Were its actions ethical to those nearby residents and the wildlife at large? Furthermore, many argue there was a deep divide between BP’s actual operations and what it was communicating to the public and market about its corporate responsibility in the Gulf. In the aftermath of the spill, BP spent large amounts of money in rebranding itself as a “green” company, though its “green” efforts were lackluster and may have only represented minimum efforts on behalf of wildlife. In this unit, we will look closely at BP’s responsive actions substantively, as well as its “greenwashing” after the fact and address its legal and ethical obligations, on what basis they rested, and whether they were discharged. BBA 4751, Business Ethics 3 UNIT x STUDY GUIDE Title In the context of the nuclear power plant meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi, the emergency was set into motion when an earthquake and resulting tsunami hit the surrounding area. The meltdown at Daiichi was as large as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster that released 100,000 tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean and a radioactive plume all over the world. In the context of producing nuclear energy as a sustainable alternative source to fossil fuels, we will focus on the theory of utilitarianism and whether this paradigm is applied, whether the nuclear energy program maximizes well-being to most people, and whether there are alternatives to accomplish the same end. We will focus on the impact of local residents and their ethical treatment, regulations, and violations, as well as whether key information was disseminated. In the analysis, we will evaluate other sources of energy, both their benefits and costs, and compare them to nuclear energy production. Some argue nuclear energy is “green” because it obviates the need to use fossil fuels, does not emit pollutants, and is generally safe. Others counter that it produces radioactive byproducts that contaminate the environment upon disposal for thousands of years. How does one decide which types of energy are ethically produced and on what basis? Might it be the process or the end result, or is it what it prevents? Last, we will look at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) emergency response to Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in the New Orleans area in 2006. In this context, we will look at whether incompetency or inefficiency can be and was the cause of FEMA’s disastrous response to the situation and decide whether incompetency rather than intent can form the basis of unethical action based on the concepts we have already covered. We will study an organization mired in bureaucracy, significantly under-funded and divided, under-staffed, primarily responsible for a situation in which it had little ability to access and communicate information about the unfolding tragedy and allocate its emergency services. Is it enough that FEMA did “the best with what they had,” or was this tragedy foreseeable, and thus they were obligated to be better organized, trained, staffed, and funded in order to ethically discharge their duties? In this case, FEMA did a few things well, but on the whole, its efforts fell short, and there were failures; too little came too late for the residents. Whether companies are doing what they have a right to do or are really doing the right thing, in the context of these disasters, is central to how we view ethical decision-making and leadership on a grander scale. Intent matters; however, we shall see that the lack of it can also form the basis of unethical action. Reference Collins, M. A. (2014). Supreme justice. Seattle, WA: Thomas and Mercer. CHAPTER FIVE: LESSONS LEARNED This government will learn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina. We are going to review every action and make necessary changes so that we are better prepared for any challenge of nature, or act of evil men, that could threaten our people. -- President George W. Bush, September 15, 20051 The preceding chapters described the dynamics of the response to Hurricane Katrina. While there were numerous stories of great professionalism, courage, and compassion by Americans from all walks of life, our task here is to identify the critical challenges that undermined and prevented a more efficient and effective Federal response. In short, what were the key failures during the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina? Hurricane Katrina Critical Challenges 1. National Preparedness 2. Integrated Use of Military Capabilities 3. Communications 4. Logistics and Evacuations 5. Search and Rescue 6. Public Safety and Security 7. Public Health and Medical Support 8. Human Services 9. Mass Care and Housing 10. Public Communications 11. Critical Infrastructure and Impact Assessment 12. Environmental Hazards and Debris Removal 13. Foreign Assistance 14. Non-Governmental Aid 15. Training, Exercises, and Lessons Learned 16. Homeland Security Professional Development and Education 17. Citizen and Community Preparedness We ask this question not to affix blame. Rather, we endeavor to find the answers in order to identify systemic gaps and improve our preparedness for the next disaster – natural or man-made. We must move promptly to understand precisely what went wrong and determine how we are going to fix it. After reviewing and analyzing the response to Hurricane Katrina, we identified seventeen specific lessons the Federal government has learned. These lessons, which flow from the critical challenges we encountered, are depicted in the accompanying text box. Fourteen of these critical challenges were highlighted in the preceding Week of Crisis section and range from high-level policy and planning issues (e.g., the Integrated Use of Military Capabilities) to operational matters (e.g., Search and Rescue).2 Three other challenges – Training, Exercises, and Lessons Learned; Homeland Security Professional Development and Education; and Citizen and Community Preparedness – are interconnected to the others but reflect measures and institutions that improve our preparedness more broadly. These three will be discussed in the Report’s last chapter, Transforming National Preparedness. Some of these seventeen critical challenges affected all aspects of the Federal response. Others had an impact on a specific, discrete operational capability. Yet each, particularly when taken in aggregate, directly affected the overall efficiency and effectiveness of our efforts. This chapter summarizes the challenges that ultimately led to the lessons we have learned. Over one hundred recommendations for corrective action flow from these lessons and are outlined in detail in Appendix A of the Report. Critical Challenge: National Preparedness Our current system for homeland security does not provide the necessary framework to manage the challenges posed by 21st Century catastrophic threats. But to be clear, it is unrealistic to think that even the strongest framework can perfectly anticipate and overcome all challenges in a crisis. While we have built a response system that ably handles the demands of a typical hurricane season, wildfires, and other limited natural and man-made disasters, the system clearly has structural flaws for addressing catastrophic events. During the Federal response to Katrina3, four critical flaws in our national preparedness became evident: Our processes for unified management of the national response; command and control structures within the Federal government; knowledge of our preparedness plans; and regional planning and coordination. A discussion of each follows below. Unified Management of the National Response Effective incident management of catastrophic events requires coordination of a wide range of organizations and activities, public and private. Under the current response framework, the Federal government merely “coordinates” resources to meet the needs of local and State governments based upon their requests for assistance. Pursuant to the National Incident Management System (NIMS) and the National Response Plan (NRP), Federal and State agencies build their command and coordination structures to support the local command and coordination structures during an emergency. Yet this framework does not address the conditions of a catastrophic event with large scale competing needs, insufficient resources, and the absence of functioning local governments. These limitations proved to be major inhibitors to the effective marshalling of Federal, State, and local resources to respond to Katrina. Soon after Katrina made landfall, State and local authorities understood the devastation was serious but, due to the destruction of infrastructure and response capabilities, lacked the ability to communicate with each other and coordinate a response. Federal officials struggled to perform responsibilities generally conducted by State and local authorities, such as the rescue of citizens stranded by the rising floodwaters, provision of law enforcement, and evacuation of the remaining population of New Orleans, all without the benefit of prior planning or a functioning State/local incident command structure to guide their efforts. The Federal government cannot and should not be the Nation’s first responder. State and local governments are best positioned to address incidents in their jurisdictions and will always play a large role in disaster response. But Americans have the right to expect that the Federal government will effectively respond to a catastrophic incident. When local and State governments are overwhelmed or incapacitated by an event that has reached catastrophic proportions, only the Federal government has the resources and capabilities to respond. The Federal government must therefore plan, train, and equip to meet the requirements for responding to a catastrophic event. Command and Control Within the Federal Government In terms of the management of the Federal response, our architecture of command and control mechanisms as well as our existing structure of plans did not serve us well. Command centers in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and elsewhere in the Federal government had unclear, and often overlapping, roles and responsibilities that were exposed as flawed during this disaster. The Secretary of Homeland Security, is the President’s principal Federal official for domestic incident management, but he had difficulty coordinating the disparate activities of Federal departments and agencies. The Secretary lacked real-time, accurate situational awareness of both the facts from the disaster area as well as the on-going response activities of the Federal, State, and local players. The National Response Plan’s Mission Assignment process proved to be far too bureaucratic to support the response to a catastrophe. Melvin Holden, Mayor-President of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, noted that, “requirements for paper work and form completions hindered immediate action and deployment of people and materials to assist in rescue and recovery efforts.”4 Far too often, the process required numerous time consuming approval signatures and data processing steps prior to any action, delaying the response. As a result, many agencies took action under their own independent authorities while also responding to mission assignments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), creating further process confusion and potential duplication of efforts. This lack of coordination at the Federal headquarters-level reflected confusing organizational structures in the field. As noted in the Week of Crisis chapter, because the Principal Federal Official (PFO) has coordination authority but lacks statutory authority over the Federal Coordinating Officer (FCO), inefficiencies resulted when the second PFO was appointed. The first PFO appointed for Katrina did not have this problem because, as the Director of FEMA, he was able to directly oversee the FCOs because they fell under his supervisory authority.5 Future plans should ensure that the PFO has the authority required to execute these responsibilities. Moreover, DHS did not establish its NRP-specified disaster site multi-agency coordination center—the Joint Field Office (JFO)—until after the height of the crisis.6 Further, without subordinate JFO structures to coordinate Federal response actions near the major incident sites, Federal response efforts in New Orleans were not initially well- coordinated.7 Lastly, the Emergency Support Functions (ESFs) did not function as envisioned in the NRP. First, since the ESFs do not easily integrate into the NIMS Incident Command System (ICS) structure, competing systems were implemented in the field – one based on the ESF structure and a second based on the ICS. Compounding the coordination problem, the agencies assigned ESF responsibilities did not respect the role of the PFO. As VADM Thad Allen stated, “The ESF structure currently prevents us from coordinating effectively because if agencies responsible for their respective ESFs do not like the instructions they are receiving from the PFO at the field level, they go to their headquarters in Washington to get decisions reversed. This is convoluted, inefficient, and inappropriate during emergency conditions. Time equals lives saved.” Knowledge and Practice in the Plans At the most fundamental level, part of the explanation for why the response to Katrina did not go as planned is that key decision-makers at all levels simply were not familiar with the plans. The NRP was relatively new to many at the Federal, State, and local levels before the events of Hurricane Katrina.8 This lack of understanding of the “National” plan not surprisingly resulted in ineffective coordination of the Federal, State, and local response. Additionally, the NRP itself provides only the ‘base plan’ outlining the overall elements of a response: Federal departments and agencies were required to develop supporting operational plans and standard operating procedures (SOPs) to integrate their activities into the national response.9 In almost all cases, the integrating SOPs were either non-existent or still under development when Hurricane Katrina hit. Consequently, some of the specific procedures and processes of the NRP were not properly implemented, and Federal partners had to operate without any prescribed guidelines or chains of command. Furthermore, the JFO staff and other deployed Federal personnel often lacked a working knowledge of NIMS or even a basic understanding of ICS principles. As a result, valuable time and resources were diverted to provide on-the-job ICS training to Federal personnel assigned to the JFO. This inability to place trained personnel in the JFO had a detrimental effect on operations, as there were not enough qualified persons to staff all of the required positions. We must require all incident management personnel to have a working knowledge of NIMS and ICS principles. Insufficient Regional Planning and Coordination The final structural flaw in our current system for national preparedness is the weakness of our regional planning and coordination structures. Guidance to governments at all levels is essential to ensure adequate preparedness for major disasters across the Nation. To this end, the Interim National Preparedness Goal (NPG) and Target Capabilities List (TCL) can assist Federal, State, and local governments to: identify and define required capabilities and what levels of those capabilities are needed; establish priorities within a resource-constrained environment; clarify and understand roles and responsibilities in the national network of homeland security capabilities; and develop mutual aid agreements. Since incorporating FEMA in March 2003, DHS has spread FEMA’s planning and coordination capabilities and responsibilities among DHS’s other offices and bureaus. DHS also did not maintain the personnel and resources of FEMA’s regional offices.10 FEMA’s ten regional offices are responsible for assisting multiple States and planning for disasters, developing mitigation programs, and meeting their needs when major disasters occur. During Katrina, eight out of the ten FEMA Regional Directors were serving in an acting capacity and four of the six FEMA headquarters operational division directors were serving in an acting capacity. While qualified acting directors filled in, it placed extra burdens on a staff that was already stretched to meet the needs left by the vacancies. Additionally, many FEMA programs that were operated out of the FEMA regions, such as the State and local liaison program and all grant programs, have moved to DHS headquarters in Washington. When programs operate out of regional offices, closer relationships are developed among all levels of government, providing for stronger relationships at all levels. By the same token, regional personnel must remember that they represent the interests of the Federal government and must be cautioned against losing objectivity or becoming mere advocates of State and local interests. However, these relationships are critical when a crisis situation develops, because individuals who have worked and trained together daily will work together more effectively during a crisis. Lessons Learned: The Federal government should work with its homeland security partners in revising existing plans, ensuring a functional operational structure - including within regions - and establishing a clear, accountable process for all National preparedness efforts. In doing so, the Federal government must:  Ensure that Executive Branch agencies are organized, trained, and equipped to perform their response roles.  Finalize and implement the National Preparedness Goal. Critical Challenge: Integrated Use of Military Capabilities The Federal response to Hurricane Katrina demonstrates that the Department of Defense (DOD) has the capability to play a critical role in the Nation’s response to catastrophic events. During the Katrina response, DOD – both National Guard and active duty forces – demonstrated that along with the Coast Guard it was one of the only Federal departments that possessed real operational capabilities to translate Presidential decisions into prompt, effective action on the ground. In addition to possessing operational personnel in large numbers that have been trained and equipped for their missions, DOD brought robust communications infrastructure, logistics, and planning capabilities. Since DOD, first and foremost, has its critical overseas mission, the solution to improving the Federal response to future catastrophes cannot simply be “let the Department of Defense do it.” Yet DOD capabilities must be better identified and integrated into the Nation’s response plans. The Federal response to Hurricane Katrina highlighted various challenges in the use of military capabilities during domestic incidents. For instance, limitations under Federal law and DOD policy caused the active duty military to be dependent on requests for assistance. These limitations resulted in a slowed application of DOD resources during the initial response. Further, active duty military and National Guard operations were not coordinated and served two different bosses, one the President and the other the Governor. Limitations to Department of Defense Response Authority For Federal domestic disaster relief operations, DOD currently uses a “pull” system that provides support to civil authorities based upon specific requests from local, State, or Federal authorities.11 This process can be slow and bureaucratic. Assigning active duty military forces or capabilities to support disaster relief efforts usually requires a request from FEMA12, an assessment by DOD on whether the request can be supported, approval by the Secretary of Defense or his designated representative, and a mission assignment for the military forces or capabilities to provide the requested support. From the time a request is initiated until the military force or capability is delivered to the disaster site requires a 21-step process.13 While this overly bureaucratic approach has been adequate for most disasters, in a catastrophic event like Hurricane Katrina the delays inherent in this “pull” system of responding to requests resulted in critical needs not being met.14 One could imagine a situation in which a catastrophic event is of such a magnitude that it would require an even greater role for the Department of Defense. For these reasons, we should both expedite the mission assignment request and the approval process, but also define the circumstances under which we will push resources to State and local governments absent a request. Unity of Effort among Active Duty Forces and the National Guard In the overall response to Hurricane Katrina, separate command structures for active duty military and the National Guard hindered their unity of effort. U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) commanded active duty forces, while each State government commanded its National Guard forces. For the first two days of Katrina response operations, USNORTHCOM did not have situational awareness of what forces the National Guard had on the ground. Joint Task Force Katrina (JTF-Katrina) simply could not operate at full efficiency when it lacked visibility of over half the military forces in the disaster area.15 Neither the Louisiana National Guard nor JTF-Katrina had a good sense for where each other’s forces were located or what they were doing. For example, the JTF-Katrina Engineering Directorate had not been able to coordinate with National Guard forces in the New Orleans area. As a result, some units were not immediately assigned missions matched to on-the-ground requirements. Further, FEMA requested assistance from DOD without knowing what State National Guard forces had already deployed to fill the same needs.16 Also, the Commanding General of JTF-Katrina and the Adjutant Generals (TAGs) of Louisiana and Mississippi had only a coordinating relationship, with no formal command relationship established. This resulted in confusion over roles and responsibilities between National Guard and Federal forces and highlights the need for a more unified command structure.17 Structure and Resources of the National Guard As demonstrated during the Hurricane Katrina response, the National Guard Bureau (NGB) is a significant joint force provider for homeland security missions. Throughout the response, the NGB provided continuous and integrated reporting of all National Guard assets deployed in both a Federal and non-Federal status to USNORTHCOM, Joint Forces Command, Pacific Command, and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense. This is an important step toward achieving unity of effort. However, NGB’s role in homeland security is not yet clearly defined. The Chief of the NGB has made a recommendation to the Secretary of Defense that NGB be chartered as a joint activity of the DOD.18 Achieving these efforts will serve as the foundation for National Guard transformation and provide a total joint force capability for homeland security missions.19 Lessons Learned: The Departments of Homeland Security and Defense should jointly plan for the Department of Defense’s support of Federal response activities as well as those extraordinary circumstances when it is appropriate for the Department of Defense to lead the Federal response. In addition, the Department of Defense should ensure the transformation of the National Guard is focused on increased integration with active duty forces for homeland security plans and activities. Critical Challenge: Communications Hurricane Katrina destroyed an unprecedented portion of the core communications infrastructure throughout the Gulf Coast region. As described earlier in the Report, the storm debilitated 911 emergency call centers, disrupting local emergency services.20 Nearly three million customers lost telephone service. Broadcast communications, including 50 percent of area radio stations and 44 percent of area television stations, similarly were affected.21 More than 50,000 utility poles were toppled in Mississippi alone, meaning that even if telephone call centers and electricity generation capabilities were functioning, the connections to the customers were broken.22 Accordingly, the communications challenges across the Gulf Coast region in Hurricane Katrina’s wake were more a problem of basic operability23, than one of equipment or system interoperability.24 The complete devastation of the communications infrastructure left emergency responders and citizens without a reliable network across which they could coordinate.25 Although Federal, State, and local agencies had communications plans and assets in place, these plans and assets were neither sufficient nor adequately integrated to respond effectively to the disaster.26 Many available communications assets were not utilized fully because there was no national, State-wide, or regional communications plan to incorporate them. For example, despite their contributions to the response effort, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service’s radio cache—the largest civilian cache of radios in the United States—had additional radios available that were not utilized.27 Federal, State, and local governments have not yet completed a comprehensive strategy to improve operability and interoperability to meet the needs of emergency responders.28 This inability to connect multiple communications plans and architectures clearly impeded coordination and communication at the Federal, State, and local levels. A comprehensive, national emergency communications strategy is needed to confront the challenges of incorporating existing equipment and practices into a constantly changing technological and cultural environment.29 Lessons Learned: The Department of Homeland Security should review our current laws, policies, plans, and strategies relevant to communications. Upon the conclusion of this review, the Homeland Security Council, with support from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, should develop a National Emergency Communications Strategy that supports communications operability and interoperability. Critical Challenge: Logistics and Evacuation The scope of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, the effects on critical infrastructure in the region, and the debilitation of State and local response capabilities combined to produce a massive requirement for Federal resources. The existing planning and operational structure for delivering critical resources and humanitarian aid clearly proved to be inadequate to the task. The highly bureaucratic supply processes of the Federal government were not sufficiently flexible and efficient, and failed to leverage the private sector and 21st Century advances in supply chain management. Throughout the response, Federal resource managers had great difficulty determining what resources were needed, what resources were available, and where those resources were at any given point in time. Even when Federal resource managers had a clear understanding of what was needed, they often could not readily determine whether the Federal government had that asset, or what alternative sources might be able to provide it. As discussed in the Week of Crisis chapter, even when an agency came directly to FEMA with a list of available resources that would be useful during the response, there was no effective mechanism for efficiently integrating and deploying these resources. Nor was there an easy way to find out whether an alternative source, such as the private sector or a charity, might be able to better fill the need. Finally, FEMA’s lack of a real-time asset-tracking system – a necessity for successful 21st Century businesses – left Federal managers in the dark regarding the status of resources once they were shipped.30 Our logistics system for the 21st Century should be a fully transparent, four-tiered system. First, we must encourage and ultimately require State and local governments to pre-contract for resources and commodities that will be critical for responding to all hazards. Second, if these arrangements fail, affected State governments should ask for additional resources from other States through the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) process. Third, if such interstate mutual aid proves insufficient, the Federal government, having the benefit of full transparency, must be able to assist State and local governments to move commodities regionally. But in the end, FEMA must be able to supplement and, in catastrophic incidents, supplant State and local systems with a fully modern approach to commodity management. Lessons Learned: The Department of Homeland Security, in coordination with State and local governments and the private sector, should develop a modern, flexible, and transparent logistics system. This system should be based on established contracts for stockpiling commodities at the local level for emergencies and the provision of goods and services during emergencies. The Federal government must develop the capacity to conduct large-scale logistical operations that supplement and, if necessary, replace State and local logistical systems by leveraging resources within both the public sector and the private sector. With respect to evacuation—fundamentally a State and local responsibility—the Hurricane Katrina experience demonstrates that the Federal government must be prepared to fulfill the mission if State and local efforts fail. Unfortunately, a lack of prior planning combined with poor operational coordination generated a weak Federal performance in supporting the evacuation of those most vulnerable in New Orleans and throughout the Gulf Coast following Katrina’s landfall. The Federal effort lacked critical elements of prior planning, such as evacuation routes, communications, transportation assets, evacuee processing, and coordination with State, local, and non- governmental officials receiving and sheltering the evacuees. Because of poor situational awareness and communications throughout the evacuation operation, FEMA had difficulty providing buses through ESF-1, Transportation, (with the Department of Transportation as the coordinating agency).31 FEMA also had difficulty delivering food, water, and other critical commodities to people waiting to be evacuated, most significantly at the Superdome.32 Lessons Learned: The Department of Transportation, in coordination with other appropriate departments of the Executive Branch, must also be prepared to conduct mass evacuation operations when disasters overwhelm or incapacitate State and local governments. Critical Challenge: Search and Rescue After Hurricane Katrina made landfall, rising floodwaters stranded thousands in New Orleans on rooftops, requiring a massive civil search and rescue operation. The Coast Guard, FEMA Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) Task Forces33, and DOD forces34, in concert with State and local emergency responders from across the country, courageously combined to rescue tens of thousands of people. With extraordinary ingenuity and tenacity, Federal, State, and local emergency responders plucked people from rooftops while avoiding urban hazards not normally encountered during waterborne rescue.35 Yet many of these courageous lifesavers were put at unnecessary risk by a structure that failed to support them effectively. The overall search and rescue effort demonstrated the need for greater coordination between US&R, the Coast Guard, and military responders who, because of their very different missions, train and operate in very different ways. For example, Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) teams had a particularly challenging situation since they are neither trained nor equipped to perform water rescue. Thus they could not immediately rescue people trapped by the flood waters.36 Furthermore, lacking an integrated search and rescue incident command, the various agencies were unable to effectively coordinate their operations.37 This meant that multiple rescue teams were sent to the same areas, while leaving others uncovered.38 When successful rescues were made, there was no formal direction on where to take those rescued.39 Too often rescuers had to leave victims at drop-off points and landing zones that had insufficient logistics, medical, and communications resources, such as atop the I-10 cloverleaf near the Superdome.40 Lessons Learned: The Department of Homeland Security should lead an interagency review of current policies and procedures to ensure effective integration of all Federal search and rescue assets during disaster response. Critical Challenge: Public Safety and Security State and local governments have a fundamental responsibility to provide for the … Beyond Legitimacy: A Case Study in BP’s ‘‘Green Lashing’’ Sabine Matejek • Tobias Gössling Published online: 31 December 2013 � Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract This paper discusses the issue of legitimacy and, in particular the processes of building, losing, and repairing environmental legitimacy in the context of the Deepwater Horizon case. Following the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in 2010, BP plc. was accused of having set new records in the degree of divergence between its actual operations and what it had been communicating with regard to corporate responsibility. Its legitimacy crisis is here to be appraised as a case study in the discrepancy between symbolic and sub- stantive strategies in corporate greening and its communi- cation. A narrative analysis of BP’s ‘‘beyond petroleum’’- rebranding and the ‘‘making this right’’-campaign issued in response to the Gulf of Mexico disaster discusses their respective implications for (green) corporate change. Fur- ther, the question is addressed why BP’s green image endeavors were so widely accepted at first, only to find themselves dismissed as corporate greenwashing now. The study concludes that where a corporation’s ‘‘green narra- tive’’ consistently evokes established narratives, its legiti- macy will be judged against narrative, rather than empirical truth. Thus, the narrative will be more willingly accepted as speaking for the issuing company’s legitimacy, irrespective of whether it reflects substantive greening or not. Keywords Corporate environmental responsibility � Impression management � Narrative analysis � Corporate communication � Image crisis � BP Introduction Legitimacy as a social construct that relates the impression of the audience concerning the behavior and actions of organizations with approval or disapproval is a central topic in institutional organization theory (Suchman 1995). In that context, two different discussions about legitimacy, although highly related with each other, can be discerned: On the one hand, research discusses the consequences of legitimacy; on the other hand, the question is on the antecedents of legitimacy, also translated to the managerial perspective and related to the question what organizations (can) do to build, maintain or lose and repair their legiti- macy. Both perspectives are dealt with in the seminal work by Mark Suchman (1995) who defines legitimacy as ‘‘a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions’’ (ibid, p. 574). In his work, Suchman distin- guishes between three essential types of legitimacy, i.e. (1) pragmatic legitimacy, related to the products and services that an organization offers and the perception of these to be relevant for the society, (2) moral legitimacy, based upon actions and behavior of the respective organization, and (3) cognitive legitimacy, which refers to the comprehensibility of an organization and its actions. In the CSR debate, the concept of legitimacy is used to understand and explain the business–society relationship and, in particular, the business case in business ethics. In this context, it is often argued that organizations that vio- late societal rules lose legitimacy whereas those organi- zations that contribute to the well-being of societies will be rewarded accordingly. For instance, Palazzo and Scherer (2006, p. 71) state the following: ‘‘In recent years, many corporations have been involved in conflicts with civil S. Matejek (&) International Business, DHBW Mannheim, Coblitzallee, 1-9, 68163 Mannheim, Germany e-mail: [email protected] T. Gössling Organization Studies and Tilburg Sustainability Center, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands 123 J Bus Ethics (2014) 120:571–584 DOI 10.1007/s10551-013-2006-6 society and as a result their legitimacy has been chal- lenged.’’ Even though it is often not made explicit, legiti- macy in a CSR context is moral legitimacy: Companies that contravene social institutions risk losing their legiti- macy; consumers and investors can take economic action, thus not buy the respective products or shares any more, employees can take organizational behavior actions in the sense of withdrawing commitment and losing motivation (Gössling 2011). Environmental legitimacy is part of moral legitimacy (Bansal and Kistruck 2006). Corporate stakeholders, the media, including social media, NGO watchdogs, and gov- ernmental regulators have all been putting increased pres- sure on companies to assume corporate environmental responsibility (CER), i.e., to strategically consider and manage the impact of their products and operations on the natural environment. The objective of CER engagement is for the company to build and sustain environmental legitimacy. Bansal and Clelland (2004, p. 94) define corporate environmental legitimacy as ‘‘the generalized perception or assumption that a firm’s corporate environmental perfor- mance is desirable, proper or appropriate’’ and conse- quently deserving of approval. This definition of the term stresses that environmental legitimacy is assigned by stakeholders in a process of perception, based primarily on impressions. Companies faced with their stakeholders’ CER demands are thus drawn into the process of impres- sion management, in which ‘‘the firm’s image is negotiated between the organization and its audience’’ (Bansal and Kistruck 2006, p. 166), as the company takes deliberate influence on how it is perceived with regard to CER ‘‘by controlling what is disclosed and how’’ (ibid). This man- agement of impression is closely related with strategic responses to institutional pressures (Oliver 1991). The key argument in Olivers’s ideas is that organizations possess different possible reactions on institutional pressure, and compliance is just one possible strategy to satisfy stake- holders. Compromising, avoiding, defying or manipulating or other strategic responses (ibid, p. 152). Public impressions of CER will usually be limited to what is communicated by the company and the media, including social media. Most stakeholders, and consumers without NGO-clout or state legislation on their hands in particular, are usually not privy to a company’s strategies and activities in terms of its substantive actions, i.e., they are not in a position to tell whether the greening activities ‘‘create real and material change in the organization’s goals, structures, and processes’’ or not (Bansal and Ki- struck 2006, p. 166; see also Brown 1994; Cole and Van Orman 2008). Rather, corporate greening can be accessed and evaluated only by proxy of the symbolic representa- tions of substantive actions (Cherry and Sneirson 2011), making external communication a vital aspect of corporate environmental legitimacy. This aspect deserves particular attention, given the rather complicated issue of corporate communication as compared with third party communica- tions. Transparency differs between organizations with regard to the amount of information that is demanded and provided (Holt and Barkemeyer 2012). Different types of social and environmental audits and rankings aim at mak- ing CER measurable and comparable; however, the amount of information provided in such rankings is controversial, ambiguous and too numerous for consumers to be workable (ibid). Critical consumers, active in the blogsphere, point particularly to problems caused by focal organizations (Etter and Fieseler 2011). However, they do so in very particular cases and are rather selective with pointing their attention to organizations. Also as a consequence of this, some organizations are more transparent than others, since the pressure for transparency differs between sectors and organizations. Hence, organizations that apply sophisti- cated communication systems can manage to be the most important source concerning information about themselves for the majority of stakeholders. Green narratives, i.e., the plots in which a company structures environmental issues to communicate them, are a decisive aspect of symbolic representations in this context. Narratives make communicable what is considered valu- able (Kearney 2002; Starkey and Crane 2003). They rep- resent one of the rare means of access to corporate values and culture, which are renowned for their evasive, implicit, and abstract nature that makes them difficult to tackle (Boje 2008), but also a crucial source of motivations and restrictions on individual as well as corporate behavior (Brown 1994). Green narratives can possibly represent two different things: First, they can be the explicit communication and the representation of underlying substantive greening. On the other hand, they may also be deployed deliberately ‘‘in order to direct attention away from certain facts and towards others’’ (Brown 1994, p. 166), taking any degree of deviation from substantive activities in an organization. In this case, symbolic actions may even eclipse substantive activities entirely, a phenomenon generally referred to as greenwashing, or window dressing. Hence, green narratives ‘‘serve as a form of deception to mislead critics of a firm’s environmental record by merely embracing the narrative as a rhetorical device, rather than as a reflection or impetus to action’’ (Starkey and Crane 2003, p. 233). Symbolic actions, then, ‘‘are acts to which meaning is attributed beyond their substantive impact’’ (Brown 1994, p. 863) and which replace, rather represent what they communicate. Empirically, this study investigates the stark contrast in BP’s public communications with regard to environmental responsibility before and after the Gulf of Mexico crisis in 572 S. Matejek, T. Gössling 123 2010. By means of a narrative analysis, it offers an explanation for the fast decline of corporate (environmen- tal) legitimacy in the context of a crisis. It strives to answer the questions of how BP’s symbolic commitment to cor- porate greening could create an image of substantial environmental responsibility, and, consequently, environ- mental legitimacy, and to what extent its prior ‘‘green’’ differentiation aggravated the reputational, financial, and operational crisis after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. In 2010, BP plc. had to experience a severe loss of legitimacy. After the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform with its fatalities and the subsequent envi- ronmental fallout, BP’s was caught in a corporate legiti- macy crisis. The company was not only found to have failed at fulfilling its responsibilities toward its employees, the environment, its stakeholders, and its shareholders (Reidel 2010; Rickens 2010; Steffy 2010). But, as it is to be shown in the following, the media and environmental NGOs also cast BP as a corporation willing to don a green image for mere symbolic sake, without backing it up with the necessary strategic and operational change which would give it substance. The following overview of the media response to the Gulf of Mexico crisis shows how BP’s greening campaign set the stage for the dimensions to its loss of legitimacy in 2010. BP in Waters Too Deep Through an elaborate, $200 Million rebranding campaign driven by former CEO John Browne (Lowry 2010), BP had turned itself into the first global player of the oil business to find its strategic vision in a future ‘‘beyond petroleum.’’ BP acknowledged the inevitably finite nature of its primary product resource and, in deliberate contrast to its industry competitors in general and market leader ExxonMobil in particular, was also the first oil company to publically accept the scientific reality of man-made climate change (Cherry and Sneirson 2011; Heubaum 2010; Reidel 2010; Vetter et al. 2010). BP declared it would proactively and sustainably diversify its product portfolio, turning toward alternative, renewable energy sources (Lowry 2010). Claiming to take its business objectives beyond petro- leum was a daring move, considering the intrinsic paradox of a ‘‘green’’ extractor, refiner, and marketer of crude oil products. Its greening campaign was consequently met with equal measures of awed approval and cynical ridicule within and outside the company from the very beginning (Balmer 2010; Cherry and Sneirson 2011; Hicks 2010; Frey 2002; Kenney 2006; Macalister 2002; Reidel 2010; Krauss 2001; Lowry 2010; Rickens 2010; Vetter et al. 2010). Most decisively, however, assuming the role of a green industry leader placed BP under increased scrutiny, and the group was to be measured against different stan- dards ever since (Cherry and Sneirson 2011). After having raised itself to the heights of spearheading in CER and profiting from the advantages of favorable visibility (Frey 2002; Hart and McGinn 2010; Macalister 2002; Cherry and Sneirson 2011; Hicks 2010; Reidel 2010), BP had to take a severe ‘‘green lashing’’ (Bansal and Clelland 2004) from financial markets, government representatives, industry regulators, environmental pressure groups, the media, and those directly affected by the oil spill in 2010. As lease owner, BP was legally responsible for opera- tional safety on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. Although it was not the only responsible party involved in the accident and its consequences, BP was confronted with by far the most severe charges of fault or shortcomings in congressional and legal investigations (Mufson and Kornblut 2010; Chazan and Carlton 2010; Cline 2010). The kind of operations it faced in response to the crisis ‘‘had never been done before in 5,000 feet of water’’ (PR VII) and BP had to concede that their success could not be guaranteed since ‘‘[t]his will be the first time this proven shallow water technology has been adapted for the deep- water’’ (PR IV) or even ‘‘tested in these conditions’’ (PR VII). Likewise, BP was facing the accusation that it had been conducting deepwater drilling with technology developed and proven reliable only under shallow water conditions, and without adequate measures to either pre- vent a blowout, or react to one (Chazan and Carlton 2010; Mufson 2011). Even though BP was no exception to its industry competitors in this regard, and even though it had obtained the necessary permits from the US authorities, this earned it no leniency with the public regarding its per- ceived environmental irresponsibility (Eilperin 2010). Only days after the accident, emails and internal com- munications were leaked to the media which suggested, if not documented, that BP had repeatedly ignored safety concerns raised by its own and contracted engineers on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig (e.g., Steffy 2010). When investigations into the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe exposed a clear lack of substantive care for environmental and personnel safety (Cline 2010; Eilperin 2010; Heubaum 2010; Mufson and Kornblut 2010), BP was not only criticized for the risks they had taken when operating the platform but also for their efforts to let the company appear greener than it was. Critics worldwide were launching ironical redesigns of the BP logo, spoofed ad layouts, and rewritings of its former marketing spins; wherever BP had positioned itself as beyond petro- leum, environmentally friendly, or setting new standards in sustainability, these communication artifacts were now ‘‘hijacked’’ and used to discredit BP (for examples see e.g., Balmer 2010), see as an example Fig. 1. The loss of legitimacy was utterly expensive, costing the group record amounts in cash (estimates of the total costs Beyond Legitimacy 573 123 ran between $16 and $67 billion, depending on the degree of negligence BP would be found guilty of; cf. Mufson 2011; Reidel 2010) and 50 % of its market capitalization in 2010 (see Fig. 2). This drastic drop was largely due to the pending question of liability as, for months, it remained unclear how much exactly BP would owe the US author- ities and how much the courts would assign to those affected on sea and at the shores (Hannam 2010; Hicks 2010; Reidel 2010). While the values lost in trust and license to operate in and beyond the Gulf of Mexico states may be less easy to quantify, the fact that BP has not entirely recovered its pre-crisis market value (see Fig. 2) indicates that the same company with the same assets may considered to be worth less without as a consequence of its loss in moral legitimacy. Effectively, the company had not lost any of its pragmatic legitimacy, since it was still fully able to operate its petrol business and provide all products and services in the same quantity and quality as before the accident happened. Indeed, BP’s public image during and immediately after the crisis took slightly varied tones of the same judgment: that the group’s green differentiation had been exposed as nothing but a means to an end—i.e., an end other than accepting environmental responsibility (Cherry and Sneirson 2011; Hannam 2010). The immense blow to BP’s corporate image has been assigned to this ‘‘sense of betrayal’’ (ibid). In different print media, BP was diag- nosed with a ‘‘pervasive profit-orientation’’ which was perceived as being in diametrical opposition to stake- holder-oriented and safety-conscious, responsible busi- ness conduct (Cline 2010; Reidel 2010; Rickens 2010; Steffy 2010). Eventually, the Deepwater Horizon crisis drew attention to this ‘‘gap that BP so effectively exploited—taking advantage of the public relations upside of CSR without actually expanding the time or money to integrate or engage in it’’ (Cherry and Sneirson 2011, p. 115). Fig. 1 Cynical response to the BP logo by Greenpeace Fig. 2 Stock chart for BP plc. (retrieved June 20th, 2012, from nasdaq.com) depicting BP’s stock price (top chart) and available shares on the public market (bottom chart) between July 2009 and June 2012 574 S. Matejek, T. Gössling 123 Besides the financial and reputational dimension, BP’s crisis was also one of engineering capacity. For all the most pressing tasks—stopping the spill, sealing the well, con- taining the oil and its damages—BP seemed ill-prepared, if not downright incapable (Chazan and Carlton 2010; Eil- perin 2010; Vetter et al. 2010). As the crisis dragged on for months, BP’s struggle was personified in its CEO Tony Hayward (Balmer 2010; Vetter et al. 2010; Boldt and Student 2010), who provided the already raging media frenzy with a running list of ‘‘Haywardisms’’: remarks that showed a lack of sensitivity for the situation, for example ‘‘There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.’’, ‘‘I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest.’’ and ‘‘What the hell did we do to deserve this?’’ The CEO undermined the legitimacy of its company by reacting perceivably inadequately throughout the crisis. Damage control became the only thing left for BP, which in consequence ‘‘raised the bar for themselves and any other company in terms of throwing the weight of com- munications resources at a crisis’’ (Bush 2010), coining the term ‘‘crisis marketing’’ (ibid). BP’s CER impression management credo turned from ‘‘beyond petroleum’’ to ‘‘Making this right.’’ Research Questions Cherry and Sneirson (2011, p. 987) have recently discussed the discrepancy of ‘‘the reality versus the myth of BP’’ and the question at which degree of discrepancy between communicated and substantive greening a company’s CER communication attains the quality of fraud. Whether or not BP will be held legally accountable for securities fraud or false advertisement will be decided in court. Judging by the rules of transparent business conduct, however, the public and media have clearly reached their verdict, generally agreeing that BP’s green impression management was hardly more than a symbolic bubble. Admittedly, the media was certainly more than a neutral observer. Certainly, the government and media themselves engaged in blame shifting and scape goating. But whether justified or not, the impression left is one for which BP now has to account. As Bansal and Kistruck (2006, p. 166) have pointed out, ‘‘scholars […] are interested in the ethics of using symbolic impressions that deliberately diverge from substantive actions.’’ After all, a corporation willing to ‘‘involve pre- tense and deceit’’ (ibid) in their impression management is expected to make similarly questionable concessions on integrity in other matters of corporate conduct as well (Bansal and Clelland 2004; Rickens 2010). However, deliberation is hard to prove with regard to false impres- sions. The challenge, then, is to provide an evaluative framework which allows for corporate responsibility communications to be analyzed with regard to the symbolic versus substantive nature of their impression management effects. Therefore, this paper asks: RQ 1: How can we explain that BP’s green narrative aggravated the company’s loss of legitimacy through the Gulf of Mexico crisis, when its public impression reversed from BP as oil industry leader in CER to BP as a deceptive greenwasher? This paper builds on such an evaluative framework through narrative analysis, addressing two matters of par- ticular interest for corporate responsibility research: On a practical level, we need to study in greater detail how management develops and embraces green narrative and how such narrative actually reflects or stimulates changes in management practices. On a conceptual level, we need to be aware of the seduc- tive and deceptive (including self-deceptive) power of language and reflect upon how better to connect green word/narrative with deeds that are consistent with the spirit of such narrative. (Starkey and Crane 2003, p. 234; emphasis added) Addressing the practical level, the BP case will be analyzed as a study in corporate narratives and their implications for substantive greening. RQ 2: Were the ‘‘beyond petroleum’’ and ‘‘Making this right’’ narratives consistent with reflecting or reinforcing substantive green change at BP? (De-)familiarization Narratives and Corporate Greening The analysis of green narratives on the practical level of substantive and symbolic greening as cited above presup- poses that they are relevant for either (Brown 1994). While corporate narratives might be intuitively considered as symbolic representations only, they can also have a con- siderable impact on substantive actions, since they may ‘‘influence and control decision premises, processes and outcomes’’ (ibid, p. 863). Green narratives enable a com- pany to accept or, where necessary, limit its corporate environmental responsibilities; especially in a change process, they can generate and foster a company’s com- mitment to its change toward greener management and operations (Preuss and Dawson 2009). Starkey and Crane (2003, p. 227) introduced the distinction of familiarization and defamiliarization narratives because they had found that ‘‘where firms actively engage in envi- ronmental programs, they are likely to mobilize existing organizational narratives to frame the process of change, rather than develop new ones.’’ Such familiarization Beyond Legitimacy 575 123 narratives are more readily accepted as part of the organiza- tion, because they plot its greening ‘‘in terms of company traditions, such as a history of product quality, cost control, customercare’’etc.(ibid), and are thusbuildingonestablished aspects of corporate strategy and identity. Familiarizing new corporate objectives and strategies via such narratives is a facilitative condition for corporate change, since it provides the ‘‘acceptable and uncontro- versial frames of reference’’ (Starkey and Crane 2003, p. 227) required to engage an organization’s internal and external agents of change. However, it is not a sufficient condition where the change process requires ‘‘a significant shift in the values and normative systems underpinning management theory and practice’’ (ibid). We argue that a company’s clear renunciation from its core business would represent such a significant shift in values and norms. Defamiliarization narratives, by contrast, create ‘‘para- digmatic tension and ideological conflict’’ (Starkey and Crane 2003, p. 222) by introducing narrative patterns diverting from or even opposed to the prevailing narratives. Yet it is exactly their initial lack of acceptability which results in their possible impetus for substantial change: alternative narratives draw attention to the ultimately con- structive and selective nature of the prevalent narrative, showing that it can be replaced. Thus, defamiliarization narratives are considered facilitators of corporate change and substantive greening. In BP’s case, we therefore suggest that a green narrative capable of reflecting or reinforcing sub- stantive greening would have to be a defamiliarizing one. Narrative Analysis as Evaluative Framework When addressing narratives on the conceptual level of legitimacy, a vital precondition is to be aware of the dis- tinction which is intuitively made between fictional and non- fictional narratives. Narratives may either be evaluated based on their accuracy of recounting events as they are claimed to have happened (empirical truth), or evaluated with regard to how plausible they make that their recounted events could have happened as described within the world as narrated (narrative truth). Narrative truth is fulfilled, where a given plot is rendered likely, convincing, and appropriate within its (fictional) framework (Kearney 2002; Koutsoubou 2010), while non-fictional narratives are expected to refer truthfully to an empirical reality ‘‘outside’’ their plot. The audience is usually content to accept narrative truth when it comes to narratives which do not refute their fic- tionality. Where a narrative lays emphasis on its non-fic- tional nature, such as in corporate impression management, however, narrative truth is generally considered as diverging from, inferior and even contrary to empirical truth. Here, the intuitive dichotomy is between narrative or truth. Thus, the distinction between narrative and empirical truth is of great relevance when developing an evaluative framework for narrative impression management: a narra- tive fulfilling the criteria of narrative truth can create impressions of corporate environmental legitimacy as defined above, even if it would fail a test against ‘‘empir- ical truth’’ or substantive CER. Approach Based on prior efforts toward that end (Starkey and Crane 2003; Preuss and Dawson 2009), this case study has been conducted by means of a narratological research method (Barthes and Duisit 1975) which has recently been trans- ferred to the analysis of narratives in CER as ‘‘an alter- native approach to judging the quality and, ultimately, the legitimacy of narratives about business and the environ- ment’’ (Preuss and Dawson 2009, p. 139). Data Basis The empirical data of a narrative analysis are the narrative texts under scrutiny (Humphreys and Brown 2008). In this case, they are selected CER communications by BP pre- dating the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe as well as taken from its ‘‘crisis marketing’’-campaign in 2010. They were chosen as data resources for this study based on the selection criteria of free accessibility to external stakeholders, direct topical relation to BP’s CER or the Deepwater Horizon crisis response, and a diversity of communication channels through which BP could spread ‘‘its own story’’ (i.e., with little interference by the media or others), because such communications were considered most likely to have an impression management effect on public stakeholders. …