Self-claimed sustainability: Building social and environmental reputations with words

In the attempt of benefiting from positioning themselves as sustainable enterprises, some companies have indiscriminately claimed to operate under sustainable management. At the same time, diverse sustainability indexes have been developed to state the practice, as consumers and general stakeholders seem to value this attitude toward businesses. In that sense, studies have demonstrated the gap between corporate strategic intention and its actual implementation, as well as the use of short-term image building strategies through punctual promotional marketing activities, arguably disconnected of a consistent sustainability strategy. While some companies indeed seek to attain stakeholders' expectations on sustainable practices, others seem to restrain sustainability merely to their public communication. Within this reasoning some questions emerge: How may corporate social and environmental reputations possibly be built over sustainable and unsustainable operations? What would be the antecedents of corporate reputation allowing for both constructions? In order to offer theoretical bases for the approach of these issues, the present work proposes two theoretical frameworks for the building of “true” and “false” social and environmental corporate reputations. Ultimately we aim to demonstrate that, based on corporate speech, the construction of sustainable reputations disconnected from real sustainable operations is logically possible.