Beyond a definition of greenwashing: from different types to different impacts

Since the mid-1960s, and the growth of the ecology movement, the phenomenon of misleading environmental communication has been recognized in corporate actions and strategies. It has been termed ‘eco-pornography’ by former advertising executive Jerry Mander. The term greenwashing was coined in 1986 by biologist and environmental activist Jay Westerveld and starting from the discussion of the phenomenon by Greer and Bruno (1996), the number of studies on greenwashing has grown significantly (Laufer,2003). Considering only full-length, peer-reviewed articles from scholarly journals from 1995 to 2014, 105 journal articles focused on this issue, and as of 2007 the number of articles began to increase rapidly (Lyon & Montgomery, 2015). Focusing on the main and more widely accepted meaning of greenwashing as ‘intentional misleading environmental communication’, and responding to some call for future research (Lyon & Montgomery, 2015; Siano et al., 2017), this paper aims to enrich greenwashing literature by developing a theoretical framework that blends elements of legitimacy theory (Suchman, 1995) and signalling theory (Connelly et al., 2011). In particular, we aim to identify the different areas of decision and application of the misleading communication.