Executive Presentations and Environmental Action in Polluting Industries: Moderating Effects of Narrative and Numeric Concreteness on Aspirational Talk

The gap between a firm's "talk" and its "walk" has received significant research attention in the CSR literature: does the firm’s behavior represent “aspirational talk” or just “greenwashing?” We drew on the formative view of communication to explore the question of whether executives’ environmental talk triggers firms to take environmental action. The method we applied was to study executive presentations in less constrained environments where the executives have more discretion. Using 1456 transcripts of executive presentations made by publicly traded firms in polluting industries at broker-hosted conferences, we found that executive utterances on environmental topics in the events were marginally associated with an increase in a firm’s environmental action. In addition, this study appears to show that a presentation style characterized by numeric concreteness moderates that impact, while a presentation style that instead emphasizes narrative concreteness does not.