CSR and Greenwashing in Finland

Abstract

Due to the general tendency to express environmental protection, environmentalism, and the actions to slow down the greenhouse effect in the world, the enterprises have noticed the importance of environmental values in their public announcements, documents, and homepages. In other words, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a very important and topical theme of the firms. The popularity of environmentalism tempts the firms to follow the direction of public opinion even though the actual environmental activities might be minor or even absent. This kind of quasi-environmentalism is called as greenwashing. This chapter focuses on greenwashing and CSR in the Finnish context via public discussions about greenwashing. This chapter is emphasizing the understandings and the sense-makings in the concepts of greenwashing and CSR and their numerous connotations basing on the results of the textual analysis. The outcomes are completed and compared with the international contexts, and, therefore, they are also internationally robust.