IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/csrchp/978-3-319-18005-2_1.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Sustainability and Communication

In: Strategic Communication for Sustainable Organizations

Author

Listed:
  • Myria Allen

    (University of Arkansas)

Abstract

In response to growing global environmental problems and threats associated with global warming, organizations are recognizing that business-as-usual is no longer sufficient and that it is time to go to scale in responding to impending challenges. Effective communication is absolutely essential. Strategic communication is needed to alert, persuade, and help people enact sustainability initiatives within and between organizations. Strategic communication also orients our consciousness by inviting us to take a particular perspective, by evoking certain values and not others, and by creating referents for our attention and understanding. Sometimes effective communication is characterized by strategic ambiguity. Organizations face multiple challenges in terms of their sustainability-related communication. Some are silenced because of their fear of speaking out. For others, the messages they create are not processed because message recipients are unmotivated. Knowledge regarding the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion and the use of repetition are important tools when designing strategic communication. Communicators need to think critically about where their audience is in their understanding of sustainability and how to present information in an accessible way. Attention to message design and message framing can help. Interview data drawn from Aspen Skiing Company; Heifer International®; the City and County of Denver, CO; the Arbor Day Foundation; and ClearSky Climate Solutions illustrates the concepts being discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Myria Allen, 2016. "Sustainability and Communication," CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance, in: Strategic Communication for Sustainable Organizations, edition 127, chapter 0, pages 1-19, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:csrchp:978-3-319-18005-2_1
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-18005-2_1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:csrchp:978-3-319-18005-2_1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.