Reputational satisficing and sour grapes mechanisms: how selective prioritization and strategic silence shape sustainability communication

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a novel conceptual framework to understand selective sustainability communication, distinguishing it from greenwashing, which can inform empirical studies on ESG disclosure patterns and credibility.

🏢実務担当者:Offers insight into how firms may unconsciously or strategically narrow their sustainability focus, prompting self-assessment of whether their disclosure reflects substantive environmental action or reputational satisficing.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the risk that current ESG frameworks may incentivize symbolic compliance rather than ecological substance, suggesting a need for standards that require materiality-based, ecologically substantive reporting.

Corporate sustainability communication, sustainability reporting, and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) frameworks have become central instruments through which firms signal responsibility and maintain stakeholder legitimacy. Yet many ecologically material challenges, including biodiversity loss, invasive species, and environmental externalities embedded in global supply chains, remain weakly addressed in corporate sustainability strategies and disclosures. Instead, firms often emphasize sustainability initiatives that are more visible, communicable, and reputationally rewarding, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. Prior disclosure research supports this pattern, indicating that firms in ecologically intensive industries, including oil and gas and aviation, often emphasize socially visible sustainability dimensions more strongly than less visible environmental impacts. To explain this dynamic, this paper introduces the concept of reputational satisficing , defined as a strategic and cognitive process through which firms narrow sustainability engagement to actions that are operationally feasible, symbolically legitimate, and capable of generating reputational returns. Drawing on adaptive preference theory , the paper conceptualizes reputational satisficing as a sour grapes mechanism through which organizations recalibrate sustainability ambitions when ecologically substantive goals are costly, complex, or difficult to communicate within prevailing governance frameworks. Over time, these dynamics may impede the green transition by reducing incentives for ecologically substantive innovation . The study develops a conceptual model identifying the antecedents, mechanisms, and organizational outcomes of reputational satisficing and distinguishes the construct from related phenomena such as greenwashing and legitimacy decoupling. By providing a cognitively grounded explanation for selective sustainability communication, the paper advances research on sustainability governance, marketing, and organizational strategy and offers a foundation for future empirical work on ESG credibility and ecological accountability.

• semanticscholar https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainability/articles/10.3389/frsus.2026.1827487/pdffirst seen 2026-07-23 06:00:14