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The purpose of this study is to examine the identification and collaboration rhetoric of the Norwegian government and public health authorities during the pandemic. The aim is to show whether and how actors use strategies and themes of identification, and whether they build identification with their publics.

The study combines qualitative and quantitative methods. Six identification strategies were identified through manual text analysis of press statements; word counts of each strategy were registered electronically to access quantitative data of individual actors.

The three strategies reflecting values, the two strategies reflecting division and disagreement and the strategy reflecting change showed almost equal frequencies. The strategy of shaping community, serving the function of change, and the division strategy, demonstrating identification through dissociation, were the most frequent strategies. Politicians preferred the collaboration strategy, while health experts preferred the strategy of concern and recognition.

The six identification strategies extend the understanding of leadership crisis communication and contemporary rhetoric as community-building discourse aiming for speaker–audience collaboration. The study demonstrates that division and disagreement are equally essential components of crisis communication as values and change. When actors differ in choice of strategy, themes and publics, they may still come across as coordinated and unified in their calls for solidarity, collective efforts and common understanding.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether organisations in the public domain have embraced a corporate type of discourse, mirroring the private sector’s preferred orientation towards expertise, or whether they maintain their traditional discourse of goodwill towards the publics they serve. At a critical time for the public sector with inadequate funding and dominance of New Public Management approaches, will it be more motivated to portray itself as expert and efficient rather than altruistic?

The paper applies a rhetorical framework to provide a detailed analysis of organisational value statements posted on the web sites of public and private organisations. The research considers the value priorities of 50 organisations in the UK and Scandinavia in order to gauge the extent of convergence between the two sectors’ preferred discourses.

The research shows that the public sector sticks to its guns in maintaining a web-transmitted values discourse which forefronts goodwill towards its clients. It also shows that the public and private sectors take different approaches to goodwill.

Strategists and communication specialists are encouraged to contemplate the extent to which their organisation’s projected web image equates their desired image to avoid alienating important public audiences and reinforce levels of trust. The current framework brings attention to the complex nature of goodwill and may be employed to better balance a discourse of organisational expertise against a discourse of goodwill in planning authentic value statements.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and illustrate ways in which the world’s largest retailers describe their logistics-related environmental considerations, their environmental indicators applied to measure the effects of these considerations and their environmental consciousness in their CSR reports.

Classification models are developed via a literature review on logistics-related environmental considerations, indicators and consciousness. A content analysis approach is then applied to examine CSR reports from 12 of the world’s largest retailers.

Few retailers show environmental considerations in all logistics activities, but purchasing is especially well described. Even if many retailers claim to use the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework, no one uses is completely. Judging consciousness from CSR reports raised a number of questions.

A contribution to theory is the development of two classification models. The first provides a description structure for environmental considerations related to logistics activities. The second expands the GRI indicator framework by incorporating a structure for logistics activities.

The classification models developed can be an important mean for managers and also consumers to judge the environmental sustainability of retailers by their CSR reports.

The study makes a social contribution with its input on sustainability and especially environmental issues.

Few studies have focused upon environmentally sustainable logistics in retail chains, and even fewer address how to measure environmental sustainability in this context.

Awareness of environmental impacts on society is increasing among companies. In order to turn environmental problems into business opportunities, many companies are beginning to consider how environmental, or green aspects can be integrated into their service offerings. This opportunity can be of specific interest to logistics service providers, whose core business is an environmental impact in itself. The purpose of this article is to indicate where green‐labelled logistics service providers are positioned today in their development, and to seek the underlying rationale in development of green service offerings.

This article takes a logistics service provider's perspective and is based on a multiple case study of six companies. The analysis is based on cross‐case analysis, and empirical, as well as theoretical, pattern matching.

The attitude towards a green approach differs among the case companies: while some are working towards a green integration throughout the entire business, others offer green alternatives to the original service offering. The results point to possible explanations for these differences, and include differences in range of service offerings, size, and to different management principles for green aspects.

The article can inspire logistics service providers in their continuing work to integrate green initiatives into the company. By introducing alternative green approaches in the development of service offerings, logistics service providers can match their own business and context with alternative rationales.

While most of the green logistics research focuses on the logistics system's characteristics, this article offers initial insights into how the integration of green aspects into logistics services can impact logistics service providers.

The research aims to draw a detailed picture of how international corporate banks and financial institutions approach image advertising to enhance impressions of their credibility. The purpose of the work is twofold, namely to demonstrate how corporate credibility can be conceptualised and made operational for strategic communication, and how the operational categories are utilised in the planning of recent image advertising campaigns in Europe.

A reconceptualised model of credibility dimensions was first proposed to obtain a collection of operational appeal forms. A corpus of 74 print adverts was then analysed in order to establish how financial marketers use the appeal forms to strengthen their corporate reputations. The patterns of credibility appeals obtained were then linked to the supporting visuals to provide a fuller picture of the industry's current praxis for portraying its expertise, trustworthiness and empathy.

The results reveal an overwhelming focus in both text and images on recounting companies' achievements and competencies at the expense of providing assurance of their integrity, truthfulness or attention to clients' needs. There is also clear evidence that corporate advertising is in fact strongly focussed on communicating credibility with less than 10 percent of discourse and visuals devoted to credibility‐free themes and issues.

The study takes a production perspective, using discourse and rhetorical analysis to determine how corporate documents are planned and executed. The data do not thus explain how advertising professionals distinguish between credibility appeals or how their target audiences recognise or respond to text and images communicating credibility.

The results of the research are intended to bring increased attention to the rhetorical options for managing reputations and their potential effects on corporate credibility discourse.

The study demonstrates how dimensions of credibility can be conceptualised at a level relevant both to practitioners and to academic writing courses. Additionally, the application of the credibility appeals disconfirms the expectation that financial services providers are increasingly branding themselves to the market on the basis of their character and concern for customers' well‐being.

Various suggested paths for greening logistics and supply chains often address the specific perspectives of single supply chain actors. Drawing on stakeholder theory, the purpose of this paper is to develop a deeper understanding of the alignment between logistics service providers (LSPs) and shippers in the context of adopting more environmentally sustainable logistics practices.

With a case study approach, a dual perspective is taken in which both LSPs and shippers were researched. The cases comprise eight LSPs and six shipper companies in Sweden, Italy and Ireland. Information was first analysed in relation to levels of environmental awareness, customer requirements and provider offerings and critical success factors (CSFs) and inhibitors. In a second step, the findings were analysed using stakeholder theory.

LSPs demonstrate higher ambition levels and more concrete offerings compared to shippers' requirements for green logistics services. Paradoxically, customers are an important CSF and also an inhibitor for both LSPs and shippers. Both LSPs and shippers perceive financial factors and senior management priorities as important CSFs. The application of stakeholder theory helps to illuminate the importance of the many secondary stakeholders vs that of one or a relatively small number of primary stakeholders.

The three-dimensional analysis of environmental alignment between LSPs and shippers reinforces existing knowledge and provides new insights. A novel use of stakeholder theory in a supply chain context underlines its usefulness in research of this kind.

Whilst green distribution alternatives for consumers have the potential to decrease environmental impact from logistics, retailers struggle to provide such alternatives. The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of the factors that hinder retailers from offering green distribution alternatives to consumers.

The paper relies on a multiple case-study of three cases, with one retailer constituting each case. Semi-structured interviews with seven respondents and visits to the retailers' checkouts were used for data collection.

The offering of green distribution alternatives is a complex task for retailers, with barriers related to six categories (organisational, financial, retailer-logistic service provider (LSP) market, retailer-consumer market, governmental and technological barriers) obstructing the way forward. A process towards offering green distribution services, including barriers and potential mitigation strategies, is suggested.

The study is limited to a Swedish context, and further research could consider how barriers would manifest themselves in countries with other characteristics.

A framework with barriers and mitigation strategies offers guidance for managers within e-commerce.

The greening of logistics is an important quest towards world-wide sustainability goals, and this paper contributes with an increased understanding of how to decrease environmental impact from e-commerce distribution.

The paper is one of few that takes the consumer side of the greening of logistics into account, thus contributing with valuable perspectives to this scarce body of literature.

The purpose of this paper is to understand whether the companies most involved in communicating their responsible behaviour externally are those most active on the social media (SM) platform, with a philanthropic purpose rather than strictly aimed at economic aspects.

The authors, first, assess firms’ efforts on the SM platform using the model proposed by Chung et al. (2014), and, second, the authors analyze the content of messages in order to verify what dimensions of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) they contain. A multivariate modelling has been performed in order to verify whether the wineries that take most care to communicate their responsible behaviour are those that are more involved in the management of Social Network. The wineries’ effort in SM platform was analyzed using the model proposed by Chung et al. (2014), which consider three dimensions named intensity, richness and responsiveness. In order to verify the relationship between the SM effort and their engagement in CSR initiatives, the Probit model has been utilized taking into consideration four CSR dimension (Green CSR, Ethical CSR, Community CSR and Cultural CSR).

The findings show that wineries most involved in corporate social responsibility initiatives and in the active communication of these initiatives on SM platforms are those that are most active on SM and in particular those that interact most with their web users, triggering in them some reactions that lead to the sharing of content and, therefore, having a significant impact on the dissemination of information through SM.

The main limitations of this study are related to the limited sample size, the time period considered.

This study provides insight and hints into wine entrepreneurs interested in improving the effectiveness of their CSR communication via SM showing the importance of the interactive dimension of SM, in order to reduce scepticism and gain greater credibility on the market.

This study uses four dimensions of the companies’ SM efforts’ built on the basis of a number of variables that are more explicative of the SM engagement.

The purpose of this research is twofold; firstly, to propose and test a measuring instrument for the efficient and effective integration of management systems (MSs), identifying the particular aspects that may distinguish the substantive (internalized) from the superficial (ceremonial) integration; and secondly, to propose and test a scale for corporate sustainability performance (CSP).

A literature review has identified pertinent variables and yielded relevant measuring items. A field survey has been conducted. The survey instrument has been administered to Greek organizations certified to two or more MS standards. Collected data from 280 respondents has been processed using exploratory factor analysis.

Internalization has been identified as the main construct to interpret substantial MS integration in terms of resources and the extent of integration. The extracted internalization factors are human resources, strategic resources, information systems, integration tools, outsourcing, internal processes integration level and audits' integration level. CSP has been operationalized in terms of the company's relationships with its stakeholders. The extracted CSP factors are customer–supplier relationship, the employees, investors/shareholders, financial institutions, the environment, state and society.

This research findings can be used by management professionals, certification bodies and governmental authorities in order to foster the implementation of multiple MSs and highlight the critical issues for their successful integration and internalization, which is imperative for their prosperity and contribution toward CSP. Practitioners are also provided with an instrument to monitor CSP through the company's relationships with its stakeholders toward satisfaction of their needs.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first empirical study on the internalization of integrated MSs. In addition, the development of a CSP scale intends to bring together corporate sustainability management with CSP.