Green organizational identity: Socio-semiotic analysis of why organizations appear green

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between organizations' green organizational identity-building efforts and their strategies for using colors. The aim is to reveal how organizations use colors in the process of redesigning their organizational identities around green thought. This study was designed as a qualitative multiple-case study. The data consisted of images from the official websites of seven companies in the Turkish iron and steel industry, selected using purposeful sampling. Findings revealed that the color green was used extensively in the images and is associated with the factory or administrative building that represents the company. It is especially common in all images to frame the factory or administrative building that represents the company in a green frame and to allow the viewer to look at the symbolic objects that represent the company through a green window. This study concludes that the use of green color as a background in the official website designs of companies and the related and interconnected display of symbolic objects representing the company in green serve a transforming function in the meaning of concrete material objects. The findings suggest that companies are attempting to create a perception that they have internalized green thought in their corporate environment, making it the central determinant of their practices through this transformation in their organizational identities using the ability of the color green to represent environmentalism or ecologism.