معنابخشی سازمانی به رفتار مصرف کننده غیر اخلاقی: مطالعه موردی شرکت بیمه فرانسه Organizational Sensemaking of Non-ethical Consumer Behavior: Case Study of a French Mutual Insurance Company

Introduction The present paper looks at the unethicality of consumer behavior (Mitchell et al. 2009), including aberrant and deviant conduct as well as subtler forms of opportunism (Wirtz and McColl-Kennedy 2010) that can be harmful to a company and/or other consumers (Fisk et al. 2010). Misdeeds range from fraudulent insurance claims to cutting in line in shops. It is the sort of misconduct that has been increasingly criticized by companies and consumers alike. Researchers have been working hard to develop precise criteria capable of determining the ethicality of certain kinds of consumer behavior (Vitell 2014). It is questionable, however, whether these kinds of determination really exist. Certainly there is no such thing as absolute unethicality, given the context-dependency of interpretations in this area (Clegg et al. 2007). Another way of saying this is that unethical behavior only exists because a specific subject has constructed it as such. The construction of unethical behavior might be the doing of governmental or parastatal institutions; environmental protection organizations; media and public opinion; or industrial interests (Gordon et al. 2009). This latter category can include companies, being contexts where sensemaking around consumer behavior usually starts with staff members and/or top managers (Suquet 2010). Until now, researchers’ main focus has been to identify consumers’ unethical behavior (Berry and Seiders 2008) and/or combat it (Mitchell et al. 2009; Fisk et al. 2010). Conversely, relatively little has been said about what kind of consumer behavior tends to be viewed and interpreted as unethical by actors operating within a particular organization (Jougleux et al. 2013); or about how this affects an organization’s management and marketing practices. Yet it is by understanding the different things playing out within the context of a specific organizational situation (Nyberg 2008) that it becomes possible to determine which discourses or interests collide or else coalesce when a particular way of behaving is called into question (Clegg et al. 2007). In contrast to normative, moralistic conceptions of ethics, this kind of approach reveals the tensions between different actors and different ideologies.