corporate narrative

Noble corporate stories can play a vital role in creating the loyalty of employees as well as enhancing programs of corporate social responsibility. This can be attained by maximizing the probability that workers will efficiently support the claims of responsibility of a company. When PMC wanted to reposition itself, the company communicated to its workers a complex corporate narrative. The corporate narrative tried to elide inconsistencies between the old as well as the new company’s stories. Some features of the narrative were manifestly false like the claimed steady evolution of the company’s beliefs about the dangers of cigarette smoking when the company had realized for 50 years that it had instigated disease and death. Another internal narrative feature of PMC is its dependence on YSP as evidence of its responsibility. This aspect appeared disingenuous, considering that PMC dismissed most of its workers’ suggestions for operative ways to minimize youth smoking. Thus, in generating its new corporate narrative, the company misled its employees as well as the public.

The company’s new narrative may not have wholly convinced workers in the first three years after it was introduced since some expressed confusion as well as skepticism, specifically concerning responsibility as an essential narrative element. However, the narrative thrived in forecasting the outcry of the public as well as reassuring workers. The company’s main tobacco business remains virtually unmoved since the 1990s turbulence. According to a report by US Surgeon General, there is a need for ongoing discursive struggles to interrupt the new narratives of tobacco companies like PMC and others in order to move towards a tobacco endgame. One of the vital disruptive elements is the focus on the deception in the industry. In the United States, the California tobacco control program is one of the country’s most effective in minimizing smoking prevalence as well as denormalizing tobacco (McDaniel & Malone, 2015). The program has “the tobacco industry lies” as one of its themes. Since the federal court ruling made in 2006 that PMC, as well as other tobacco companies, had cheated the public on the connection between smoking and disease, employees in tobacco companies sensed fundamental contradiction. These employees sensed the contradiction between the narrative of new responsibility and the progressive promotion of hazardous products.