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

The study is about the relationship between organizations' green organizational identity building efforts and their strategies for using colors. The study aims to reveal how organizations use colors in the process of redesigning their organizational identities centered on green thought. The study was designed with a qualitative multiple case studies. As data, images on the official websites of seven companies selected from the Turkish iron and steel industry using purposeful sampling technique were used. Images were analyzed with the color analysis technique of social semiotics. Findings show that the color green is used intensively 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. The conclusion of the study is 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. It can be said that companies are trying to produce a meaning and perception that they have internalized green thought in their corporate environment and made it the central determinant of their practices through this transformation in their organizational identities by using the ability of the color green to represent environmentalism or ecologism.