摘要：Objectives. We explored what corporate “credibility” means to tobacco companies to determine why it matters to companies and what a lack of credibility means to them. Methods. We collected documents from an online tobacco industry document archive and analyzed them with an interpretive approach. Results. Tobacco companies conceptualized credibility not as being worthy of belief or confidence but as inspiring it. Thus, credibility was understood primarily as altering public perception of the industry. “Truth” was largely absent from tobacco industry conceptualizations of credibility, which were linked with “responsibility” and “reasonableness.” However, industry research found that the public regarded credibility and responsibility differently, expecting these to entail truth telling, advertising reductions, less harmful products, apologies for deception, making amends, or exiting the tobacco business altogether. Overall, industry credibility-building projects failed repeatedly. Conclusions. Public health discourse increasingly attends to the roles of corporations in promoting disease. Industries such as tobacco and alcohol have been identified as profiting from harmful products. Yet corporations' ability to continue business as usual requires sustaining an implicit societal assent to their activities that depends on corporate credibility. For public health to address corporate disease promotion effectively, undermining corporate credibility may be strategically important. Increasingly, a strand of public health discourse has diverged from traditional “risk” discourse, which tends to draw attention to individual or community-level behavior, to explicitly highlight the roles played by the “supply side”: corporations whose activities create or contribute to ill health. 1 – 4 Numerous industries have been identified as “antihealth” because of the effects of their products or activities, including the alcohol, chemical, firearms, food, oil, automobile, and tobacco industries. 5 – 10 Their continued operation depends, in part, on achieving and maintaining corporate “credibility”; without it, companies may face regulatory constraints, political disadvantage, and public disgrace. If credibility problems are severe, a corporation might ultimately lose its license to operate. Researchers have examined how various industries attempt to build credibility by, for example, creating image-building campaigns or imposing self-regulation. 6 , 9 , 11 , 12 However, no previous studies have analyzed how any particular industry conceptualizes corporate credibility, how it relates to other concepts such as “responsibility,” and whether the public shares corporate interpretations of credibility. We addressed this gap by examining the tobacco industry's conceptualizations of credibility across time and across companies. Our analysis has implications for public health efforts to challenge other industries' health-damaging practices.
