Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

In many business textbooks and courses, particularly in finance curricula, students continue to be taught that the single goal of the firm is shareholder wealth maximization (SWM). Although this statement presents a clear and succinct goal, which adheres well to rational expectations and financial economic models, I argue it is over simplistic and may actually be detrimental to student learning and professional conduct. A strict adherence to the SWM goal has at least anecdotal evidence of cases in which business students act unethically after graduating. In this article I propose a framework that includes a discussion of four classical ethics camps vis-à-vis SWM in foundational business classes. I assume students have not yet had a philosophical or business ethics course and begin the discussion from the ground up.

The purpose of our workshop was to call attention to emerging communities of practice where academics and community activists are coming together to learn how to grow slow food networks. One expression of this movement is the creation of local food hubs which can potentially forge global links that scale up to forge a global action network or GAN (Waddell, 2011).

Business Law and Religion has long been one of the more intriguing and misunderstood partnerships in contemporary American Society. One of the main purposes of this paper is to make clearer and more helpful the boundary conditions between this partnership from the specific perspective of American Jurisprudence.

The discussion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has tended to overlook corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) in global markets. This is particularly the case for discussions of the Arab world in which institutional elements such as wasta (to be defined later) and fatalism play a key role in both the conception and outcomes of CSI.

Management research has extensively considered who, what, when, why, which, and how aspects pertaining to firms’ proactive environmental strategies, yet where aspects have received remarkably less attention. Building on institutional theory and economic geography, we explore three place-based research questions relating social and physical attributes of a place with a firm’s proactive environmental strategies. We contribute to a better understanding of the role of place in three ways. First, we find that geographic concentration of environmentally proactive firms is positively related to firm commitment in a voluntary environmental program (VEP). Second, we find that firm proximity to a sacrosanct environment is positively related to firm commitment in a VEP. Finally, we integrate these effects and find that social and physical attributes of a place have an interactive effect of firms’ voluntary environmental commitment in a VEP. We address our research questions in the context of the Costa Rican tourism industry.

This case study explores local North Carolina emergency manager perspectives on Defense Support (US Military) to Civil Authorities (DSCA). We ask a) How do county emergency managers integrate DSCA to prepare for disasters, and b) What factors do emergency managers consider when integrating DSCA into response and recovery activities. The reason why this study is important is that the results provide detailed and rich data for local emergency managers, and offers possibilities to improve collaborative emergency responses between various local, state, and national emergency management agencies. Moreover, the study outcomes can help key leaders in emergency agencies to improve education and training to facilitate local emergency management through DSCA.

This paper was presented as a workshop session and considers how preexisting contexts of power inhibit or enable firm corporate social responsibility actions when the issue is a hotly contested social and political issue: immigrant labor in the American South. This research examines the impact of the passage and implementation of the 2011 Alabama Immigration Law on the state’s poultry processing industry through a discourse and content analysis. By using an adaption of Clegg’s Circuits of Power theory, the intersection of economic identity and political influence of the state poultry industry is analyzed within the power flows of Alabama’s economic network. This work is part of a broader study and contributes to CSR literatures through a focus on the role of pre-existing conditions of power on firm effectiveness in achieving CSR outcomes.

Social entrepreneurs mark a distinct business form of market enterprise. These business ventures achieve positive entrepreneurial social change for underrepresented stakeholders in uncertain markets. Markets are rarely certain. The business and society field continues to shape the narrative about what business looks like, and how it tells its story to the market, our students and fellow scholars. Social entrepreneurship is the new wave of the intersection between individual entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility (CSR) models. There are no social entrepreneurial road maps – for business development, strategy, operations, or delivery. Social entrepreneurs eschew historical profit-driven market venture models. Indifferent, profit-driven market players are contradictory to the social entrepreneurs’ mission. This paper pursues theoretical underpinnings of social entrepreneurship at the crossroads of business and society using a new narrative.

In this paper empirical findings and theoretical explanations are presented on how sustainable business model innovations emerge and diffuse in the practices of retail logistics companies. This entails different forms of sustainable business model innovations (BMI) depending on the type of company as well as different interacting factors that drive their emergence and diffusion. This paper contends that neither the institutional environment nor the initiatives of agents alone can explain these processes but an intersection between both can do – within an institutional theory. This means that win-win-situations between companies and relevant stakeholders are an important precondition for sustainable business model innovations. There are also intersections of different reasons driving the emergence and diffusion of sustainable BMI. These reasons are legitimacy, instrumentally rational and value-rational reasons.

This paper examines the Slack Resource Mechanism (SRM) in the Corporate Responsibility (CR) literature, proposing that when a firm has enough slacks, it is more likely to engage in CR activities, which eventually improve its financial performance. In order to assess whether or not, and in which contexts SRM really works, this paper reviews two research issues in SRM. Based on literature review, we empirically test two proposed hypotheses with a large-scale longitudinal dataset from 1997 to 2012. We find that firms become involved in CR activities for external stakeholders when they have enough slack resources, and that the slack-induced CR engagements are not favored by the stock market. Based on our research findings, we assure that SRM may need to be reconsidered and further developed.

This paper examines the incremental value added to sustainability reporting by changes in disclosure requirements of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) G4 guidelines in the Metals and Mining industry. Three companies’ most recent G4 sustainability reports are critically compared to their previous G3 reports, and the some results of content analysis are reported.

Using the lens of neo-localism and sustainable livelihoods, this paper considers the process and outcomes achieved through networks of locally-based entrepreneurs. Guided by a grounded theory approach, interviews with several entrepreneurs in the Sustainable Business Network of Philadelphia were conducted. Based on these findings, we were able to identify eight strategies that provided benefits to the firms and the broader network. These strategies further enhanced in the livelihood assets of the community, including human, social, financial, natural, and physical capital.

This paper explores how policy-practice decoupling affects organizational insiders, synthesizing literatures on decoupling, organizational identity, behavioral integrity, and organizational cynicism to derive a theoretical model illustrating the effects of organization-level structural choices on individual perceptions and actions.

The relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and society is at a crossroads. In particular, multinational enterprises (MNEs) must operate in multiple host environments while maintaining a social license to operate, and increasingly adopt CSR strategy relevant to stakeholders in these environments. This study examines MNE employee perceptions of CSR from one multinational in Indonesia and Australia, and determines their identification with and engagement in the organization’s CSR Social Initiatives (SIs). The results reveal perceived CSR has a significant effect on identification with SIs for Indonesian employees but not for Australian employees. Second, the importance of CSR has an effect on employee’s identification with SIs (SI-I) and SI-I has a significant effect on engagement with SIs in both countries. This suggests that MNEs need to educate employees generally in developed and developing countries on the importance that companies practice CSR. However for developing countries like Indonesia, managers may need to focus more on employee perceptions of the organization’s perceived CSR, as this affects SI-I and subsequent engagement. These findings provide a unique contribution toward combining business and society under the umbrella of one MNE in two different countries.

Whereas ‘strategic’ Corporate Social Responsibility (henceforth, CSR) scholars (e.g.: Husted & Allen, 2006, 2007; McWilliams, Siegel, & Wright, 2006; McWilliams & Siegel, 2000) have studied CSR as a competitiveness and/or differentiation tool (Panwar, Nybakk, Hansen, & Pinkse, 2016) -this is, a competitive strategy’s outcome-, CSR has remained ‘out of the loop’ of the broader corporate strategy choice discussion and, in specific, unexplored as an antecedent of firm’s scope. Granted that firms formulate different governance strategies to effectively implement corporate objectives (Harrigan, 1985), my ongoing investigation focuses on how CSR may come to play into decisions pertaining to vertical scope, that is, how firms organize internal or external supplier-buyer relationships along their value chains (Jacobides & Billinger, 2006). The need for this research stems from the fact that in a context of global dispersion of production, normative pressure concerning the need for environmental protection and growing demands to redress social concerns compel firms to reconsider their vertical relationships.

Privacy has played substantial roles in culture and commerce for centuries, but its political and economic impacts have intensified as utilizations of information technologies have expanded. Businesses should consider whether their increasing investments in data collection and analysis are indeed worth their costs in erosion of trust between themselves and their customers (and other stakeholders). This paper examines specific kinds of data, including from geospatial systems and “Internet of Things” applications. It also discusses potential expansion of US privacy discourse from the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution to the Third (which may be interpreted to involve limits on residential “quartering” of intelligent computer agents as well as human soldiers). Businesses may find that privacy-related products and services can provide strategic advantages as privacy concerns intensify. However, opportunistic business exploitations of privacy fears without provision of effective solutions may backfire as households share experiences via word-of-mouth and social media crowdsourcing.

This paper develops a theoretical framework to explain how B-Corps certification is used by organizations to gain legitimacy in their industry and among diverse stakeholders. We explore two research propositions using data from pilot cases. The paper introduces our preliminary findings, outlines a revision of the study based on these findings, and discusses contributions for the research.

In this paper, we argue and test the hypothesis that real progress towards greater sustainability in our society will occur only when individuals adopt a new language for business, use holistic thinking, and develop a robust set of economic, social and environmental measures performance.