Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

The "UNI"-case explored in this paper analyses several principles important in understanding strategic management and business ethics. The paper contributes in describing manipulation and power dimensions in strategic management from an interorganizational perspective. It shows how corporate management balancing on the edge of formal laws and following an informal set of laws in a network based on cooptation, may manoeuvre in order to avoid control by stakeholders such as owners, creditors, public governance suppliers, employees, etc. It shows how laws may be made, and how boards of directors and the general assembly may be overrun when powerful corporate managers use relationbuilding abilities, persuasive charm and financial power in building strategic alliances with politicians, union leaders corporate managers and even its own board of directors.

This paper provides a theoretical foundation on which American policy-makers can address critical trade issues with Japan. This foundation is grounded in a vision of social control and is presented in terms of concentric circles and social hierarchies. We explore an approach that takes advantage of the mediator-centered character of Japan, and avoids threatening extant social controls.

Corporate political action committees (PACs) have been pragmatic contributors to election campaigns since 1974. They consistently have sought access to incumbents regardless of party affiliation or political philosophy and ordinarily have shunned making funds available to challengers or open seat contestants with the rare exception of conservative Republicans. The circumstances surrounding the 1992 election enhanced the potential for success among non-incumbents, both challengers and particularly, open seat contestants. Many of these candidates were women, often liberal Democrats, a group which historically had received little, if any, corporate PAC contributions. In order to maintain access to these likely incumbents in the new Congress, corporate PACs were forced to revise their pragmatic strategies and to contribute in a manner previously associated with ideological PACs.

Normative Theories - Deontology, Distributive Justice, Rights, and Utilitarianism - are applied to an analysis of both the internal activities and external impacts of corporate PACs. Regarding internal activities, both the methods of soliciting and disbursing funds are examined. Regarding external impacts, the PAC/Candidate relationship is emphasized, including the potential for access, influence, extortion, entrenchment of incumbents, and distorting the representativeness of the political system. The ethical record of PACs is deemed mixed on deontological grounds, negative on distributive justice grounds, positive on the basis of political rights’ and mixed to unknowable on utilitarian grounds.

Most models, of issues life cycles assume that issues move sequentially through the stages. At most they acknowledge that issues may be resolved at earlier stages. This paper argues that issues often deviate from this "normal" path, and develops a typology of issues life cycles.

This paper examines the popular notion that there is a need for the United States to devise a new social contract entailing greater cooperation among labor, management, and government in order to both enhance economic performance and to better deal with troubling social issues. This is examined in the context of a long-term international study of labor, management, and government efforts to promote occupational safety and health in the auto industry. Policy implications of this research are discussed that relate not only to safety and health, but to other corporate social performance issues.

This paper examines the nature, causes and effects of the new "enterprise webs" (Reich, 1992) of strategic alliance networks which have arisen in international business during the past fifteen years. While the alliance network form offers many advantages to firms facing global competition, it nonetheless contains fundamental administrative flaws which render its survival capabilities suspect. Accordingly, we contend that firms will attempt to consolidate major transnational segments of their networks in order to overcome the form's latent failures. We conclude by discussing the probable distributional effects of consolidation for capital, consumers, labor and the nationstate.

By directly linking the power of stakeholders to the internal distribution of power in organizations, stakeholder theory generates potential internal conflict between organizational effectiveness and organizational legitimacy. This paper develops this conflict by examining the reform and organization of Congress.

This paper attempts to integrate Brenner and Cochran’s recent development of a stakeholder theory of the firm (1991) with knowledge about organizational decision making to expand the theory’s description of how stakeholders’ values influence organizational action. The paper provides a brief overview of stakeholder theories, identifies major theories of organizational decision making and links these two literatures by describing a set of propositions and a model which explores these concepts’ interrelationships.

The public utility rate case determines outcomes important both to the regulated firm and its customers. One factor which should affect the politics of the rate case process is whether regulators are elected or appointed; however, the empirical literature does not support the expected effect of regulator selection method. A strategic model of the rate case process, presented here, suggests that analysts have been looking in the wrong place; the effect of regulator selection method should be seen in requests made by the firm rather than in awards made by the regulators.

Profitable corporations often find themselves "unable" to sacrifice shareholder gains in favor of some broader public good. Not only do well-trained business executives want to keep pursuing profits, they may be forced to do so by the operation of applicable corporation laws.

Environmental privatization consists of ongoing efforts to adopt property rights-based approaches to environmental protection. Though the rhetoric of environmental privatization often emphasizes principles of justice and economic efficiency, one of the movement's most significant impacts would be a substantial reallocation of political power. By restricting the abilities of groups to expand or socialize conflict beyond the boundaries of private transactions, privatization will restrict conflict to arenas in which economic resources are the primary determinants of power.

Feminist critique offers insights into rethinking our models and re-examining the management processes based on gendered thinking. This paper questions issues management that follows dominant social expectations and manipulates perceptions while ‘managing’ issues. Specifically, the paper focuses on the case of silicone breast implants and the various voices: the manufacturers, the FDA, the medical community, and the implant recipient consumers.

This study examines the determinants of the timing and magnitude of political involvement towards trade protection by domestic firms. Specifically, it investigates unfairtrade petitions and Congressional testimony from American integrated steel producers regarding foreign steel imports. The findings reveal that many firms file antidumping and countervailing duty petitions when the external economic environment is threatening. Furthermore, the findings support the collective action framework in that consistently the largest steel firms are the most involved in the political activities surrounding U.S. trade policy.

The economic and political components of trade issues are usually analyzed as separate components. The success of a particular trade policy is then analyzed through a particular lens. In this paper, the effect which Voluntary Export Restraints (VERs) had on the textile and steel industries will be examine from both an instrumental and expressive framework in order to capture at the same time the economic and political aspect of this policy.

The central thesis of this paper is that intrinsic morality, defined as morality which is embedded in company policy, solves many of the internal and external problems faced by business firms in the contemporary global economy. Conversely, strategic morality, defined as morality employed as a business policy, undermines morality in principle and may not be effective in practice. Thus, intrinsic morality bestows competitive advantage on firms.