Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

The “wage gap” statistically refers to the fact that the median wage of an American woman is 79% of the median wage of an American man. This paper examines the extent to which companies disclose equitable pay as recommended by GRI standards and in advance of a proposed Obama-era presidential mandate. Using the incidence of and content from disclosures contained in firm standalone sustainability reports, I find that firms did not significantly increase their disclosure of compensation and remuneration policies or their disclosure of policies intended to promote equal representation of women and equal compensation of women. My results thus support the difficulty in identifying and quantifying the wage gap and suggest that significant action – actions extending beyond new laws, proposed regulatory requirements, or sustainability accounting frameworks – is required to motivate corporate social change.

This workshop asked: How does business in society move beyond the ambition to develop excellent scholarship that helps make the world a better place to impact? The narrowness of current assessment criteria for ‘impact’ is becoming increasingly evident and criticized. Simultaneously, social media, blog outlets, easy-to-make and post videos and audios, and other means of communicating beyond scholarly audiences have become more prominent. We raised some of the following questions: How can and should, if at all, we as a field move beyond narrow metrics and ‘ambitions’ to have actual impact on the world? How should we think about what impact means in practice? How do we maintain credibility as scholars yet do research that achieves impact that shifts practice, and possibly the world of business in society for the better? What role should social media, blogging, public intellectualism, video and audio production, and teaching play in assessing scholarly impact?

This workshop explores cultural trends and their effects on students’ learning and the classroom environment. We discuss these trends and their implications, and propose pedagogical approaches and exercises that underline the importance of single-tasking, discriminating between facts and opinion, interdisciplinary analysis, and critical thinking.