Values theory posits that individuals have values, formed by upbringing and life’s experiences, and influence an individual’s cognitive processes, decisions and behavior. Emerging onto the business scene is a new population group, the Millennials. This research seeks to explore Millennials’ values from the viewpoint of their personal value orientation (PVO). Managerial PVO from the 1980s and 2010s are used as comparative populations. The Millennials’ PVO is generally consistent with managerial PVO from past research. They tend toward a Personal, rather than Social, and Competence, rather than Moral, value orientation. Yet, some subtle differences emerged. Millennials are more self-focused and less other-focused than managers from the 1980s or 2010s. They emphasize competency skills more than today’s managers but less than the managers of the 1980s and place more worth on moral values than managers of the 1980s but less than today’s managers.

Organizations that do not implement espoused policies in practice face the risk of societal disapproval if the decoupling is exposed in an era of increased transparency and accountability expectations. While policy-practice decoupling remains an observed organizational outcome, organizations are becoming less inclined to deliberately adopt strategies of decoupling. Our first contribution to theory is an extended conceptual model which integrates both original accounts and recent developments in decoupling theory. Secondly we propose that decoupling is more often an unintended outcome of attempts to tightly couple, than a cynical evasive organizational act. Finally we propose three key conditions under which attempts to implement the policy yield decoupled or tightly coupled organizational outcomes, explicitly incorporating the role of individual agency into the decoupling frame.

Motivated by the desire to make our courses more relevant to students, we use experiential techniques that highlight the importance of civic and environmental causes. In three courses, across three disciplines, at three institutions, we are each grappling with issues of measuring student outcomes and assessment in sustainability themed courses. The purpose of this research is to compare the experiential mechanisms used across courses, in particular, service-learning and engaged scholarship, and with the help of IABS colleagues, to create relevant student outcome metrics. Our goal is to impact the scholarship of teaching by documenting pedagogical processes and outcomes that highlight best practices in the teaching of sustainability, and more broadly, business and society courses.

This paper describes the principle of service used to guide operations in W.M. Ritter Lumber Company towns, whether this principle supports early attempts at industrial betterment, and whether research on company towns located in remote areas of Central Appalachia during the early 1900s can enhance our understanding of CSR emergence. Many company towns in Central Appalachia are described as “Satanic Mills,” a term reflecting exploitive working conditions. Ritter’s 1920 book (The Lumberman), employee newsletters (The Hardwood Bark), and other resources paint a different picture of company town life and describe a management approach based on Ritter’s principle of service.

This paper analyzes cases of procurement fraud by government contractors for the period, 2000-2014. The exploratory study provides information on which industry sectors were most likely to settle cases of procurement fraud and which types of violations occurred most frequently in these sectors. We develop two hypotheses that examine whether Ethics and Compliance processes for federal contractors, established in 2008, reduced the number of cases and whether political administration might increase or decrease the number of settled cases. Further research questions are suggested to learn more about the phenomenon of government contractor fraud.

This paper identifies the connections between the diffusion of innovations, social network, and institutional literatures to the study of the diffusion of managerial practices in general and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in particular. We demonstrate that each literature has contributed to explaining the diffusion and adoption of CSR practices but that there are still unexploited opportunities specially in combining the concepts and methods from diffusion, institutional, and networks literatures. We also argue that social network theory is a natural bridge that connects diffusion and institutional literatures providing richer explanations

Society is increasingly utilizing a firm’s social and environmental performance as a primary metric in evaluating legitimacy. As a result there is a growing scholarly need for more precise and socially relevant measures of the social impact of corporations, or corporate social impact (CSI), as opposed to broader or more firm-relevant metrics, such as financial or reputational impacts. I propose that a contingent approach, which explicitly examines the methodological fit between research scope and research method, can be a useful framework to aid CSI scholars in navigating the conceptual messiness of measuring CSI. The aim of this article is to contribute a framework that can be used to effectively address questions of CSI measurement by guiding the use of appropriate research methods and design to fit a given research scope.

The current debate around better measures of progress and going ‘beyond-Gross Domestic Product (GDP)’ raises the question of implications for businesses and their sustainability efforts. Bhutan, with its Gross National Happiness (GNH) development approach provides an interesting case to investigate businesses in an economy focused on improving the conditions for wellbeing and happiness in society, alongside the goal of growing GDP. This study explores if and how GNH influences business conduct and sustainability efforts in Bhutan. It also investigates Bhutanese business and government leaders perceptions of the concept of GNH in relation to concepts such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Corporate Sustainability (CS). Some preliminary findings include that the Bhutanese value-system forms the foundation of business leaders’ world-views and influences their business conduct and decision-making more than the recent formulation of the GNH framework. A comparison of the CSR, CS and GNH frameworks shows however that the GNH model has the potential to offer a sustainability framework that goes beyond-CSR.

The literature has long addressed the question if corporate social responsibility (CSR) can help a firm differentiate from competition and reduce its costs of doing business, ultimately leading to a sustainable competitive advantage. These two possible CSR outcomes, differentiation and cost leadership, also represent the two paths that firms could take in their strategic pursuits. Despite this apparent synergy between a firm’s strategic path and CSR, previous studies have not explored whether firm strategic choices have a bearing upon their level of CSR engagement. The present paper examines that question in the context of small US manufacturing firms.

Study abroad has the power to be a transformative experience for students and there are few programs as unique as Semester at Sea (SAS). In order to empirically investigate the impacts, if any, this program had on former students we surveyed 107 alumni. A variety of themes emerged from the coding of the qualitative data, but many of them clustered around the emergence of compassion. From our findings we believe there is potential to recreate the parts of the SAS experience that fostered compassion in our own classrooms for students unable to study abroad.

The results of a survey carried out in 2014 around the status of CSR and sustainability practice and reporting at the European Universities show this to be a recent phenomenon. While 82% of the 73 responding European universities (response rate 11,5%) had adopted CSR and sustainability in their strategy, 70% declared to report on sustainability, half of them after 2010, and with varying level of comprehensiveness and integration. It is the sustainability dimension that overhauled university management to communicate and to report on these issues with 20 years of delay as compared to business. As commonly with innovation, it are not always the most reputed universities that are innovators in sustainability, but less known universities in a competitive strategy of differentiation. Drawing on institutional theory and on the innovation literature, our study allows us to deduce that sustainability reporting at universities has reached its phase of dissemination and institutionalization.

This paper explores whether and if so why virtuous behavior, good citizenship, and justice theory reach a limit when applied to legal tax and regulatory avoidance. A general conception of public policy avoidance includes such instances as corporate inversion, other tax avoidance, and regulatory haven decisions. These instances are legally permissible choices, but subject to moral and political criticism intended to promote voluntary self-regulation and changes in public policy strengthening regulatory controls. Economic patriotism and corporate social responsibility arguments call for voluntary self-regulation by companies in advance of public policy changes.

In this article we aim to build on an emergent literature that recognizes a corporate reputation as an aggregation of individual reputational judgments. We apply insights from social influence theory in order to develop a set of testable propositions to explain how various aspects of a social context – the visibility of judgments and the anticipation of discussion – affects individuals’ reputational judgments of CSR.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.