Strategic leadership and corporate governance scholars have long been interested in the relationship between a company’s board of directors and firm performance – primarily financial, and increasingly social and environmental performance as well. To date, research on the board-performance link, especially in the domain of ethics, responsibility or sustainability (ERS), has concentrated almost exclusively on board structural, demographic or ownership factors arguing from an agency theory perspective that increased board independence will result in more effective CEO and TMT monitoring as well as better strategic guidance. And yet, many reputable corporations with exemplary corporate governance structures continue to make questionable strategic decisions (e.g. Volkswagen emission scandal; Exxon climate change denial). As such, this research seeks to go beyond descriptive corporate governance approaches to understand exactly how boards of directors are dealing with ERS issues from a strategic decision-making perspective. We present a theoretical model that we aim to explore through qualitative interviews with board members thereby contributing to the corporate governance and sustainability literatures by elucidating on the mechanisms by which board decision-making processes affect firm performance.

Stakeholders are often sceptical of a firm’s engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR). They may doubt whether the firm reports its engagement honestly and, even when this engagement is seen as real, they can still doubt whether the firm is driven by genuine motives or self-interest. A firm’s motives are important for stakeholders, because genuine motives are stable and can be counted upon, while self-interest depends on circumstances that could change. This paper uses attribution theory to develop a two-stage model of how stakeholder motive attributions contribute to the development of stakeholder trust is presented. This model separates issues of credibility of CSR information from issues of trustworthiness of a firm, which previous research has usually mixed. The model implies that both values-driven and strategic-driven motives can confer credibility to a firm, but only values-driven motives can support stakeholder trust that is not merely calculative.

CSR scholarship does not enjoy the centrality it should have. One way to replace it at the center of the conversation on business and society, is to make it more attractive to neighboring disciplines by demonstrating its unique added value. An essential move would be to acknowledge the contribution of these disciplines and to extend CSR models and theories to include their own core concepts. This process of cross-fertilization, called hybridization, can start with Political Science (recognizing various brands of public interest and national CSR) and Organizational Theory (rooting legitimacy and other normative schemes in social processes). A number of theoretical enrichments would ensue, from embedding CSR within the multiple levels that define it, to transdisciplinary perspectives, thereby increasing the relevance of the field across the social sciences. The growing international policy shift towards Sustainable Development (as defined by its three pillars of economic proficiency, social equity and environmental protection) provides a promising empirical source to take CSR theorizing beyond its traditional confines and make it a valued reference for both academia and decision-makers, corporate as well as political.

In prior research, moral intensity has been proposed as a characteristic of situations that influences ethical decision-making. In this paper, I seek to apply the concept of moral intensity in the context of work engagement. I first propose moral intensity as a characteristic of work tasks. I then explain why moral intensity of a task should increase work engagement. I test this hypothesis in a pilot study using a sample of students. Results of the study support the hypothesis that moral intensity is an objective characteristic of work tasks that is positively related to work engagement through its influence on perceived impacts of the work. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed.

This study examines how multinational corporations’ (MNCs) subsidiaries manage institutional complexity when deploying their corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities in Africa. Building on insights from international business studies of CSR and recent development in comparative institutionalism, we explore how distinct institutional forces combine to shape subsidiary’s CSR behaviour across five African countries. Relying on 33 interviews with managers at 26 subsidiaries operating in Angola, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa, we identified patterns of variations in CSR deployment across these countries. Our findings reveal that MNCs’ subsidiaries mobilize the CSR strategy of their parent firm to demonstrate their compliance with their headquarters’ expectations, but also complement this minimum level of requirement with elements that reflect the needs from the local business system. As a whole, our findings reveal the complex bricolage undertaken by subsidiary’s managers to tailor their CSR strategy in ways that meet the contradictory institutional forces they face.

This paper addresses the characteristics and skills that the leader of a financially viable nonprofit organization needs to have. The nonprofit sector continues to intersect with the business sector by providing services and programming that the government and private sectors are not willing to or cannot provide. However, the nonprofit sector now faces an environment that includes increased competition for funds as it attempts to meet demands for more specialized services. In this context, is there a specific type of leader that is needed to ensure a nonprofit’s financial sustainability? Should a nonprofit simply become more like a business and adhere to common for-profit leadership and staff-building principles, or do nonprofits require a unique set of skills and a different type of staff culture? This paper will present a discussion of subject matter expert’s perceptions on the characteristics of nonprofit leaders that are needed for today’s financially viable nonprofit.

The Chinese owned Jiuxing Mine withdrew from Madagascar due to community protests against its operations. This research considered the theoretical constructs of Carrol’s Pyramid of Social Responsibility (Carroll and Buchholtz, 2006: 39) and the Continuum of Community Engagement (Bowen, Newenham-Kahindi and Herremans, 2010: 304) in three comparative mining case studies in South Africa, China, and Madagascar. The case studies identified possible reasons for Jiuxing Mine’s failure to engage the local population’s approval, and proposed a range of recommendations for mining companies to effectively engage with their local communities.The case studies confirmed that transformative community engagement in the mining sector provided the opportunity to identify negative externalities from land acquisition and mining operations; encouraged collaborative engagement with national and local government, other industry players, community representatives, community members, and community organisations; facilitates collaborative agreements for the benefit of all parties; and encourages an integrated strategy that maximises social investment outcomes.

This paper evaluates Porter and Kramer’s ‘creating shared value’ (CSV) approach against the value, balance, and accountability (VBA) business and society model proposed by Schwartz and Carroll (2008). The analysis finds that while CSV potentially meets the requirement of creating value, their approach fails to properly address the balance and accountability elements of the VBA model. As a result, the CSV approach cannot presently be considered as an underpinning or overarching construct for the business and society field.

This in-process study asks how companies in different cultural regions (East, West) with different macro-risk levels (e.g. Low Risk, Moderate Risk21) understand the Corporate Sustainability (CS) practices. For this developing qualitative study, we review the influence of two components of the National Business Systems, culture and country risk, for firm level Corporate Sustainability (CS) practices as expressed by East / West firms in the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI) database – a global initiative that works toward the standardization of organizational sustainability reporting. This study is important because many concepts of CS stem from Western regions like North America and Western Europe; therefore, we expect that Eastern firms would conceptualize and implement CS differently.

Drivers of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are generally weak in developing countries like India and the very action of making CSR spending mandatory in India highlights the nonchalance exhibited by firms when it comes to pursuing CSR voluntarily. This study reviews literature on CSR in India, brings into perspective the new legislation that makes it mandatory for firms of a particular size to spend on CSR activities and analyzes the financial spend figures on CSR by Top 100 companies in India during the year 2014-15 to unearth emerging trends. A large majority of the top 100 firms in India have failed to spend the prescribed amount towards CSR activities during the first year after the new legislation came into force. Private sector and public sector companies report significantly different behavior with respect to their CSR spending and shortfall. The study concludes by providing recommendations for making the policy more effective.

Neoinstitutional theory relatively neglects the process of new practices evolving into "protoinstitutions". These being important in understanding institutional change, the paper adopts a historical perspective to generate propositions by examining the genesis of a practice (socially responsible investment funds), with incongruent logics, in an increasingly mature organisational field (financial services) with dominant logics. Apart from identifying the inus conditions that determine the success or failure of new practices, it is illustrated that the process did not follow the existing generalisations on institutional change due to crucial factors, such as the nature of (and pressures exerted by) the incumbent institutions and logics, the nature of the new practice, and the presence (or absence) of certain events. Additionally, the demolition of existing logics and institutions is not easily achievable especially when a new practice differs from the incumbents on the basis of its driving logics.

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.

Most firms have taken substantive actions to improve their environmental performance, but much more still needs to be done to mitigate serious environmental degradation that threatens the planet. What can drive firms to further improve their environmental performance? Drawing from an attention-based view of the firm, we develop two hypotheses that predict that because they disrupt established patterns of organizational attention and shift managerial focus, regulatory fines and leadership turnover lead to improvements in corporate environmental performance. We test our hypotheses on a sample of North American firms over the period of 2006-13. Surprisingly, we find a positive but not statistically significant relationship between regulatory fines and environmental improvement. Even more surprising, we find that when large fines are followed by CEO turnover or high turnover in board membership, environmental improvement is dampened. However, when a large fine is followed by high turnover in environmental-related leadership positions, then firms do significantly improve their environmental performance. We thus conclude that when firms are "shaken, not stirred" -- that is, they are shaken by a shock from a major regulatory fine, but it is not followed by stirring up the topmost leadership positions -- then they are most likely to improve their environmental performance.

The current ‘linear’ system based on the principles of “take, make, waste” is unsustainable. As a solution, the concept of Circular Economy (CE) has emerged. This research explores the drivers and enablers for a developing nation to transition to CE, taking Nepal as a case study. Using both primary and secondary data, the results were mapped on the Enabling Framework proposed by Garcia and Cayzer (2017) and several interventions were identified. First, improving the current solid waste management via sorting at source and turning waste into bio-gas, is a key enabler. Second, rather than dismissing the informal sector of waste collectors incorporating them into the formal sector is vital. Third, simple technologies can be equally crucial for CE in comparison to high-end technologies. These points are identified as key enablers towards a Circular Nepal. This paper acts as a springboard for further research and strategies for businesses, academics, and policymakers.

International Accountability Standards have become the primary instruments for supporting firms in becoming more accountable in terms of their sustainability performance. However, there is evidence suggesting that firms who adopt such standards, frequently fail to achieve compliance. Rather, the formal policies prescribed by these standards tend to be decoupled from daily practice. Such decoupling may lead to situations where standards are not effectively implemented or regularly violated. The purpose of this study is to comparatively assess the risk of decoupling across a sample of 50 well-known standards. We find that certain types of standards are more prone than others to being decoupled. Furthermore, we identify three main components explaining the relative differences between standards with regard to decoupling risk, notably comparability, measurability and implementability. We conclude by contextualising our findings and elaborating on their implications for the quality and effectiveness of International Accountability Standards.

This paper examines the impact of two regulatory approaches to attack so-called excessive CEO compensation. The first is the say-on-pay rule adopted in 2010 by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the second is the pay gap rule, adopted in 2017. The former provides for a shareholder vote on CEO compensation, either annually or every third year, while the latter requires corporations to disclose the ratio between CEO compensation and average worker pay. In addition to mitigating against inequality, the rules also serve the purpose of providing more information disclosure to investors on CEO compensation. The study concludes that neither the say-on-pay rule, nor the pay gap rule, has restrained the increase in executive compensation. Based on the weaknesses of each rule, especially of the pay gap rule, that finding is not surprising. The study then examines various other methods of serving equality, not by imposing limits on CEO compensation, but by lifting the bottom of worker pay, and suggests that those measures might more effectively serve the interest of alleviating inequality.

The purpose of this paper is to begin a discussion of the ethical aspects of corporate espionage by examining the behaviour of a major accounting firm (Deloitte) with respect to its acquisition of a rival consulting firm (BearingPoint) through the use of competitive intelligence. The techniques used by Deloitte were questionable. But where they unethical? Arguments are presented both pro and con with the overall conclusion that Deloitte did not act in the public interest.