The location for the 2006 annual meeting provides an excellent opportunity to consider the interplay between important topics in our discipline and a new country setting. This paper presents a brief historical overview on how public policy shaped the Mexican film industry since the 1960s. An examination of seven recent Mexican films identifies several themes of interest to business and society scholars.

Multi-stakeholder collaboration networks are being asked to solve complex cognitive problems, but we can neither assume nor design the systems of shared meaning such tasks demand. This paper develops an autonomous systems view of the organizational field that provides a framework for examining the emergence of multistakeholder collaboration while recognizing that the construction of such networks is framed by institutional pressures.

This paper describes a structured approach to the selection of an analytic strategy for cross-case analysis and a method for data display. To this end, criteria will be developed addressing both, aspects of scientific rigor as well as the practicability of application and the application of the decision process will be demonstrated.

This study aims at discussing Global Business Citizenship Experiments (GBCE) as adaptation and selection mechanisms in organizations. GBCE are processes used by companies operating abroad to deal with discrepancies between their own principles and values and local norms, or the lack of them. I argue that these processes lead to adaptation of the individual companies to their environment, and to the evolution of organizational forms in the population.

An entrepreneurial firm was sold to a MNC, and then back to the original entrepreneur. The process will be examined through the lenses of the integration-responsiveness framework, moral and stakeholder approaches, as well as theory of entrepreneurship.

This research applies the notion of sustainability (Barney, 1991; Braa, Monteiro, & Sahay, 2004) to the mechanisms used by socially responsible investment(SRI) firms with respect to their stakeholders (investors and target firms). A contrast is developed between US and UK SRI firms. It is noted that screens, while maintaining a strong investor base, are less sustainable from the perspective of the firms targeted by SRI funds, whereas advocacy has stronger elements of sustainability with respect to the relations with corporations.

A new instrument, The Moral Reasoning Inventory, designed to measure moral reasoning responses to moral dilemmas within a business setting is the subject of this paper. The instrument consists of two moral dilemma scenarios with eight moral reasoning statements. Two measurement scales were used for rating responses on the strength of belief in the reasons and the importance of the reasons for resolving the dilemma. Data analysis clearly supported theeffectiveness of the instrument to differentiate patterns of consistency in moral reasoning within decision groups.

This paper begins to explore how corporate social responsibility (CSR) has evolved in Mexico. It looks at Mexico's social and political history to see the values that shaped expectations about how Mexican firms should address the needs and desires of their stakeholders in various periods in the 20th century. Particular attention is given to firms in Monterrey because they pioneered a form of company paternalism that reflected early CSR initiatives. Finally the paper briefly examines some contemporary CSR practices by large Mexican firms. The paper begins to fill a gap in the business-andsociety literature about CSR practices outside the U.S. and Western European countries, which have received most attention by business-and-society scholars.

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission recently began requiring mutual funds to make their proxy voting transparent so that investors can make better decisions about investing with the mutual fund and with the ultimate goal of improving corporate governance. We review the proxy voting records of major mutual funds to determine if transparency has changed the patterns of voting by mutual funds. Initial results show that support for management increased and support for social responsibility resolutions decreased after transparency was required.

The purpose of this workshop is to share our current work-in-progress and solicit feedback and ideas from our colleagues as we begin to design a research study based on a paper we presented at the 2005 Academy of Management conference, “The Ethical Implications of Power in Organizations.” Our paper examines the nexus of power and ethics in organizations, and how they are treated in the management, sociology, and psychology literature. Our discussion assumes a wide range of uses and abuses of power, including but not limited to sexual harassment, anti-labor practices, excessive executive compensation, manipulation of stock prices, discrimination, environmental degradation, etc. In addition we surface and discuss the assumptions, norms, paradoxes, and practices of power in organizations in relation to business ethics. We have clustered these into two levels: organizational and individual, while realizing the interaction effects.

This article introduces a different insight on the role of leadership in the process to develop sustainability and achieve lasting improvement in quality of life. Authors bring together the societal, organizational and individual levels of sustainability in one conceptual framework and discuss the interconnectedness among these three levels. The conclusion is that an effective approach to sustainability starts from the inside, i.e. from the individual level. This implies a decisive role for personal leadership in the change path towards sustainability. It brings new challenges and responsibilities for higher education in the preparation of a new generation of managers and leaders who can think and act from a sustainability perspective.

The classic formulation of doubt regarding the appropriateness of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), as voiced by Milton Friedman, is that “…there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game…” I present a reply to Friedman, and to others, that accepts their implicit premise – that business, including globalizing business activity, can be a virtuous mechanism of free society – but that denies their conclusion regarding responsibility. The reply does not fit the traditional mold of CSR arguments, which argue for responsibility to a broad group of corporate stakeholders, and which, Friedman suggests, “undermine the very foundations of our free society.” My reply hinges upon precisely the virtue of “freedom” that Friedman and others clearly consider intrinsically valuable. In the most extreme case, where maximizing profits will place a government under threat, such activity will not coincide with maximizing social value, and would undermine the freedoms that these authors claim to value. Concerning less extreme cases, responsibilities will also apply, if we can take a page from the capabilities approach, developing Amartya Sen’s argument that, “we have to see individual freedom as a social commitment.”

What role do political campaign contributions make in generating and maintaining political capital? Are no-bid contracts awarded to more influential defensecontractors? We explore these questions by conducting a social network analysis of defense contractors and their political campaign contributions to U.S. Representatives and Senators. Using a model of political capital from Rehbein, Schuler, and Doh (2005), we operationalize network ties in terms of political contributions and the relative influence of legislators and defense contractors.

The question that this paper sets out to answer is: How do political processes within the firm structure corporate political strategy? In answering this question thepaper starts to address the research problem of the congruence between processes of consensus building and conflict resolution within the firm and on the other hand corporate attempts to influence political processes taking place outside the firm. The paper argues that power-dependence relations between firm-internal stakeholders are an explanatory factor in examining empirical variation in corporate political behavior.

This paper outlines issues of corporate philanthropy research. Of significant value is that normative prescriptions and non-empirical conceptual models lack thesupport of rigorous empirical research. Moreover, dominant methodological approaches embedded in the positivist tradition lack the depth required inunderstanding managerial involvement in corporate philanthropic programmes. Accordingly, this paper argues for new methodological insights. The research agenda should question the capitalistic nature of corporations, delve deep into management thought and recognise the affect of corporate philanthropy on multiple corporate stakeholders.

The objective of this study is to evaluate empirically a firm’s political relationships with elected officials. A general premise is that firms with certaincharacteristics are in a better position for developing political relationships and gaining benefits from these relationships. We draw upon the resource dependency, resource based, and political strategy choice literatures to consider certain factors that lead firms to seek political relationships with elected officials. We test a model drawing upon measures from each of these areas on a sample of large companies with U.S. operations.

This paper provides an empirical test of a model for the strategic management of stakeholders. More specifically, it provides a methodology that linksstakeholder expectations of business with the strategic expectations of managers. This is achieved by operationalising the idea of bi-directionality in stakeholder research and by applying rigorous statistical data analysis.

One of the more interesting counter-intuitive findings in organizational research is that success breeds failure. This counter-intuitive has been described in termsof core rigidities, core incompetencies, and even the Icarus Paradox. The literature on these topics has concluded that success yields overconfidence and myopia in firms and their managers, and this eventually causes failure. We augment this literature by suggesting that success breeds not only internal pathologies that cause firms to misuse their established resources over time, but also external pathologies that cause firms to lose access to new resources. In particular, success influences stakeholders’ perceptions of firms, causing firms to lose the benefits of underdog status and gain the problems of overlord status. We term this notion that success warps images of the successful, leading to their decline over time, the Helios Paradox, and suggest that dominant firms must counter natural tendencies to succumb to both the Icarus and Helios Paradoxes if they are to remain successful over time.

The influence of externally focused organizational capabilities on the generation of proactive environmental strategies was examined under contingenteffects of uncertainty in the general business environment in 134 North American and European ski resorts. Capabilities of strategic proactivity and continuous innovation were found to be associated with proactive environmental strategies. Managerial perceptions of uncertainty in the general business environment were found to moderate the deployment of the capability of continuous innovation at all levels of uncertainty and stakeholder engagement at low and average levels of uncertainty. The study contributes to the resource-based view by illuminating an important contingency under which these capabilities are likely to be deployed to generate such a strategy.