This paper explores the effect of structurally enacted governance, such as board membership rules, versus process enacted governance, such as disclosure practices, on investor trust. Certain organizational factors are proposed due to their ability to inform trust propensity and transparency enactment. Regulatory oversight, organizational structure and investor salience are considered in light of their effect on relational and transactional approaches to a company’s investors.

This paper examines the linguistic strategies used by tobacco industry executives in public speeches made pre and post two important events in tobacco industry history to assess the trust building efforts of Philip Morris.

Acknowledging the unique and potentially powerful positions held by activist stakeholders, the author argues that organizations and activists signal thestate of their relationships using public statements about their shared issues of concern as reported by the news media. The findings of three case studies ofAustralia’s major banks and their activist stakeholders over 21 years are reported.

Corporate Reputation (CR) has become an increasingly important topic in the social responsibility literature. In this exploratory study we relate reputation to crisis management by implementing an experimental survey in which respondents indicate how strongly they feel about a potential crisis. Findings reported here indicate that respondents’ reactions to the potential crisis varied according to the industry in which the firm operated.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the paradoxes of industry self-regulation and to draw parallels between recent work on collaboration with the notion of control and regulation. Various examples of collaborative control are identified and self-regulation is used to illustrate how the process happens. Suggestions are offered on how collaboration is necessary for future regulatory issues.

This paper aims at exploring the relationship between corporate wrongdoing and CEOs’careers. We hypothesize that the managerial labor market does not punish CEOs of companies involved with wrongdoing. The analysis of data on 16 companies charged by the SEC supports this hypothesis.

The study of reputation has often focused on the creation of good reputations rather than on the varied means by which reputations are modified, or shifted, and the factors affecting such shifts. This paper develops a theory of reputation shifting and identifies five basic reputational actions, the types of strategic responses that can be taken to manage reputations.

What is missing in issue analysis is the movement across transnational and arena borders. In this paper we offer an initial theoretical model of cascading arenas, addressing specifically three different arenas: local level (country level in EU, state level in US), regional level (EU & US), and transborder international issues (across trading NAFTA and EU). We note the broad characteristics of these arenas and address the processes by which issues migrate up and down and across such arenas over time, using the genetically modified organisms debate as an illustrative example of this process.

In this study, I seek to contribute to the existing literature on corporate political activity by providing insights into how the content of corporate political strategy evolves over time within a single firm. A basic premise of the study is that the evolution of corporate political strategy is embedded within a broader social context that influences its pace and direction. Empirical evidence is based on a historical single case study of a large scale Finnish industrial conglomerate, Tampella Ltd., covering the time period of 1944–1991. The results of the study show how the contextual forces shape the patterns of corporate political strategy. Moreover, an evolutionary model of intra-firm political strategies is introduced.

This paper argues that research on the business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) must account for the path dependent nature of firm-stakeholderrelations, and develops the construct of stakeholder influence capacity (SIC) to fill this void. SIC helps to explain why the effects of CSR on corporate financial performance (CFP) vary across firms and across time, therein providing a missing link in the study of the business case. This paper distinguishes CSR from related and confounded corporate resource allocations and from corporate social performance (CSP), then incorporates SIC into a model that explains how acts of CSR are transformed into CFP through stakeholder relationships. This paper also develops a set of propositions to aid future research on the contingencies that produce variable financial returns to investments in CSR.

When assembling a collaborative initiative, how do you select the appropriate stakeholders to promote collaborative success? We examine the limitations of thestakeholder theory approach to resolving this issue. Instead, we argue that the domain-based perspective and the notion of requisite variety both offer worthwhile perspectives on the issue of participant selection. Combining these perspectives, we pave the way for a theory of participant selection that focuses on evaluating collaborative resources and capabilities at the individual, organizational and domain levels.

This panel considered the uses of and prospects for the stakeholder theory/approach. After 20 years of popularity, the stakeholder concept has still notemerged as a true theory. However, it offers some unique perspectives on business organizations and there is plenty of room to develop stakeholder theory and research. These session notes are offered to further the scholarly discussion.

This paper reports the results of a study essentially replicating that of Agle, Mitchell, and Sonnenfeld (1999) concerning stakeholder salience, values, andorganizational performance, but surveying small business managers instead of large-firm CEOs. The results in some ways parallel the findings of Agle et al. and in some ways diverge.

This study investigates possible links between small-business managers’ perceptions of stakeholder salience and their views of the ethicality of business decisions. Results indicate few if any links between the two concepts exist. They provide evidence that small-business managers make decisions in line with internal viewpoints rather than external pressures.

It proposed that certain types of human resource (HR) practices can be both normatively rooted and also instrumental in achieving economic goals. Specifically,managers may perceive organizational justice HR practices and work-family conflict HR practices as a legitimate response to these seemingly conflicting interests. Legitimacy evaluations of HR practices by managers are also likely to impact managerial perceptions of organizational reputation.

This paper presents empirical data which allow us to examine how ethical aspects influence ethical consumers’ brand choices on technology-based products,such as washing machines, fridge freezers, and cars. Predicted by the literature review, the majority of our interviewees did make their brand choice based onreliability. However, we found that ethical consumers’ concept of reliability includes not only functionality but also ethical values. The results suggest that we have to reconsider whether considerations of companies’ ethical standards are the only indicators of brand choice as a shortcut of the assessment of business ethics or whether various forms of ethical considerations including ethically reconstructed reliability can also a contribute to this.

Existing descriptions of stakeholder management have primarily been static and one-dimensional. In this paper, we offer a multidimensional perspective and outline four main profiles of stakeholder management. We then explain how and why companies change their stakeholder management approach over time.

A framework is given for the discussion of blogs as a form of online business protests against objectionable labor practices. Blogs are described and analyzed regarding responsibility and effectiveness. Future research on the morality and effectiveness of blogs and other types of online business protests is detailed.

In the paper, prior research is criticized for giving privileged position to individual-level managerial characteristics in explaining differences in firm-level socialand political activity. Recognizing cultural differences between firms is offered as a partial solution for improving our understanding. Cultural Theory from anthropology and political science is cited as a guiding framework for fruitful future inquiry.

This paper explores industry-level, collective stakeholder action. It argues that when industry stakeholders perceive change to be radically in conflict with their shared beliefs, this motivates them to act collectively at the industry level. The introduction of Cardhu pure malt in the Scotch whisky industry is used here as an illustrative example.