This paper explores what we can call the paradox of corporate citizenship, that is, it explores the paradoxical dark underbelly created by strategic success in corporations and their efforts to implement voluntary corporate social responsibility initiatives to demonstrate their good corporate citizenship. In this exploration, we will look at the tensions of corporate citizenship and responsibility that are created not when there are crises, scandals, or misdeeds, but when the very success of the company’s strategy is itself the source of concern.

This paper explores a possibility of using discourse and text analysis to assess the business ethics of specific documents from within the tobacco industry. I argue that automated text analysis can provide important insights into the ethical discursive stance of not only a single textual communication, but also the company of origin and perhaps the industry at large.

Both positive and negative consequences typically result from business activities for all types of stakeholders. How these consequences are judged is at the heart of economics and ethics, sociology and political economy. For example, the poorly run supermarket in a low-income community that charges exorbitantly high prices rarely gets our sympathy, and we often call for more competition to bring down prices and improve customer service. At the same time, small businesses that serve their customers well and provide a modest living to the owners may well be threatened by the entry of a large efficient competitor, and we often call for less competition in order to preserve small firms. Such paradoxes are worth pondering and sorting out. We offer our assessment of the paradox by examining morally mature management and socially efficient political economies through the lens of global business citizenship.

We examine how UK listed companies set executive pay, considering the implications of following best practice in corporate governance and how this canconflict with what stakeholders might perceive as good behaviour. We do this by presenting the results of 40 interviews with protagonists in the debate, setting out the dilemmas faced by remuneration-setters, and how the processes they follow can lead to ethical conflicts. Overall, we conclude that although best practice might drive good behaviour, it often does not.

This paper documents for the first time tournament incentives of pension fund managers and their preferences for social and environmental security characteristics. Using a comprehensive data set on pension fund security holdings, differences in manager tournaments are distinguished by sorting pension funds into portfolios based on the number of concurrent managers each pension fund employs. Results indicate that the way pension schemes structure portfolio manager tournament incentives is important in explaining the social and environmental portfolio firm characteristics of pension fund held stock.

This paper investigates the determinants of the diffusion of the international environmental management system standard ISO 14001 within the chemical industry using a panel of 126 different countries during the period 2000 to 2003. We investigate how institutional pressure originating from different stakeholders such as governments, businesses, and the civil society and forces related to trade will drive the diffusion. Our results show that the level of community involvement within a particular country and the previous experience of businesses with voluntary standards such as Responsible Care and ISO 9000 impacts ISO 14001 adoption in chemical firms.

Identifying the antecedents of unethical corporate behavior remains a priority among management scientists. Among the many causes that have been explored, the influence of celebrity and legacy has not been examined. This paper contributes to the existing research by focusing attention on how celebrity and legacy encourage unethical behavior and suggests practices that can diffuse the negative influence of these factors.

A research project currently underway at the Mexico City campus of the Instituto de Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterey (ITESM) was presentedfor discussion. A number of constructive suggestions from participants have been incorporated into the paper.

Social contract theory has been criticized as a “theory in search of application.” We argue that incorporating the nano- or individual level of analysis into social contract inquiry will yield more descriptive theory. We draw upon the psychological contract perspective to address two critiques of social contract theory: its rigid macro orientation and inattention to the process of contract formation. We demonstrate how a psychological contract approach offers practical insight into the impact of social contracting on day-today human interaction.

This paper employs data from a sample of the CEOs and top managers of seventy-nine U.S. companies and non-profit organizations to test hypotheses concerning the effects of the salience of organizational values on the accuracy of top managers’ perceptions of their CEOs’ values and their propensities to project their own values onto their CEOs. Results provide evidence that the salience of organizational values is positively related to both accuracy in subordinates’ perceptions of their superiors’ values and projection of the subordinates’ values onto their superiors. This initially counterintuitive result is explained with reference to contemporary views of projection as a heuristic rather than as a non-normative bias that results in the cognitive distortion of reality.

This paper tests whether a person’s predominant level of moral reasoning has an effect on the ability to detect cheaters on conditional social contract rules. Itspecifically examines if principled reasoners are better at cheater detection on adapted versions of the Wason selection task. Results from my study do not support the hypothesis that cheater detection is influenced by a individual’s socio-moral perspective.

The rapid diffusion of computers and information technology into organizational settings is bringing profound changes to employee-employer relationships.Managers and employees are faced with challenges of electronic monitoring of communications and collection and use of information about employees (Mello, 2003). This paper proposes to discuss several issues related to electronic workplace monitoring. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to explore the interplay between privacy and ethical issues with processes related to the initiation and formation of trust between management and employees.

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.

Balancing the often conflicting objectives of promoting social equity, ecological integrity and economic growth creates complexity in strategic decision-makingbecause of the number and diversity of stakeholders impacted. Therefore, sustainability solutions transcend organizational boundaries and an effective understanding requires an integration of perspectives from a wide range of stakeholders. Integrating diverse stakeholder perspectives can influence organizational innovation at two levels: by altering organizational knowledge structure and by transforming managerial interpretations of sustainability issues from threats to be averted into opportunities to be sought. Openness to external stakeholder influences may lead to continuous learning and innovation via insights of multiple thought worlds or interpretive schemas of communities who think differently.

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.

The validity of assessment programs is increasingly important in higher education. Existing approaches to assessment are problematic because they eitherfail to provide timely feedback or have suspect measurement issues. We propose a feed-forward assessment model to help overcome these two limitations oftraditional assessment approaches.

The paper presents an analysis of the influence of welfare state regimes on national models of corporate social responsibility. The paper takes its point of departure in Esping-Andersen’s three models of welfare state regimes. These models are extended to provide hypotheses on the role of corporate social responsibility in the provision of welfare goods. The paper exemplifies its points by providing an analysis of the Danish model of CSR, and drawing comparisons to other European models and the American model.

The purpose of this paper is to provoke a debate on the management of social issues building on the analysis of a well known illegal organization, namely theSicilian Mafia. According to the analytical framework provided by Gambetta (1993), the Sicilian Mafia could be considered as a business on its own dealing a specific commodity: the ‘protection of people’. That approach of ‘Mafia as a corporation’ allows investigating the social responsibility of that organization and the way the Mafia managed its key stakeholders. As we will argue, the recent spate of corporate scandals reveals the risk of normal corporations turning into a Mafia type of organization. One of the key drivers of those scandals is the overstretched instrumental interpretation of a corporation's societal responsibilities. By caricaturing and perverting some established practices of the mainstream approach to CSR perspective, we will demonstrate the potential pathologies of a CSR approach that is mainly based on the neoliberal foundation of individual and organizational self-interest.

Many scholars have pointed out obstacles to establishing a causal link between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and financial performance. Good Management Theory suggests CSR is necessary to maximizing financials. Others believe that, realistically, less ethical means are necessary. In response, this article proposes the Equivalency Theory of Corporate Social Responsibility and Financial Returns (ETRR). It holds that, while CSR contributes to financials when managed adaptively and intelligently, unfortunately, corporate social irresponsibility produces equally strong financials when it is managed adaptively and intelligently. ETRR implies greater personal moral freedom and therefore responsibility for executives.