This paper summarizes a discussion session investigating the corporate representatives behind corporate citizenship and sustainability initiatives.

Stakeholder salience has proven an elusive measure of critical stakeholders. Existing stakeholder theory commonly focuses on firm-centric maps. The technique employed in this paper offers a measurable and visual approach to stakeholder salience. This paper operationalizes the stakeholder salience concept using an issue focus, furthering stakeholder theory while providing an example of its application.

This paper explores the theoretical underpinnings of collaboration and ecosystem management in order to identify the relationships and processes involved in implementing ecosystem management programs through cross-sector collaboration. Ecosystem management requires a highly adaptive and resilient social-ecological governance approach, which addresses spatiality and temporality issues. In order to explore possible implementation issues with ecosystem management, propositions are developed dealing with institutional isomorphism and collective action. The paper concludes with a discussion of the theoretic underpinnings involved in implementing ecosystem management through cross sector collaborations.

This paper provides a model on repairing re-establishing stakeholder relationships after a firm engages in a moral indiscretion. Depending upon their nature, indiscretions can be classified as mistakes, misconduct, or improprieties. After committing an indiscretion, firms can attempt to reestablish positive stakeholder relationships by strengthening their technical competency (for mistakes), improving their reputation (for misconduct), and enhancing their goodwill with relevant stakeholders (for improprieties). However, a firm’s cultural orientation may result in the misapplication of the stakeholder repair mechanism (competency, reputation, and goodwill) with the applicable indiscretion (mistakes, misconduct, and improprieties).

Renewable energy has gained much-deserved prominence on the world stage of sustainable development, yet despite the surging interest there is a notable lack of understanding regarding best practices in business – stakeholder relations. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2005) and drawing from complexity theory and social scientific theories of identity, our empirical study shows that core values and identity are strongly implicated in the formation and negotiation of stakeholder attitudes for both individuals and social groups. Specifically, we find that personal and social identity are core drivers of community attitude development in a complex adaptive system, and that conflicts between strongly held identities are galvanized along bifurcated “axes of tension” that are also strongly implicated in community attitude formation processes.

This paper examines the controversial governance mechanism of classified boards. Classified board advocates believe that multiple year terms give directors a longer-term horizon. Shareholder activists push for declassifications of boards because they argue that agency problems are likely to arise. In a longitudinal study of six years of KLD, RiskMetrics and Compustat data, we test the influence of classified boards on social performance dimensions. We find that classified boards are negatively associated with social performance strengths in the areas of community and diversity, indicating that they are not proactive in these areas. However, classified boards are negatively associated with social performance concerns on five out of six dimensions, providing evidence that while these boards are not proactive in stakeholder management, neither are they harmful nor neglectful towards stakeholders. The overall findings suggest that classified boards may be associated with a stakeholder management philosophy of “do no harm.”

Prior research that analyses the cross-firm variation in the prevalence of women on corporate boards has tended to emphasise the importance of firm and industry-level factors, such as firm size, the quality of corporate governance, and the proximity to final consumers. In contrast, very little research has explored the role of national institutional factors for this important phenomenon. In this study, we explore the relative importance of country, industry, and firm-level factors in explaining the cross-firm variation in the proportion of directorships occupied by female directors. Findings indicate that while all levels of influence are significant, country-level effects are a highly-important and under-researched antecedent of the presence of women on corporate boards.

This report on research in progress lists ratings of journals useful for business & society scholars for publishing. Ratings by an expert panel of such scholars are presented. Included are journals focused largely on this and closely related fields, and also those that reach a wider audience involved with management studies.

Teaching sustainability from the “inside-out” means starting at the level of individual students, progressing to organizational responsibilities, and lastly arriving at system-wide responsibilities.

The goal of the workshop is to bring IABS performance measurement researchers together, so that they can improve the quality of their research, develop new ideas and projects, strengthen and enlarge their networks, and increase collaboration. During the workshop four discussion sessions were facilitated, all discussion a specific issue related to performance measurement; (1) evaluation methods for CSP, (2) measurement metrics, (3) level of analysis, and (4) relation between motivations and impact

Twenty-one IABS colleagues held a roundtable discussion of the challenges of teaching a fully-wired generation of students. Collectively they presented some solutions to commonly experienced problems and some ideas for experimenting with new media and new ways of teaching and learning.

Psychological contracts represent perceived reciprocal obligations between an employer and an employee. Most research has focused on employee or employer rights (the entitlement side of the obligation equation). We examine the responsibilities inherent in psychological contracts. After reviewing the moral aspect of psychological contracts, we use the issue of tenure as a discussion point for this topic.

The migration of publicly-held companies to private status through use of private equity has been both lauded and lambasted. While agency theorists praise the public-to-private or PTP firm as being an efficient form of corporate governance, others suggest that going private allows owners and managers to extract, rather than add, value.We contribute by developing a categorization of the potential sources of value for the PTP firm. We analyze the effects of each source of value, and find that there are specific negative effects for non-equity stakeholders associated with several sources. Our analysis indicates that the degree to which value is added versus extracted will vary across firms; yet, all will tend to engage in some value extraction. Policy implications are discussed.

In this paper, I provide a number of suggested exercises and assignments for integrating sustainability into Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics classes, as well as other classes offered in Business Schools. I developed or adapted these activities and have successfully used them in a range of classes. Not only do these activities engage students and promote creativity, they also promote critical thinking in the classroom.

This paper examines how behavioral integration of top management teams may contribute to our understanding of how stakeholder initiatives become a part of a firm’s strategy. Multiple case design was used by conducting a series of interviews with the executive teams at three firms in the U.S. telecommunications industry.

This study examines social issues shareholder resolutions filed at S&P 500 companies in 2007. These firms received 86% of all social issues resolutions filed. Findings indicate that green resolutions were the most common single type (30% of social issues resolutions), but nearly one third (32%) of resolutions contained non-traditional content. Firms were more likely to be targeted if they were large in size and demonstrated poor treatment of employees and customers. As might be expected, the primary sponsors of social issues resolutions were socially responsible investment funds, religious groups, and pension funds. Surprisingly, over half (52%) of resolutions made it onto proxy ballots in 2007, while there was sufficient dialogue between the target companies and shareholder activists for filers to withdraw only 29% of the resolutions (although 41% of green resolutions were withdrawn). Resolution content and firm response differed by type of filer.

Early research examining the relationship between corporate social practices and candidate attraction generally concludes that prospective employees prefer to be affiliated with socially responsible organizations (Dolan, 1997; Greening & Turban, 2000; Turban & Greening, 1996). A basic assumption embedded in these studies is that there is a generalized consensus among job candidates regarding the factors that constitute a desirable social record. Our project challenges this assumption and seeks to uncover variation among prospective job candidates’ attraction to specific organizations’ social practices. We draw on the model of stakeholder orientation outlined by Mitroff (1983) to build a theoretical framework to explain variations in candidate attraction to specific practices and to guide the development of propositions that outline how candidates might be attracted to certain practices. Analysis of pilot data provides an illustration of how various corporate social practices cluster in a manner that is consistent with the theoretical propositions.

Prior research has shown the importance of institutional pressures in investigating corporate environmental behaviour. To date, the literature has been lacking in survey-based reflective measures of institutional pressures. This paper focuses on the development of reflective measures of coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphism.

The social responsibility field in the organizations has become recently a subject scholars have debated. Despite of the huge discussion regarding to this concept, there is no consensus. Still, there is a confusion related to “social actions,” this way reducing the social responsibility scope as a philanthropic activity. This reductionism is inadequate, distorting the essence of what is supposed to be a socially responsible conduct. The present proposal intends to evaluate enterprises in the Corporate Social Responsibility – CSR. This research will investigate confessional universities in Brazil, which are organizations in higher education that have a relationship with a specific church(s) or religion and are ordinarily dependent upon that religion, through sponsorship and/or board oversight. These universities are skilled in financial reporting, but they have no good process for evaluating and reporting on the programs, activities, and outcomes that relate more directly to their educational and service missions. This paper shows the Brazilian universities scenario on CSR, describes the Hopkins and Wood’s framework followed by an evaluation of a small group of universities through a survey. From the outcomes, the framework may be reformulated, finally displaying the elements to future research and its implications.