Freeman correctly points out that the “business stuck story” presents a barrier to implementing value-based capitalism, but he ignores the obstacles created by the better financed and propagated “government sucks” story. The reality is that value-based capitalism requires government assistance in three distinct realms. The Schumpeterian principle asserts that government has always proven necessary for subsidizing “creation” and ameliorating “destruction,” while the Keynesian principle assures the continued health of markets through policies that bolster demand. The Jeffersonian principle demands government efforts to strengthen democracy in the public sphere while encouraging it in the private sector.

A review of some major theoretical contributions to the field of business ethics over the past fifteen years shows that the present state of the art suffers from some typical childhood diseases. In this paper we look into the manner of problem setting of these theories and identify a number of standard patterns in the conceptualization of business ethics.

In this paper, we look at the prospects for mobilization of the wealthy to contest widening income inequality. We begin by looking at members of an organization that supports the mobilization of grassroots groups on behalf of economic justice. We found among its members an “unexpected voice” - the voice of wealthy people grappling with their fairly invisible wealth and their own surprise that it evoked such a series of emotions and a gradual process they termed “coming out” as wealthy. We discuss the implications of this identity formation and interpretation for the organization’s ability to shape a collective agenda for social change. This study locates a novel space at the intersection of business and society - where the spoils of business are used to redress societal inequalities, and even to reshape how business is conducted.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church is plumbed for its insight into business ethics. The prescriptions for right conduct in business offered by this compendium of Catholic doctrine are found to be concentrated in the instruction given for the Seventh Commandment: “You shall not steal.” As expected, theft, the usurping of another’s property against the reasonable will of the owner, is prohibited. Beyond this, however, and perhaps unexpectedly, the Commandment insists on nothing less than a right ordering of the world’s goods based on the dignity of the human person.

A global business citizen is a multinational enterprise that responsibly implements its duties to individuals and to societies within and across national and cultural borders. In earlier work, we grounded the concept of global business citizen in political theory and showe The theory of global business citizenship is a normative theory of socially responsible business practices across the full span of cultures and regions where a company operates. This paper extends our theory of global business citizenship by developing a process model for implementation.

This workshop session provided a tutorial for the session participants on how to develop, assign and conduct course presentations and projects using Davenport’s Twenty Principles of Corporate Citizenship. Session participants received sample materials from the panelists and heard about their successes and lessons learned. The majority of the session’s time was dedicated to discussing how the participants might use the sample material in their classes or adapt these materials for the participants’ unique application for their class presentations or project assignments.

This paper explores the growing array of initiatives aimed at creating corporate accountability with the goal of attempting to uncover the foundation principles that underlie them and create a ‘floor’ below which practices are ethically questionable. Using the Global Compact’s nine principles and the work of Transparency International as guides, we find that foundational principles seem to exist in the areas of human rights, labor standards, environment, and anti-corruption initiatives.

In recent years, the multiple pressures on companies to behave more responsibly have resulted in the emergence of systems for managing their stakeholder and environmental responsibilities. This paper will explore how one company, Sainsbury's, has responded to the dilemmas posed by the competing pressures from the international social and competitive environments by developing explicit systems for managing its stakeholder responsibilities. We term such responses total responsibility management or TRM approaches, finding similarities with such approaches across numerous companies studied. Analogous in many respects to total quality management approaches, TRM approaches represent companies’ mostly voluntary initiatives to meet the criticisms they have received from activists, labor unions, social investors, and anti-corruption agitators.

Corporate governance and the relationships between the board of directors and top management have become mainstream topics since the collapse of Enron. Prior corporate governance research examines the affect of top management and the board on firm performance: however, we suggest that the research on corporate governance be expanded to include the role of the board audit committee, internal audit, and external audit. The primary theoretical base for our propositions is agency theory, which explains the divergence of interests that can occur between the manager/agent and owners/principal. Our basic proposition is that the more the interests of each group are aligned with those of the shareholders, the better the firm will perform. Furthermore, we propose a systems perspective is necessary to analyze the interdependence and interactions of these groups. Control mechanisms such as incentive alignment, monitoring, and transparency can be used to minimize agency costs and improve corporate governance effectiveness.

This paper reports evidence from a field study in Australia aimed at testing a theoretical model of corporate social responsiveness that describes organizations enacting stakeholder relationships through their social responsibility orientation and their public relations orientation. The study demonstrates how an organizational orientation to social responsibility contributes to performance by using public relations, it its broadest sense, to reduce conflict with stakeholders.

This paper explores the Kinder, Lyndenberg & Domini Company Profiles database to detect underlying dimensionality and taxonomy. A factor analysis finds 3 key social performance dimensions and a cluster analysis detects 3 distinct CSP orientations that firms adopt.

This paper analyzes the choice of the form of organization within which UK companies manage their charitable donations. An econometric model of the choice of organizational form is estimated which emphasizes the role of stakeholder pressure, Firm characteristics and industry conditions. Stakeholder pressure is found to significantly affect the choice of location of control of charitable giving within the firm.

Mental models shape and frame our expectations of the role of management organizations within society. Mental models provide abstractions of reality and justifications for behaviors. This paper links mental models and various definitions of corporate social responsibility (CSR), ultimately suggesting the need for an agreed upon mental model before CSR may be fully defined and for modifications of CSR teaching.

Williams (1985) stated that directors cannot determine when CEOs will be opportunistic and that it is prudent to exercise strong control over that threat. Stewardship theory serves as an alternative to agency theory based schemes of corporate governance and proposes that not all managers not act opportunistically and that empowerment may instead be appropriate. Stewardship theory proposes that some mangers may possess intrinsic motivations that make him/her community-service rather than selfinterested oriented and that psychological and situational variables account for the exhibiting of stewardship behaviors by a company’s CEO. In a matched-pair study of 102 CEOs and directors we found that three of eight independent variables were statistically significant predictors of stewardship.

This paper suggests a new way to address Corporate Social Performance's theory-building issues, based on organizational learning theories. After a review of the limits of CSP models and an analysis of CSP from a dynamic perspective, a model of “Corporate Social Learning” is proposed. This model is finally evaluated in terms of its potential contribution to Business and Society research.

The debate over corporate social responsibility and social involvement has raged for over 30 years. This paper argues that corporate social responsibility and the ensuing Corporate Citizenship activities of the firm add value to shareholders by providing “insurance-like" protection to the firm’s idiosyncratic base.

This paper considers the conditions under which strategic forms of corporate social strategy will have a positive impact on firm performance, using the tools of game theory. We develop models of CSR investment using prisoner’s dilemma, ad hoc, Bertrand, and Cournot models of competition. We find that profitability may be possible in Cournot-type markets.

Multiple regression models were used to identify the predictors of pledged donations to September 11 charities as well as the predictors of “regular” annual corporate philanthropy (CP) in the prior year for the same firms. The best predictors of September 11 pledges were firm size and slack resources (cash flow), size and slack being closely associated with “regular” CP according to the conventional wisdom. One type of “regular” CP—cash donated either to corporate-sponsored foundations or directly to charities—could not be successfully predicted for the prior year; i.e., the conventional wisdom did not work. The best predictors of another type of “regular” CP—the donations that charities actually receive in the form of direct cash, cash passed through corporate-sponsored foundations, and in-kind donations—for the prior year were slack resources and, somewhat unexpectedly, product differentiation and previous profitability (ROA lagged one year).