This paper evaluates Porter and Kramer’s ‘creating shared value’ (CSV) approach against the value, balance, and accountability (VBA) business and society model proposed by Schwartz and Carroll (2008). The analysis finds that while CSV potentially meets the requirement of creating value, their approach fails to properly address the balance and accountability elements of the VBA model. As a result, the CSV approach cannot presently be considered as an underpinning or overarching construct for the business and society field.

Drivers of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are generally weak in developing countries like India and the very action of making CSR spending mandatory in India highlights the nonchalance exhibited by firms when it comes to pursuing CSR voluntarily. This study reviews literature on CSR in India, brings into perspective the new legislation that makes it mandatory for firms of a particular size to spend on CSR activities and analyzes the financial spend figures on CSR by Top 100 companies in India during the year 2014-15 to unearth emerging trends. A large majority of the top 100 firms in India have failed to spend the prescribed amount towards CSR activities during the first year after the new legislation came into force. Private sector and public sector companies report significantly different behavior with respect to their CSR spending and shortfall. The study concludes by providing recommendations for making the policy more effective.

Neoinstitutional theory relatively neglects the process of new practices evolving into "protoinstitutions". These being important in understanding institutional change, the paper adopts a historical perspective to generate propositions by examining the genesis of a practice (socially responsible investment funds), with incongruent logics, in an increasingly mature organisational field (financial services) with dominant logics. Apart from identifying the inus conditions that determine the success or failure of new practices, it is illustrated that the process did not follow the existing generalisations on institutional change due to crucial factors, such as the nature of (and pressures exerted by) the incumbent institutions and logics, the nature of the new practice, and the presence (or absence) of certain events. Additionally, the demolition of existing logics and institutions is not easily achievable especially when a new practice differs from the incumbents on the basis of its driving logics.

The “wage gap” statistically refers to the fact that the median wage of an American woman is 79% of the median wage of an American man. This paper examines the extent to which companies disclose equitable pay as recommended by GRI standards and in advance of a proposed Obama-era presidential mandate. Using the incidence of and content from disclosures contained in firm standalone sustainability reports, I find that firms did not significantly increase their disclosure of compensation and remuneration policies or their disclosure of policies intended to promote equal representation of women and equal compensation of women. My results thus support the difficulty in identifying and quantifying the wage gap and suggest that significant action – actions extending beyond new laws, proposed regulatory requirements, or sustainability accounting frameworks – is required to motivate corporate social change.

This workshop asked: How does business in society move beyond the ambition to develop excellent scholarship that helps make the world a better place to impact? The narrowness of current assessment criteria for ‘impact’ is becoming increasingly evident and criticized. Simultaneously, social media, blog outlets, easy-to-make and post videos and audios, and other means of communicating beyond scholarly audiences have become more prominent. We raised some of the following questions: How can and should, if at all, we as a field move beyond narrow metrics and ‘ambitions’ to have actual impact on the world? How should we think about what impact means in practice? How do we maintain credibility as scholars yet do research that achieves impact that shifts practice, and possibly the world of business in society for the better? What role should social media, blogging, public intellectualism, video and audio production, and teaching play in assessing scholarly impact?

This workshop explores cultural trends and their effects on students’ learning and the classroom environment. We discuss these trends and their implications, and propose pedagogical approaches and exercises that underline the importance of single-tasking, discriminating between facts and opinion, interdisciplinary analysis, and critical thinking.

In many business textbooks and courses, particularly in finance curricula, students continue to be taught that the single goal of the firm is shareholder wealth maximization (SWM). Although this statement presents a clear and succinct goal, which adheres well to rational expectations and financial economic models, I argue it is over simplistic and may actually be detrimental to student learning and professional conduct. A strict adherence to the SWM goal has at least anecdotal evidence of cases in which business students act unethically after graduating. In this article I propose a framework that includes a discussion of four classical ethics camps vis-à-vis SWM in foundational business classes. I assume students have not yet had a philosophical or business ethics course and begin the discussion from the ground up.

The purpose of our workshop was to call attention to emerging communities of practice where academics and community activists are coming together to learn how to grow slow food networks. One expression of this movement is the creation of local food hubs which can potentially forge global links that scale up to forge a global action network or GAN (Waddell, 2011).

Business Law and Religion has long been one of the more intriguing and misunderstood partnerships in contemporary American Society. One of the main purposes of this paper is to make clearer and more helpful the boundary conditions between this partnership from the specific perspective of American Jurisprudence.

The discussion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has tended to overlook corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) in global markets. This is particularly the case for discussions of the Arab world in which institutional elements such as wasta (to be defined later) and fatalism play a key role in both the conception and outcomes of CSI.

Management research has extensively considered who, what, when, why, which, and how aspects pertaining to firms’ proactive environmental strategies, yet where aspects have received remarkably less attention. Building on institutional theory and economic geography, we explore three place-based research questions relating social and physical attributes of a place with a firm’s proactive environmental strategies. We contribute to a better understanding of the role of place in three ways. First, we find that geographic concentration of environmentally proactive firms is positively related to firm commitment in a voluntary environmental program (VEP). Second, we find that firm proximity to a sacrosanct environment is positively related to firm commitment in a VEP. Finally, we integrate these effects and find that social and physical attributes of a place have an interactive effect of firms’ voluntary environmental commitment in a VEP. We address our research questions in the context of the Costa Rican tourism industry.

This case study explores local North Carolina emergency manager perspectives on Defense Support (US Military) to Civil Authorities (DSCA). We ask a) How do county emergency managers integrate DSCA to prepare for disasters, and b) What factors do emergency managers consider when integrating DSCA into response and recovery activities. The reason why this study is important is that the results provide detailed and rich data for local emergency managers, and offers possibilities to improve collaborative emergency responses between various local, state, and national emergency management agencies. Moreover, the study outcomes can help key leaders in emergency agencies to improve education and training to facilitate local emergency management through DSCA.

This paper was presented as a workshop session and considers how preexisting contexts of power inhibit or enable firm corporate social responsibility actions when the issue is a hotly contested social and political issue: immigrant labor in the American South. This research examines the impact of the passage and implementation of the 2011 Alabama Immigration Law on the state’s poultry processing industry through a discourse and content analysis. By using an adaption of Clegg’s Circuits of Power theory, the intersection of economic identity and political influence of the state poultry industry is analyzed within the power flows of Alabama’s economic network. This work is part of a broader study and contributes to CSR literatures through a focus on the role of pre-existing conditions of power on firm effectiveness in achieving CSR outcomes.

Social entrepreneurs mark a distinct business form of market enterprise. These business ventures achieve positive entrepreneurial social change for underrepresented stakeholders in uncertain markets. Markets are rarely certain. The business and society field continues to shape the narrative about what business looks like, and how it tells its story to the market, our students and fellow scholars. Social entrepreneurship is the new wave of the intersection between individual entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility (CSR) models. There are no social entrepreneurial road maps – for business development, strategy, operations, or delivery. Social entrepreneurs eschew historical profit-driven market venture models. Indifferent, profit-driven market players are contradictory to the social entrepreneurs’ mission. This paper pursues theoretical underpinnings of social entrepreneurship at the crossroads of business and society using a new narrative.

In this paper empirical findings and theoretical explanations are presented on how sustainable business model innovations emerge and diffuse in the practices of retail logistics companies. This entails different forms of sustainable business model innovations (BMI) depending on the type of company as well as different interacting factors that drive their emergence and diffusion. This paper contends that neither the institutional environment nor the initiatives of agents alone can explain these processes but an intersection between both can do – within an institutional theory. This means that win-win-situations between companies and relevant stakeholders are an important precondition for sustainable business model innovations. There are also intersections of different reasons driving the emergence and diffusion of sustainable BMI. These reasons are legitimacy, instrumentally rational and value-rational reasons.