Following the situation of poverty in the rights paradigm, this paper explores the links between the rights-based and corporate social responsibility approaches to the realization of socioeconomic rights in the broader context of an emerging recognition of CSR as private regulation of business behaviour. It examines complex theoretical and practical dimensions of responsibility and potential contributions of businesses to poverty alleviation and clarifies the apparent paradox of legal compulsion of essentially voluntary CSR activities. Rather than treat rights and CSR as (...) parallel approaches to protecting socioeconomic rights, it is argued that CSR can be part of a coherent framework of laws and policies for legally translating broad human rights commitments to poverty reduction into concrete programmes. The paper demonstrates how legally propped CSR arrangements can support poverty reduction and appropriate task-specific contextualised definitions and boundaries of CSR that complement the rights-based approach. It is argued that human rights principles have normative dimensions to guide and help formulate policies, programmes and practices, which in turn allow for a creative use of and legal prop to CSR. The conceptualization of human rights is not restricted to one implementation method, and CSR can partly satisfy states’ human rights obligations and transcend the narrow conventional human rights discourse on obligations of non-state actors. (shrink)

In many contexts, such as business, science and law, it is essential to determine whether a company, a product or a person in fact has the reputation attributed to it, regardless of whether that reputation has been rightly earned. In this paper I offer two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the attribution of a reputation to a subject within a social group. The first one concerns the way in which reputational information is spread among the members of the relevant (...) social group; the second is the existence, in most members of the group, of a disposition to interpret and evaluate a reputational object in a manner molded by reputational information. Reputational claims generate expectations that are tested every time a member of the group comes in contact with the reputational object. In many cases, the preferential search for behavioral evidence consistent with those expectations will result in a distorted evaluation of the reputational object. (shrink)

Responsible family ownership is a combination of the family’s commitment to the family-firm’s stakeholders in the long term and the explicit behaviour of the family members associated with the firm. However, families are not individuals but rather a system of relationships among family members. In such a context, misunderstandings in communication, anachronistic mentalities and different value systems can block the intergenerational transmission of RFO. Consequently, the responsibility of the family towards the FF’s stakeholders may be damaged and the firm’s socially (...) responsible behaviour hindered. This paper aims to identify how RFO is transferred across generations and to ascertain the role that family social capital plays in preserving the transmission of RFO from generation to generation. Our research is based on three in-depth case studies of Mexican family-owned small- and medium-sized enterprises. First, the paper identifies and contrasts a set of FSC-specific factors and problems which play a relevant role in the transmission of RFO while recognizing the influence of the mutually reinforcing dynamics of FSC dimensions. Secondly, the family’s honourableness :751–767, 2013) is identified as a key driver for sustaining the transmission of RFO. Finally, the paper identifies RFO institutionalization required to face the intrinsic problems of transmitting RFO in growing families. (shrink)

Cause-related marketing has risen to become a popular strategy to increase business value through profit-motivated giving. Despite the growing number of articles published in the last decade, no comprehensive analysis of the most discussed constructs of cause-related marketing is available. This paper uses an advanced Text Mining methodology to conduct a comprehensive analysis of 246 articles published in 40 different journals between 1988 and 2013 on the subject of cause-related marketing. Text Mining also allows quantitative analyses to be performed on (...) the literature. For instance, it is shown that the most prominent long-term topics discussed since 1988 on the subject are “brand-cause fit”, “law and Ethics”, and “corporate and social identification”, while the most actively discussed topic presently is “sectors raising social taboos and moral debates”. The paper has two goals: first, it introduces the technique of CTM to the Marketing area, illustrating how Text Mining may guide, simplify, and enhance review processes while providing objective building blocks to be used in a review; second, it applies CTM to the C-RM field, uncovering and summarizing the most discussed topics. Mining text, however, is not aimed at replacing all subjective decisions that must be taken as part of literature review methodologies. (shrink)