The debate about the appropriate standards for upstream corporate social responsibility of multinational corporations has been on the public and academic agenda for some three decades. The debate originally focused narrowly on “contract responsibility” of MNCs for monitoring of upstream contractors for “sweatshop” working conditions violating employee rights. The authors argue that the MNC upstream responsibility debate has shifted qualitatively over time to “full producer responsibility” involving an expansion from “contract responsibility” in three distinct dimensions. First, there is an expansion (...) of scope from working conditions to human rights and social and environmental impacts broadly defined. Second, there is expansion in depth of this broader responsibility to the whole upstream supply chain without regard to contracting status. Upstream responsibility now includes all suppliers, including direct contractors and the chain of suppliers to such contractors. Finally, the change in CSR scope and depth has led to an evolution of CSR management practice. (shrink)

Due to the lack of a standard definition for the concept of corporate social responsibility, various discourse communities have assigned different meanings to it. Based on the intermedia agenda setting theory, this study examines the extent to which CSR-related news releases published by the two electricity providers in Hong Kong have influenced press coverage over a 6-year period between 2006 and 2011. A total of 202 news releases and 1,045 news articles were content-analyzed based on the following mutually exclusive categories (...) of CSR-related news events: operations, education, community, products and services, recognition, environment, and donations and sponsorships. This study found that operations-related and products and services-related news releases were more likely to be reported in the press. Recognition-related news releases were the least likely to be reported. Based on the findings, this study posits that two criteria would determine whether a CSR-related news release is likely to be covered in the press: the extent to which the news events are relevant to the core operations of the corporations and the extent to which the news events make an impact on society. (shrink)

This paper examines the impact on firm value created by investor reaction to same day news of corporate social responsibility and corporate social irresponsibility activities. First, using trading volume, the authors establish that the perceived value of moral capital generated by news involving institutional stakeholders is less clear to investors than that of the news involving technical stakeholders. Subsequently, the authors analyze abnormal returns from 565 unique firm events—each comprising at least one positive and one negative stakeholder news item. Using (...) signaling theory, the authors demonstrate that news of the number of CSR activities involving institutional groups counteracts the effects of same day CSiR news in an inverted U-shaped fashion. In contrast, they find that news of the number of CSR activities involving technical groups mitigates the effects of same day CSiR news in a U-shaped fashion. (shrink)

This research documents consumers’ potential to monitor corporations’ License to Operate through their consumption responses to corporate social responsibility failures. The premise is that the type of social contracts or standards in place may determine how consumers, through their individual and collective behaviors, can play a direct role in influencing corporate behavior, when corporations fail to meet social responsibility standards. An experiment conducted with a large sample of consumers in the United States shows that consumers respond differently to a company’s (...) failure in its social responsibilities depending on whether the violated standard is a government mandate or a voluntary commitment and depending on the consumers’ own environmental consciousness. The findings highlight the potential power of individual consumers and consumer collectives in narrowing the governance gaps relative to social and environmental issues and reducing the likelihood of CSR failures. (shrink)

In this paper, the process for firms to decide whether or not to invest in corporate social responsibility is treated from a real option perspective. We extend the Husted framework with an important extra parameter that allows us to understand the timing of CSR investment and explain why some companies drag their feet over CSR investments. Our model explicitly allows for the impact of the opportunity cost of delaying the CSR investment decision, providing firms with tools to determine the optimal (...) moment of exercising the CSR investment option. We illustrate our timing model through a case study and analyze governmental support strategies for CSR from a real options perspective. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In 2010,Business Ethics Quarterlypublished ten articles that considered the potential contributions to business ethics research arising from recent scholarship in a variety of philosophical and social scientific fields (strategic management, political philosophy, restorative justice, international business, legal studies, ethical theory, ethical leadership studies, organization theory, marketing, and corporate governance and finance). Here we offer short responses to those articles by members ofBusiness Ethics Quarterly’s editorial board and editorial team.

The literature is replete with articles emphasizing the importance of corporate social responsibility. However, few, if any, of these articles discuss the role of the consumer in achieving corporate social responsibility. It is the premise of the current paper that it may be difficult for corporate social responsibility to succeed without the assistance of consumers. That is, for corporate social responsibility to flourish, it needs to be accompanied by consumer social responsibility. This paper examines this proposition, makes the distinction between (...) consumer ethics and CnSR, and presents research in these two expanding areas of inquiry, examining literature which supports the role of CnSR in complementing corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

Corporate Reputation (CR) is essential to value generation and is co-created between a company and its stakeholders, including supply chain actors. Consequently, CR is a critical and valuable resource that should be managed carefully along supply chains. However, the current CR literature is fragmented, and a general definition of CR is elusive. Besides, the academic CR debate largely lacks a supply chain perspective. This is not surprising, as it is very difficult to collect reliable data along supply chains. When supply (...) chains span the globe, data collection is especially challenging, as the chain consists of multiple suppliers and subcontractors, positioned at different tier levels. Recognizing this, the paper examines firstly the current state of CR research through a systematic literature review from a business perspective. The review is combined with a bibliometric mapping approach to show the most influential research clusters, representative of CR research streams and their contributors. This process highlights that the connection between CR and supply chain issues represents a major research gap. Consequently, this paper introduces a research agenda connecting these the two traditionally separated research fields. (shrink)

The terminology employed to explore consumption ethics, the counterpart to business ethics, is increasingly varied not least because consumption has become a central discourse and area of investigation across disciplines. Rather than assuming interchangeability, we argue that these differences signify divergent understandings and contextual nuances and should, therefore, inform future writing and understanding in this area. Accordingly, this article advances consumer ethics scholarship through a systematic review of the current literature that identifies key areas of convergence and contradiction. We then (...) present the articles in this Journal of Business Ethics Symposium and analyse how these articles fit within the interdisciplinary themes. Subsequently, we develop a transdisciplinary theoretical framework that encapsulates the complexity and contextual nature of consumption ethics. We conclude by outlining how genuinely transdisciplinary research into the intersection of ethics with consumption may develop. (shrink)

The traditional understanding of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has largely been focused on its downstream performance implications, particularly its associations with firms’ customer market metrics such as customer loyalty, customer satisfaction and customer co-creation as well as financial ones such as firm value, return on assets etc. However, given the close relationship between CSR and marketing that literature has identified, it is surprising that the relationship between a focal upstream construct, i.e. the marketing function’s power within a firm and the (...) firm’s propensity toward CSR has not been addressed in the literature. Examining the link between marketing’s power (MP) in a firm’s top management team (TMT) and firm CSR levels, we investigate how this fundamental TMT configuration, i.e. the distribution of marketing power in the TMT, motivates the firm’s social endeavors. Further, we formulate this relationship in a contingency-based model that incorporates the moderating effects of firm size, firm age, service intensity, and resource slack across 1569 firms operating in 63 industries. In addition to their effect on CSR, this study shows how MP in TMT may influence corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) as well as CSR capability after controlling for industry type. The inclusion on these additional dimensions of CSR (CSI and CSR capability) complements our analyses of the effect that MP has on CSR. The research contributes to a deeper understanding of CSR’s fundamental corporate determinants as well as identifies the essential role of the marketing function in firms’ CSR strategy. In this process, it yields useful implications for multiple streams of theory as well as for business practices. (shrink)

This paper assesses the relationship between corporate social responsibility and downside equity tail risk, a field of research that is underdeveloped at this moment. Using global equities data over the period of January 2003 to December 2011, inclusive, the downside tail risk of each company is estimated using techniques of extreme value theory and CSR is approached using stakeholder theory. Our findings show a significant relationship between certain aspects of CSR and downside tail risk. The nature of the relationship differs (...) across region, stakeholder and time. Furthermore, the relationships we found are sequential, which makes a causal link between CSR and tail risk plausible. (shrink)