Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing humanity and has become an area of growing focus in Business & Society. Looking back and reviewing climate change discussion within this journal highlights the importance of time and space in addressing the climate crisis. Looking forward, we extend existing research by theorizing and politicizing the co-implication of time and space through the concept of “space-time.” To illustrate this, we employ the logical structure of “the trace” to advance business and (...) society scholarship on climate change by shifting the focus to a place-bound emphasis on climate impacts and directing scholarship toward climate change’s temporal markers and material effects. By operationalizing “the trace,” we contribute to Business & Society debates in three ways: reimagining complex stakeholder relations, advancing a performative understanding of climate risk, and foregrounding planetary systems and the physical environment. (shrink)

AbstractClimate change is a complex, multilevel challenge with implications of failure unimaginable for current and future generations. However, despite the Paris Agreement supporting the imperative for action in an atmosphere of scientific consensus, organisations are failing to take the decisive action required. We argue that this lack of organisational action needs to be addressed by examining the cognitive foundations of managerial decisions on climate change and sustainability. A systematic review of research on cognition, sensemaking and managerial interpretation where it is (...) linked to climate change or sustainability is presented within this article. The results detail a multilevel analysis highlighting key themes and the core concepts from the literature including factors shaping the cognitive process, to elucidate reasons for inaction and potential for promoting change. Through this research, an integrated model is presented demonstrating the interaction of factors, cognitive processes and outcomes. Based on this analysis, potential reasons for inaction are proposed and countered by three potential solutions linked to leadership, social norms and structural reform. (shrink)

This study examines whether private information exchange between institutional investors and public companies in engagement dialogs on sustainability issues improves the publicly disclosed measurements of the target company’s financial and non-financial performance and transparency. It uses a unique dataset containing 326 private reports related to environmental, social, and anti-corruption recommendations to address material incidents among publicly traded MSCI World Index portfolio companies of Nordic institutional investors. The results indicate that target companies appear to have similar values with matched companies on (...) sustainability performance and transparency ratings in the 3 years following the initiation of private reporting. Unexpected sustainability incidents are subsequently reflected in the next year’s fall in the market value of target companies relative to MSCI World Index. This paper provides empirical evidence for the legitimacy-based provision of private sustainability information used in a larger disclosure system of public companies. (shrink)

Shareholder activists increasingly pressure corporations on social policy issues; yet, extant research provides little understanding of who these activists are and how they choose their corporate targets. In this article, we adopt an activist-centered approach and rely on hybrid organizational identity theory to determine, in a two-phase analysis, how shareholder activists define their economic and social identities and whether these identities are associated with specific target characteristics and tactical strategies. Our findings form the premise of a typology of institutional shareholder (...) activists that is empirically derived and takes into account the wide range of hybrid organizational identities that shareholders exhibit. With a sample of 735 social policy shareholder proposals filed by 104 institutional shareholders in the 2009-2010 period, our study presents one of the first empirical tests examining the heterogeneity of identities within the broad stakeholder category of “social shareholder activists.” Our empirical evidence demonstrates that these shareholders’ mix of economic and social identities is systematically related to their targets’ characteristics and tactical strategies. The implications of our new typology for research on shareholder activism and the value of our findings for managers conclude this article. (shrink)

Facing an increasing number and variety of issues with social salience, firms must determine how to engage with issues that likely have a significant impact on them. Integrating issues management and salience theories, the authors find that firms engage with socially contested issues—where there is a high degree of societal disagreement—in a different manner from issues that have social consensus, or high agreement. Examining social issue resolutions filed by shareholders from 1997 to 2009, the study finds that socially contested issues, (...) as well as those issues with social consensus, are both likely to result in engagement by the firm. For social issues with consensus, a firm is more likely to opt for a low level of shareholder engagement whereas resolutions regarding contested issues lead to engaging shareholders at a higher level. These findings shed new light on the IM and issue salience literature streams that have suggested firms will react differently to these types of issues, even while they remain largely untested. Finally, firms become less engaged with perennial issues over time. rather than more, providing new guidance to researchers, shareholder activists, and firms alike. To the authors’ knowledge, such fined-grained insight into expected levels of firm engagement with social issue salience has not been put forth previously. (shrink)

We review articles about corporate political activity published in Business & Society since its beginnings 60 years ago and in a set of other leading management journals over the past decade. We present evidence that most studies of CPA use the political markets’ perspective. Under the premise that the contemporary political environment has changed significantly since the inception of the political markets’ perspective, our review asks two interconnected questions. First, to what degree have changes in the political environment challenged the (...) ability of the political markets’ perspective to understand the pillars of politics: issues, institutions, interests, and information? Second, to what degree have CPA scholars augmented or diversified their theoretical arguments to accommodate these changes in the political environment? We document the CPA literature across these dimensions and questions and note that many scholars are already adopting other theories side by side with the political markets’ perspective. (shrink)