Historic inequities exacerbated by COVID-19 and spotlighted by social justice movements like Black Lives Matter have reinforced the necessity and urgency for societies and organizations to bring healing into focus. However, few integrated models exist within management and organization scholarship to guide practice. In response, our focus aims to unpack how organizations can become healing spaces. This paper offers a holistic definition of healing as the foundation for a new conceptual model of organizations as healing spaces. Drawing upon literature from (...) clinical psychology, social psychology, and political science, we identify four perspectives that address healing in organizational contexts: restorative justice, posttraumatic growth, relational cultural theory, and dignity. These healing modalities represent prominent views of how healing can be achieved at the individual, dyadic, organizational, and societal levels. Synthesizing and building on these perspectives, we develop a typology that illustrates three ways organizations can function as healing spaces — Emergent, Endeavoring, and Exemplifying — representing a range of opportunities for how organizations can better respond to suffering. These spaces of healing are differentiated across seven dimensions, including source of harm, recipients of healing, facilitators of healing, focus of healing, length and strength of organizational attention, process of healing, and activators or enablers of healing. This research contributes to organizational healing research and to nascent social justice discussions in the management literature by exploring a range of opportunities for how organizations can better respond to suffering and substantively contribute to remedying harm from systematic bias against marginalized groups via healing. (shrink)

This research investigates various firm motives for practicing corporate social responsibility (CSR). More precisely, it examines whether a firm's primary motive for undertaking CSR is related to the type of actions performed. Such exploratory research is overdue following more than 40 years of scholarly contention on the financial rewards of doing (and looking) good. By uncovering and measuring specific aspects of CSR, I offer an initial understanding of interactions within firm CSR operations. Theory on types of CSR have surfaced, yet (...) empirical studies are few. In this research, I address this disparity by using original quantitative measures of both motive and type. The outcomes of this investigation challenge certain extant notions of CSR, while introducing a measure of objectivity in some long‐standing debates among scholars and corporate stakeholders. (shrink)

Applying media effects and attributions to news coverage of corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues, this content analysis examines recent CSR news in the United States. Results showed that the news media presented CSR activities positively with episodic events, offering proactive solutions to social problems, particularly when the media attributed CSR to corporate motives for social benefits. Opposing results were detected when the media inferred corporations’ business motives from CSR activities. Further, the general non-business media favorably described CSR cases with social (...) motives and episodic events, whereas the business-specific media critically portrayed business motives and thematic issues behind CSR activities. Study implications are discussed. (shrink)