Firms have traditionally responded to environmental violations by increasing information disclosure and/or communication to manage stakeholder perceptions. As such, these approaches may be symbolic in nature, with no genuine intention to improve the environment. We draw from restorative justice grounded in stakeholder theory and explore a relatively new approach in the form of supplemental environmental projects aimed at restoring the environment, and empirically examine the role of corporate governance in firms’ decisions to undertake reparative actions. Using environmental violations and SEPs (...) data from the US Environmental Protection Agency between 2002 and 2015, we find that firms with smaller boards are more likely to undertake SEPs. We also find that firms with higher board independence and CEO duality undertake SEPs more frequently; however, board gender diversity and the existence of a sustainability committee appear to have no impacts. These results are robust to propensity score matching and an alternative data source. We extend the scope of stakeholder theory by emphasizing a new approach—restorative justice—by which corporations can repair damaged relationships and also improve the environment. We also contribute to corporate governance and environmentalism literature by identifying governance structures that promote environmental restorative justice. Thus, our study will inform different stakeholders, including regulators, shareholders, and boards of directors, and will open new avenues for business ethics scholarship. (shrink)

After the approval of a code of ethics, the creation of a permanent board‐level ethics committee is the next step in the institutionalization of business ethics. This study explores how the board's structure and demographic characteristics explain the decision to form an ethics committee. The analysis is based on the constituents of the Standard and Poor's Europe 350 index. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that ethics committees are more likely to be found in firms with a lower presence of (...) executive directors and of directors holding MBA degrees. However, we also observe that boards chaired by executive directors seem to favor the creation of an ethics committee. Additionally, as we had anticipated, firms with stronger agency conflicts seem to be more willing to create committees. The analysis conducted with segmented samples reveals that the model has greater explanatory power when applied to firms from common‐law and French civil‐law countries than when applied to firms from the German–Scandinavian civil‐law area. Finally, our results indicate that a firm's country of origin is a more influential factor in explaining the decision to create an ethics committee than the industry to which it belongs or even the magnitude of its agency conflicts. (shrink)

The evidence for a positive, direct link between the representation of women on boards of directors and financial performance is tenuous. Given the importance of the gender diversity–financial performance debate, researchers are left to examine how, if at all, the two are linked. The present study takes the position that the link is indirect. Specifically, following stakeholder theory, an argument is made that women on boards’ attunement to stakeholder interests leads them to influence firms’ prosocial actions, which results in higher (...) levels of corporate social responsibility. In turn, following the extant literature, CSR is expected to be positively linked to financial performance. Relying on a sample of Australia’s largest publicly traded firms, the results demonstrate that women on boards are linked to CSR and that CSR is linked to financial performance. However, in the mediation test, CSR appears to fully mediate the link between women on boards and financial performance. The results are discussed along with limitations and future research directions. (shrink)

Social networking sites have challenged ethical issues about users’ information security and privacy. SNS users are concerned about their privacy and need to control the information they share and its use. This paper examines the security of SNS by taking a look at the influence of users’ perceived control of information over their information-sharing behaviors. Employing an empirical study, this paper demonstrates the importance of perceived control in SNS users’ information-sharing behaviors. Specifically, perceived control has been found to be negatively (...) related to perceived privacy risk and attitude toward information sharing, which in turn has an impact on their information-sharing behaviors. In addition, gender has been shown to be an important factor that moderates the influences of both perceived control and perceived privacy risk on SNS users’ attitudes toward information sharing. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

A questionnaire study was performed among Swedish organic livestock farmers to determine their view of animal welfare and other ethical issues in animal production. The questionnaire was sent to 56.5% of the target group and the response rate was 75.6%. A principal components analysis (exploratory factor analysis) was performed to get a more manageable data set. A matrix of intercorrelations between all pairs of factors was computed. The factors were then entered into a series of multiple regression models to explain (...) five dependent variables. Respondents were well educated and had long experience of farming. 81% were full-time farmers. They generally had a very positive attitude towards organic animal husbandry. They considered allowing animals their natural behavior a central aim, which is in accordance with organic philosophy. Farmers tended to be less approving of concepts like animal rights, dignity, and intrinsic value. When analyzing correlations between the factors, two groups of farmers emerged that were only partially correlated, representing different attitudes and behavioral dispositions. These may be interpreted as two subpopulations of organic livestock farmers in Sweden: those who saw organic farming as a lifestyle (``pioneer attitude'''') and entrepreneurs, who considered making money and new challenges more important. Their view of animal welfare differed. While the pioneers considered natural behavior a key issue, this was less important to the entrepreneurs, who also had a more approving attitude towards invasive operations such as castration and were more critical of the organic standards. (shrink)

Identifying the determinants of human behavior is useful to adjust interventions and lead the civil society toward a stronger commitment to climate change mitigation and adaptation objectives, achieving greater support for successfully implementing environmental policies. Existing research has largely focused on case studies of pro-environmental behaviors in developed economies but there is very little evidence for developing countries. This study provides estimations of the effect of internal factors, such as sociodemographic variables, and four psychological dimensions on PEBs. Data were obtained (...) through a survey applied with future decision makers – university students – from Colombia and Nicaragua. Indices were generated for PEBs and the psychological dimensions using z-scores and Principal Component Analysis. Partial correlations were evaluated through the Ordinary Least Squares method. Our results suggest that, in order to reach the planned emission reduction targets, policy approaches should more strongly focus on educating and motivating citizens and prepare them for contributing to the environmental cause, as well as provide individual solutions to combat CC, rather than providing only information on its causes and consequences. (shrink)

Not much attention has been paid to gender in environmental management and decision-making. This article explores how a gender dimension can contribute to the environmental debate by means of a comparative study of three environmental grassroots organisations in the North of Catalonia. The study shows that gender is significant for distinguishing different priorities between women and men in local conflicts and in environmental interests in general. The analysis of unequal power relations between genders in grassroots organisations leads us to discuss (...) how women have fewer opportunities to influence the environmental debate and to advance their ideas. The concluding thoughts stress the need for developing a gender dimension in environmental management and decision-making, considering the opportunities that are presented by emerging governance practices, and particularly by participatory processes. (shrink)

Consumers often intend to create a socially responsible identity by consuming ethically. Observers, however, do not limit their inferences to the specific identity consumers intend to project. To illustrate, we examine how observers make inferences about consumers on the basis of their ethical consumption. Across four studies we find that, in addition to being viewed as ethical, consumers are viewed as less masculine and more feminine when they consume ethical products. We also identify two boundary conditions to this effect, including (...) the use of self-benefit/other-benefit advertising appeals and the use of descriptive norms to establish gender appropriate behavior. We finally examine how consumers resolve the conflict of creating ethical and gender-congruent identities. We find that when male consumers are in the presence of observers of the opposite sex, they are more likely to prioritize ethical identity even when it threatens their gender orientation. (shrink)

A growing body of work suggests that the presence of women and of independent directors on boards of directors is associated with higher corporate environmental performance. However, the mechanisms linking board composition to corporate environmental performance are not well understood. This study proposes and empirically tests the mediating role of sustainability-themed alliances in the relationship between board composition and corporate environmental performance. Using the population of public oil and gas firms in the United States as the sample, the study relies (...) on renewable energy alliances to measure sustainability-themed alliances and longitudinally analyzes lagged data for independent and control variables. The study found that the higher the representation of women on a firm’s board, the more likely the firm is to form sustainability-themed alliances, and the higher the representation of independent directors on a firm’s board, the more likely the firm is to form sustainability-themed alliances. Such alliances, in turn, positively contribute to corporate environmental performance. This paper discusses the study’s contributions to the board composition-social performance literature. (shrink)

Recent years have featured a leap in academic and public interest in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities and related corporate reporting. Two main themes in this literature are the exploration of management incentives to engage in and disclose this information, and of the use and value of this information to market participants. We extend the second theme by examining the interest that specific investor classes have in the use of CSR information. We rely on feminist intersectionality, which suggests that gender (...) intersects with other identities to yield different values, experiences, and opportunities that can lead to gender-based preferences for CSR information. Based upon a survey of 750 US-based retail investors, we find that female retail investors have a greater interest in the use of CSR information, relative to male retail investors. Women express greater anticipated future demand for this information than do men. Further, the magnitude of the increase from current use to anticipated future demand is greater for women than men. Age is a significant modifying factor in that the discrepancy between women of any age and older men is greater than that between women and younger men. Finally, women also exhibit greater demand for streamlining of the information flow, consistent with pressures induced by time poverty. It appears that current disclosure practices provide a less than optimal match with the needs of the information consumers that are primarily interested in using this information. This mismatch may result in a systematic disenfranchisement of female investing classes which suggests an ethical need to level the playing field. (shrink)

This study integrates the motivating and challenging elements impacting on the implementation of organic farming practice in Iran. Analysis was based on the results of two surveys; one from organic farmers to determine motivating factors and the other from experts in organic farming to identify challenging factors. These surveys incorporated a gender perspective to enable gender comparison and analysis of the results presents a practical model to support program developers in Iranian organic agriculture. Gender comparison indicated that attitudes among farmers (...) to organic agriculture were slightly variable according to gender; while experts’ attitudes to organic agriculture remained constant and were not influenced by gender. The practical model ranked motivating factors as husbandry, financial, health-quality of life, general and personal; and challenging factors as financial, legal, educational, and technical. Finally, several suggestions are made according to these findings. (shrink)

This study replicates Paul, Zalka, Downes, Perry, and Friday’s scale to measure U.S. consumer sensitivity to corporate social performance (CSP) in another sample—namely, that of Dutch consumers. In addition, theories on the effects of sociodemographic variables on environmental concern have been applied to investigate the influence of individual consumer characteristics on the sensitivity to CSP. It was found that the Consumer Sensitivity Scale to CSP is a reliable one, and it also seems applicable to West European countries. For Dutch consumers, (...) CSP serves more as a hygiene factor—it should be at a minimum acceptable level (a bottom line)—than as a motivator to buy a product. Having a left-wing political orientation, a higher level of education, being female, and being older are consumer characteristics that all have a positive influence on sensitivity to CSP. Surprisingly, household income did not influence this. (shrink)

Today's societies are confronted by a daily biodiversity loss, which will increase in the face of climate change and environmental pollution. Biodiversity loss is a particularly severe problem in so-called biodiversity hotspots. Ecuador is an example of a country that hosts two different biodiversity hotspots. Human behavior - in developing as well as in industrial countries such as Germany - must be considered as one of the most important direct and indirect drivers of this global trend and thus plays a (...) crucial role in environmentalism and biodiversity conservation. Nature relatedness and environmental concern have been identified as important environmental psychological factors related to people's pro-environmental behavior. However, the human-nature relationship depends on a variety of other factors, such as values, gender, nationality, qualities of environmental concern and time spent in nature. This study compared young people from Ecuador and Germany with regard to their nature relatedness and environmental concern. Furthermore, the role of the aforementioned factors was investigated. In total, we surveyed 2,173 high school students from Germany (Mage = 14.56 years, SD = 1.45; female: 55.1%) and 451 high school students from Ecuador (Mage = 14.63 years, SD = 1.77; female: 55.3%). We found that young Ecuadorians were more related to nature than young people from Germany. Additionally, we found country-specific differences in the structure of environmental concern and in the role of gender in the explanation of biospheric environmental concern and nature relatedness. In both samples, the self-transcendence value cluster was a significant positive predictor for biospheric environmental concern and nature relatedness. Time spent in nature was a significant positive predictor for nature relatedness in both samples. The results are an empirical basis for the assumption of culture-specific differences in human-nature relationships. (shrink)