Voluntary management standards for social and environmental performance ideally help to define and improve firms’ related capabilities. These standards, however, have largely failed to improve such performance as intended. Over-emphasis on institutional factors leading to adoption of these standards has neglected the role of firms’ existing capabilities. External pressures can drive firms to adopt standards more than their technical capacity to employ them. This can lead to problems of “fit” between institutional requirements and a firm’s existing capabilities . We describe (...) a conceptual model that considers the impact of an interaction between a firm’s institutional requirements and its existing capabilities on standards failure. We suggest solutions that align institutional requirements to appropriate governance forms as a means to improve standards success. We contribute to theory by describing the role of firms’ internal capabilities to the success of voluntary management standards and the reliability of self-regulation generally. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop an ethical framework for the marketing of corporate social responsibility. Methods The approach is a conceptual one based on virtue ethics and on the corporate identity literature. Furthermore, empirical research results are used to describe the opportunities and pitfalls of using marketing communication tools in the strategy of building a virtuous corporate brand. Results/conclusions An ethical framework that addresses the paradoxical relation between the consequentialist perspective many proponents of the marketing of (...) CSR adopt, and ethical perspectives which criticize an exclusive profit-oriented approach to CSR. Furthermore, three CSR strategies in relation to the marketing of CSR are discussed. For each CSR strategy it is explored how a corporation could avoid falling into the promise/performance gap. (shrink)

This paper offers the first large-scale empirical study of organizational virtue as perceived by both internal and external stakeholders and of the links between these virtues and organizational outcomes such as identification, satisfaction, and distinctiveness. It takes a strategic approach to virtue ethics, one that differs from a more traditional Aristotelian concept of virtue and from Alasdair MacIntyre’s manner of distinguishing between internal and external goods. The literature review compares three different perspectives on the empirical study of organizational virtues, taken (...) by virtue theorists, POS scholars, and strategy scholars. The main study describes an empirical research undertaking that involved the analysis of 2548 usable questionnaires administered to employees and customers of seven organizations in the U.K. A structural equation model was used to test the linkages of the six dimensions of organizational virtue to satisfaction, identification, and distinctiveness. All the links were significant, with the strongest between virtue and identification. For employees, identification was driven most significantly by integrity, whereas customers’ identification was principally influenced by empathy. The empirical finding also sounds an alarm bell to the global firms who focus on creating a differentiated image based on CSR in the hope that it will lead to satisfaction. The results lead to a discussion of how companies might build favorable stakeholder perceptions of key dimensions of virtue that most shape their identification and differentiation in the marketplace. (shrink)

Building on earlier work on the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and a firm’s financial performance, this integrative empirical study supports the theoretical argument that the higher a firm’s CSP the lower its financial risk. Specifically, the relationship between CSP and risk appears to be one of reciprocal causality, because prior CSP is negatively related to subsequent financial risk, and prior financial risk is negatively related to subsequent CSP. Additionally, CSP is more strongly correlated with measures of market risk (...) than measures of accounting risk. Of all CSP measures, reputation for social responsibility appears to be the most important one in terms of its risk implications. (shrink)