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  1. Compound Conflicts of Interest in the US Proxy System.Cynthia E. Clark & Harry J. Van Buren - 2013 - Journal of Business Ethics 116 (2):355-371.
    The current proxy voting system in the United States has become the subject of considerable controversy. Because institutional investment managers have the authority to vote their clients’ proxies, they have a fiduciary obligation to those clients. Frequently, in an attempt to fulfill that obligation, these institutional investors employ proxy advisory services to manage the thousands of votes they must cast. However, many proxy advisory services have conflicts of interest that inhibit their utility to those seeking to discharge their fiduciary duties. (...)
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  • Towards a Model of Corporate and Social Stakeholder Engagement: Analyzing the Relations Between a French Mutual Bank and Its Members. [REVIEW]Carine Girard & André Sobczak - 2012 - Journal of Business Ethics 107 (2):215-225.
    The aim of this article is to develop a new classification of stakeholders based on the concept of corporate and social engagement. Engagement is analyzed as an organizational learning process between the managers of an organization and its stakeholders. It is a necessary condition to improve the organization’s impact on its economic, social, and natural environment. Applied to the membership of a French mutual bank in order to identify the members’ varying levels of engagement, this new mapping technique may help (...)
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  • Socially Responsible Investment and Fiduciary Duty: Putting the Freshfields Report into Perspective.Joakim Sandberg - 2011 - Journal of Business Ethics 101 (1):143-162.
    A critical issue for the future growth and impact of socially responsible investment (SRI) is whether institutional investors are legally permitted to engage in it – in particular whether it is compatible with the fiduciary duties of trustees. An ambitious report from the United Nations Environment Programme’s Finance Initiative (UNEP FI), commonly referred to as the ‘Freshfields report’, has recently given rise to considerable optimism on this issue among proponents of SRI. The present article puts the arguments of the Freshfields (...)
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  • The Contingent Role of Conflict: Deliberative Interaction and Disagreement in Shareholder Engagement.Irene Beccarini, Daniel Beunza, Fabrizio Ferraro & Andreas G. F. Hoepner - forthcoming - Business Ethics Quarterly:1-41.
    How is the tension between conflict and deliberation resolved in shareholder engagement? We address this question by studying shareholder engagement as a deliberative process with three stages: establishing dialogue, solution development, and solution implementation. We theorize that two interactionist mechanisms, deliberative interaction and the voicing of disagreement, play different roles at different stages of the process. We test our hypotheses with a proprietary database of 169 environmental, social, and governance engagements with US public companies over 2007–12. We find that while (...)
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  • The Public Effect of Private Sustainability Reporting: Evidence from Incident-Based Engagement Strategy.Natalia Semenova - 2021 - Journal of Business Ethics 182 (2):559-572.
    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 (...)
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  • Shareholder Engagement on Environmental, Social, and Governance Performance.Tamas Barko, Martijn Cremers & Luc Renneboog - 2022 - Journal of Business Ethics 180 (2):777-812.
    We study behind-the-scenes investor activism promoting environmental, social, and governance improvements by means of a proprietary dataset of a large international, socially responsible activist fund. We examine the activist’s target selection, forms of engagement, impact on ESG performance, drivers of success, and effects on the targets’ operations and value creation. Target firms are typically large and visible, perform well, and have high liquidity and low ESG performance. Engagement induces ESG rating adjustments: firms with poor ex ante ESG ratings experience a (...)
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  • Religion as a Macro Social Force Affecting Business: Concepts, Questions, and Future Research.Raza Mir, Jawad Syed & Harry J. Van Buren - 2020 - Business and Society 59 (5):799-822.
    Religion has been in general neglected or even seen as a taboo subject in organizational research and management practice. This is a glaring omission in the business and society and business ethics literatures. As a source of moral norms and beliefs, religion has historically played a significant role in the vast majority of societies and continues to remain relevant in almost every society. More broadly, expectations for responsible business behavior are informed by regional, national, or indigenous cultures, which in many (...)
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  • Firm Engagement and Social Issue Salience, Consensus, and Contestation.Jennifer J. Griffin, Andrew P. Bryant & Cynthia E. Clark - 2017 - Business and Society 56 (8):1136-1168.
    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, (...)
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  • Engaging Ethically: A Discourse Ethics Perspective on Social Shareholder Engagement.Jennifer Goodman & Daniel Arenas - 2015 - Business Ethics Quarterly 25 (2):163-189.
    ABSTRACT:The primacy of shareholder demands in the traditional theory of the firm has typically excluded marginalised stakeholder voices. However, shareholders involved in social shareholder engagement (SSE) purport to bring these voices into corporate decision-making. In response to ethical concerns about the legitimacy of SSE, we use the lens of discourse ethics to provide a normative analysis at both action and constitutional levels. By specifying three normative questions, we extend the analysis of SSE to identify a political role for shareholders in (...)
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  • Carrot and Stick? The Role of Financial Market Intermediaries in Corporate Social Performance.Wendy Chapple & Rieneke Slager - 2016 - Business and Society 55 (3):398-426.
    This article examines the role of intermediaries in financial markets in fostering corporate sustainability. Responsible investment indices have been primarily identified as intermediaries that provide information regarding corporate social performance for investors and other stakeholders. The authors argue that the role of these intermediaries is not confined solely to information provision, but they may also incentivize high levels of CSP through mechanisms such as exclusion threats, signaling, and engagement. The authors rely on unique access to the archives of the FTSE4Good (...)
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  • Advisory Governance Policy, Shareholder Voice, and Board Responsiveness: The Case of Majority Vote in Director Elections.Latifa A. Albader, Jonathan Bundy & Christine Shropshire - 2023 - Business and Society 62 (2):285-321.
    This study investigates how adoption of advisory governance policy encourages firms to become more responsive to their shareholders over time. Although shareholder activism is costly and often viewed as unable to drive meaningful change, we identify increasing shareholder voice as an underlying mechanism to explain how advisory policy adoption ultimately reshapes board–shareholder relations. Drawing on signaling theory and behavioral views of board–shareholder dynamics, we test our predictions following the broad shift in corporate board voting policies from plurality to majority vote (...)
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  • Corporate Responses to Shareholder Activists: Considering the Dialogue Alternative.Kathleen Rehbein, Jeanne M. Logsdon & Harry J. Van Buren - 2013 - Journal of Business Ethics 112 (1):137-154.
    This empirical study examines corporate responses to activist shareholder groups filing social-policy shareholder resolutions. Using resource dependency theory as our conceptual framing, we identify some of the drivers of corporate responses to shareholder activists. This study departs from previous studies by including a fourth possible corporate response, engaging in dialogue. Dialogue, an alternative to shareholder resolutions filed by activists, is a process in which corporations and activist shareholder groups mutually agree to engage in ongoing negotiations to deal with social issues. (...)
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  • Doing the Right Thing? The Voting Power Effect and Institutional Shareholder Voting.Efrat Dressler & Yevgeny Mugerman - 2023 - Journal of Business Ethics 183 (4):1089-1112.
    Through a combination of a controlled experiment and a survey, we examine the effect of voting power on shareholders’ voting behavior at general meetings. To avoid a selection bias, common in archival voting data, we exogenously manipulate shareholders’ power to affect the outcome. Our findings suggest that, when it comes to corporate decisions involving conflicts of interest, voting power nudges shareholders to oppose management and to choose the “right” alternative, that is, vote against a proposal which _prima facie_ does not (...)
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  • Social Shareholder Engagement: The Dynamics of Voice and Exit. [REVIEW]Jennifer Goodman, Céline Louche, Katinka C. van Cranenburgh & Daniel Arenas - 2014 - Journal of Business Ethics 125 (2):1-18.
    Investors concerned about the social and environmental impact of the companies they invest in are increasingly choosing to use voice over exit as a strategy. This article addresses the question of how and why the voice and exit options (Hirschman 1970) are used in social shareholder engagement (SSE) by religious organisations. Using an inductive case study approach, we examine seven engagements by three religious organisations considered to be at the forefront of SSE. We analyse the full engagement process rather than (...)
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  • Reactivity to Sustainability Metrics: A Configurational Study of Motivation and Capacity.Rieneke Slager, Jean-Pascal Gond & Donal Crilly - 2021 - Business Ethics Quarterly 31 (2):275-307.
    Previous research on reactivity—defined as changing organizational behaviour to better conform to the criteria of measurement in response to being measured—has found significant variation in company responses toward sustainability metrics. We propose that reactivity is driven by dialogue, motivation, and capacity in a configurational way. Empirically, we use fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to analyze company responses to the sustainability index FTSE4Good. We find evidence of complementary and substitute effects between motivation and capacity. Based on these effects, we develop a (...)
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  • Stakeholder Capability Enhancement as a Path to Promote Human Dignity and Cooperative Advantage.Michelle K. Westermann-Behaylo, Harry J. Van Buren & Shawn L. Berman - 2016 - Business Ethics Quarterly 26 (4):529-555.
    ABSTRACT:Promoting dignity is at the heart of the human capability approach to development. We introduce the concept of stakeholder capability enhancement, beginning with a discussion of the capability approach to development proposed by Sen (1985) and further advanced by Nussbaum (1990) to incorporate notions of dignity. Thereafter follows a review of the literature on value creation stakeholder management and convergent stakeholder theory (Freeman, 1984; Freeman, Harrison, Wicks, Palmer, & DeColle, 2010; Harrison & Wicks, 2013; Jones & Wicks, 1999), as the (...)
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  • Domesticating Radical Rant and Rage: An Exploration of the Consequences of Environmental Shareholder Resolutions on Corporate Environmental Performance.Min-Dong Lee - 2011 - Business and Society 50 (1):155-188.
    This article examines the effect of social shareholder activism on one of the most visible aspects of corporate social behavior, namely corporate pollution management practice. Social shareholder activism is a distinct form of social movement that engages firms “in the suites.” We theorize the effect of social shareholder activism using three social movement mechanisms: (a) disruption of routines, (b) reframing of issues using extant institutional logics, and (c) mobilization of relevant third-party constituents. Our empirical analysis using 13-year panel data of (...)
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  • Influencing Climate Change Policy.Cynthia Clark & Elise Crawford - 2012 - Business and Society 51 (1):148-175.
    Firms face a great deal of pressure to engage in the heightened debate about climate change policies and practices. Building on the corporate political strategy literature, the authors evaluate how firms choose to influence those policies when faced with pressure from shareholders and activists. The authors triangulate firms’ choice of corporate political activity (CPA) with their environmental performance to draw out whether performance affects the firm’s choice of engagement level in CPA. The authors find that firms in the S&P 500 (...)
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  • Dominant Articulations in Academic Business and Society Discourse on NGO–Business Relations: A Critical Assessment. [REVIEW]Salla Laasonen, Martin Fougère & Arno Kourula - 2012 - Journal of Business Ethics 109 (4):521-545.
    Relations between non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and companies have been the subject of a sharply increasing amount of publications in recent years within academic business journals. In this article, we critically assess this fast-developing body of literature, which we treat as forming a ‘business and society discourse’ on NGO–business relations. Drawing on discourse theory, we examine 199 academic articles in 11 business and society, international business, and management journals. Focusing on the dominant articulations on the NGO–business relationship and key signifiers they (...)
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