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  1. 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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  • 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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  • Reciprocity in Firm–Stakeholder Dialog: Timeliness, Valence, Richness, and Topicality.Lite J. Nartey, Witold J. Henisz & Sinziana Dorobantu - 2023 - Journal of Business Ethics 183 (2):429-451.
    Scholars of stakeholder management have long grappled with the question of how to communicate with stakeholders to enhance cooperation and reduce conflict. We build on insights from the literature on stakeholder dialog to highlight the importance of four elements of firm–stakeholder dialog processes: timing, valence, richness, and topicality of firms’ responses to stakeholder engagements. We demonstrate a link between these elements of the firm–stakeholder dialog process and changes in stakeholder cooperation or conflict with the firm, as well as contingent tradeoffs (...)
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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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  • Who Do They Think They Are? Identity as an Antecedent of Social Activism by Institutional Shareholders.Katarina Sikavica, Elise Perrault & Rehbein Kathleen - 2018 - Business and Society 59 (6):1228-1268.
    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 (...)
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  • Examining the Conflicting Consequences of CEO Public Responses to Social Activist Challenges.François Neville - 2022 - Business and Society 61 (1):45-80.
    While the notion that CEOs have a general influence over their firms’ stakeholder strategies is well accepted, little attention has been given to how CEOs can actively and performatively manage social activism in and around their firms. I seek to develop an initial understanding of this phenomenon by examining some of the critical consequences of CEOs’ public responses to social activist challenges. Drawing on instrumental stakeholder theory and social movement theory, I recognize the dualistic nature of CEOs’ public responses to (...)
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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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  • Stakeholder Engagement, Knowledge Problems and Ethical Challenges.J. Robert Mitchell, Ronald K. Mitchell, Richard A. Hunt, David M. Townsend & Jae H. Lee - 2020 - Journal of Business Ethics 175 (1):75-94.
    In the management and business ethics literatures, stakeholder engagement has been demonstrated to lead to more ethical management practices. However, there may be limits on the extent to which stakeholder engagement can, as currently conceptualized, resolve some of the more difficult ethical challenges faced by managers. In this paper we argue that stakeholder engagement, when seen as a way of reducing five types of knowledge problems—risk, ambiguity, complexity, equivocality, and a priori irreducible uncertainty—can aid managers in resolving such ethical challenges. (...)
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  • Corporate Governance Meets Corporate Social Responsibility: Mapping the Interface.Dima Jamali, Georges Samara, Tanusree Jain & Rashid Zaman - 2022 - Business and Society 61 (3):690-752.
    Despite ample research on corporate governance (CG) and corporate social responsibility (CSR), there is a lack of consensus on the nature of the relationship between these two concepts and on how this relationship manifests across institutional contexts. Drawing on the national business systems approach, this article systematically reviews 218 research articles published over a 27-year period to map how CG–CSR research has evolved and progressed theoretically and methodologically across different institutional contexts. To shed light on the full gamut of the (...)
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  • Global Insights on TMT Gender Diversity in Controversial Industries: A Legitimacy Perspective.Abubakr Saeed, Muhammad Saad Baloch & Hammad Riaz - 2022 - Journal of Business Ethics 179 (3):711-731.
    Firms in controversial industries such as tobacco, alcohol, gambling, weapon, and nuclear power suffer organizational legitimacy problems. These firms, therefore, adopt various strategies to acquire legitimacy. Drawing on institutional theory, we conceptualize the top management team gender diversity as a legitimacy-seeking strategy and examines how a firm’s belonging to a controversial sector affects TMT gender diversity. Based on a cross-country sample of 1542 firms operating in controversial industries from 34 countries and control sample with another set of 1542 similar-sized firms (...)
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  • Shared Value Creation in Equivocal CSR Environments: A Configuration Approach.Olivia Aronson & Irene Henriques - 2023 - Journal of Business Ethics 187 (4):713-732.
    Organizations are increasingly expected by their stakeholders to tackle the “wicked” problems of society. These new pressures have created a highly equivocal corporate social responsibility (CSR) environment whereby firms face competing stakeholder perspectives regarding their CSR strategy. To reduce CSR environmental equivocality and determine a CSR strategy, organizations need to effectively and efficiently identify, evaluate, and exploit CSR initiatives to create financial and social value (i.e., shared value). In this paper, we explain how organizations can optimize their shared value creation (...)
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  • The Power of One to Make a Difference: How Informal and Formal CEO Power Affect Environmental Sustainability.Judith L. Walls & Pascual Berrone - 2017 - Journal of Business Ethics 145 (2):293-308.
    We theoretically discuss and empirically show how CEO power based on environmental expertise and formal influence over executives and directors, in the absence and presence of shareholder activism, spurs firms toward greener strategies. Our results support the idea that CEOs with informal power, grounded in expertise, reduce corporate environmental impact and this relationship is amplified when the CEO also enjoys formal power over the board of directors. Additionally, we found that any source of CEO power, whether informal or formal, is (...)
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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 Relationships, Engagement, and Sustainability Reporting.Irene M. Herremans, Jamal A. Nazari & Fereshteh Mahmoudian - 2016 - Journal of Business Ethics 138 (3):417-435.
    The concept of sustainability was developed in response to stakeholder demands. One of the key mechanisms for engaging stakeholders is sustainability disclosure, often in the form of a report. Yet, how reporting is used to engage stakeholders is understudied. Using resource dependence and stakeholder theories, we investigate how companies within the same industry address different dependencies on stakeholders for economic, natural environment, and social resources and thus engage stakeholders accordingly. To achieve this objective, we conducted our research using qualitative research (...)
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  • Motivators of Mobilization: Influences of Inequity, Expectancy, and Resource Dependence on Stakeholder Propensity to Take Action Against the Firm.Sefa Hayibor & Colleen Collins - 2016 - Journal of Business Ethics 139 (2):351-374.
    Although the possibility that a firm’s stakeholders may take damaging measures against it in response to its activities has been an underlying assumption of stakeholder theory from inception, the conditions that predispose stakeholders to act against firms remain largely unexplored in the literature. Based on work in equity theory, expectancy theory, and resource dependence theory, we present and test hypotheses concerning stakeholders’ propensities to impose sanctions upon—or to support—firms. Using a vignette-based experiment, we found strong confirmation of the criticality of (...)
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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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  • Innovation Responds to Climate Change Proposals.Greg Tindall, Rebel A. Cole & David Javakhadze - forthcoming - Journal of Business Ethics:1-28.
    Climate change is an ethical and moral challenge of a global scale due to its potentially catastrophic implications for human welfare. Understanding forces that drive corporate adaptation to climate change is an important research topic in business ethics. In this paper, we propose that shareholder climate-related proposals could be a catalyst for corporate innovations in technologies mitigating climate change. Our results, based on the analysis of US firms, indicate that corporations respond positively to these proposals by producing more climate-related patents (...)
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