The importance of ethical consumerism to many companies worldwide has increased dramatically in recent years. Ethical consumerism encompasses the importance of non-traditional and social components of a company's products and business process to strategic success - such as environmental protectionism, child labor practices and so on. The present paper utilizes a random utility theoretic experimental design to provide estimates of the relative value selected consumers place on the social features of products.

The purpose of this investigation is to extend earlier research on the relationship between corporate social and financial performance. The unique contribution of the study is the empirical analysis of a sample of companies from the banking industry and the use of Community Reinvestment Act ratings as a social performance measure. The empirical analysis solidly supports the hypothesis that the link between social and financial performance is positive.

This article examines the construction and implementation of the Sullivan Principles, a two-decade effort to use corporate codes of conduct to improve the behavior of multinational corporations in South Africa under apartheid. Without organized social movement pressure, corporations would not have agreed to adopt the code, and corporate compliance required sustained pressure from the anti-apartheid movement. The system's independent monitoring process was problematic, and managers' definitions of “good corporate citizenship” were more guided by monitors'emphases than by substantive concerns. Based on (...) the historic case, the article raises questions about the voluntaristic, stateless character of transnational corporate codes of conduct and questions whether such codes offer a viable strategy for improving working conditions. (shrink)

The comparison of corporate social performance with corporate financial performance has been a popular field of study over the past 25 years. The results, while broadly conclusive of a positive relationship, are not entirely consistent. In addition, most of the previous studies have concentrated on large-scale cross-industry studies and often with a single variable for corporate social performance, in order to produce statistically significant results. This weakens the richness of understanding that might be obtained from a single industry study with (...) multiple social variables, which would also allow investigation of inter-relationships between individual and sub-sets of social performance measures and between individual and sub-sets of social performance and financial performance measures. There have also been criticisms that the results lack a rigorous theoretical basis, and the paper demonstrates clearly how stakeholder theory must form the basis for this area of research. Following a review of the literature this paper presents the initial findings from a study of the U.K. Supermarket industry which suggest that contemporaneous social and financial performance are negatively related, while prior-period financial performance is positively related with subsequent social performance. Positive relationships between both age and size of the company with social performance are also found. (shrink)