Institutional ownership of stock and dimensions of corporate social performance: An empirical examination

Collectively, institutions own an increasing proportion of outstanding corporate equities. As an emergent force in shaping corporate America, the linkages between institutional ownership and corporate social performance (CSP) require empirical examination. Not only do corporate policy makers need to know those areas where social performance may lure or inhibit capital infusions, lawmakers also need a better understanding of the social forces guiding corporate policy. As anticipated, this study found a positive relationship between the amount of institutional ownership of corporate stock and a company's social responsiveness as measured by the representation of women on its board of directors; however, no statistically significant relationship with social responsibility as measured by charitable giving was found. The exemplar of social issues management — compliance with the Sullivan principles — showed an unexpected, negative relationship with the level of institutional ownership.Betty S. Coffey's research interests are in the area of strategic management, organizational change, and social issues.Gerald E. Fryxell is Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His current research interests are in the area of corporate culture, innovation, and strategic management.     

The Britney Spears universe: Social media and viral marketing at its best

Britney Spears is one of the most successful female recording artists in contemporary music, world-wide. Herein, we analyze how Britney Spears and her team of employees rely on social media applications to communicate around this pop icon, and create and maintain her celebrity brand image. Specifically, we look at the use of social media during the launch of her single ‘Hold It Against Me’ and the associated album Femme Fatale in early 2011. The interplay of postings on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook—combined with comments on her webpage, BritneySpears.com—can be seen as a prime example of social media usage to support new product introductions.     

The Cuban market:: Opportunities and barriers

To open our feature on business in Cuba, Kaplowitz presents a brief overview of the dramatic changes in the Cuban market since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. Until 1988, 85% of Cuban two-way trade was with the former Soviet Union, but by 1993 the COMECON nations accounted for only 20% of Cuban trade. The resulting chaos has created openings for Latin American, European and Canadian businesses to fill the investment void in Cuba. Kaplowitz lays out how recent developments have affected Cuban laws on foreign investment and trade, reviews which foreign companies are barkening to Cuba's call, and what the opportunities might be for U.S. businesses should relations between the two countries improve over the long-term. Her article is the first of seven articles in this feature.     

Exploring the Interplay of the Design and Emergence of Business Processes as Organizational Routines

Much of the BPM literature views business process design and implementation as a top-down process that is built on strategic alignment and managerial control. While this view has enabled the design of many IT artifacts for business processes, it is inconsistent with the observation that information infrastructures, including a company’s business process infrastructure, are at drift, a term that refers to the lack of top-down management control. The paper contributes to resolving this inconsistency by developing a meta-framework that conceptualizes business processes as emergent organizational routines that are represented, enabled, and constrained by IT artifacts. IT artifacts are developed in processes of functional-hierarchical decomposition and social design processes. Organizational routines have ostensive and performative aspects, forming a mutually constitutive duality. A literature review demonstrates that the propositions offered by the meta-framework have been insufficiently considered in the BPM field. The paper concludes with an outlook to applying the meta-framework to theorize about the interplay of design projects with the subsequent emergence of business processes in organizations.     

Managing distance in international purchasing and supply: a systematic review of literature from the resource-based view perspective

The aim of this research is to find out how the extant literature on international purchasing and supply management (PSM) covers the elements of capability from the perspective of distance. A priori, we form a framework of capability driving elements and conclude that distance—in its multiple dimensions—is the fundamental management aspect in international PSM. Equipped with analytical frameworks and a bottom–up process for identifying emergent themes, a systematic literature review was conducted on a representative sample of scholarly literature on international PSM, using the NVivo analysis software and a data display as tools. We identify several capability relevant themes from the literature, and provide a distance-based a posteriori conceptualisation of international PSM, founded in the information processing theory, with the source-user, user-user and source-source distance types driving the information processing requirements, and loading avoidance, policy-based and enhancement mechanisms determining the information processing capacity.     

Business Cases and Corporate Engagement with Sustainability: Differentiating Ethical Motivations

This paper explores links between different ethical motivations and kinds of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities to distinguish between different types of business cases with regard to sustainability. The design of CSR and corporate sustainability can be based on different ethical foundations and motivations. This paper draws on the framework of Roberts (Organization 10:249–265, 2003) which distinguishes four different ethical management versions of CSR. The first two ethical motivations are driven either by a reactionary concern for the short-term financial interests of the business, or reputational, driven by a narcissistic concern to protect the firm’s image. The third responsible motivation works from the inside-out and seeks to embed social and environmental concerns within the firm’s performance management systems, and the fourth, a collaborative motivation, works to bring the outside in and seeks to go beyond the boundaries of the firm to create a dialogue with those who are vulnerable to the unintended consequences of corporate conduct. Management activities based on these different ethical motivations to CSR and sustainability result in different operational activities for corporations working towards sustainability and thus have very different effects on how the company’s economic performance is influenced. Assuming that corporate managers are concerned about creating business cases for their companies to survive and prosper in the long term, this paper raises the question of how different ethical motivations for designing CSR and corporate sustainability relate to the creation of different business cases. The paper concludes by distinguishing four different kinds of business cases with regard to sustainability: reactionary and reputational business cases of sustainability, and responsible and collaborative business cases for sustainability.     

Institutional Structure and Firm Social Performance in Transitional Economies: Evidence of Multinational Corporations in China

In this conceptual article, we look at the impact of culture on ethical decision making from a Douglasian Cultural Theory (CT) perspective. We aim to show how CT can be used to explain the diversity and dynamicity of ethical beliefs and behaviours found in every social system, be it a corporation, a nation or even an individual. We introduce CT in the context of ethical decision making and then use it to discuss examples of business ethics in the Indian business context. We argue that the use of CT allows for a theoretically more sophisticated treatment of culture in ethical decision making and thus the avoidance of some common problems with existing cross-cultural studies of business ethics. In our discussion, we raise questions about the compatibility between management systems and processes created in one context and ethical behaviours in another.     

The open academic: Why and how business academics should use social media to be more ‘open’ and impactful

The mission of Business Horizons is to publish research that practitioners can understand to help them change their thoughts and actions. However, this mission remains an elusive ideal for many business school academics as they struggle to overcome the research-practice gap. To help scholars bridge this gap, we present social media as a boundary-spanning technology to be open to connecting with, learning from and working with academics and other stakeholders outside their field. Social media can be used as a boundary-spanning technology to help bridge the research-practice gap. To support this idea, we present a process model of five research activities—networking, framing, investigating, disseminating, and assessing—and describe how social media can make each activity more open. We present a framework of four social media-enabled open academic approaches—connector, observer, promoter, and influencer—and outline some do’s and don’ts for engaging in each approach. We also discuss the potential dark side of openness through social media and offer some coping strategies. As per the mission and scope of Business Horizons, this article aims to help business academics rethink and change their practices so that our profession is more widely regarded for how our research positively impacts business practice and society in general.     

Juliann Sivulka,Stronger than Dirt: A Cultural History of Advertising: Personal Hygiene in America, 1875–1940, New York: Humanity Books, 2001

Abstract

In Stronger Than Dirt, Juliann Sivulka explores how concepts of personal hygiene underwent a dramatic change in the United States between 1875 and 1940 and how, during this relatively short period, Americans changed from a group of reluctant bathers—who rarely if ever used soap for personal hygiene—to a nation in love with suds and lavishly outfitted bathrooms.     

Translation behaviour: An exploratory study within a service multinational

In this paper, we address the issue of translation behaviour in the context of a service multinational. Our case study of a Nordic bank shows that emergent translation needs may be handled by the organisation and the individual in various ways such as self-translation, technical translation tools, social networks, or the central translation department. The choice between these options is shaped by situational influences including growing language diversity, accuracy, response speed, cost considerations, confidentiality of the information and task criticality. A key finding is the importance of social networks as a coping mechanism for employees confronted with the need to provide timely translation solutions, including the resort to external social networks, even relatives. Rather than a seemingly mundane, peripheral activity, translation was found to play a role in service delivery, organisational functioning and hence company performance. We propose a multilevel theoretical model of the translation process and conclude that organisation's translation ability which consists of organisational and individual responses should be considered as a component of its language absorptive capacity.     

Transforming Human Resource Management Systems to Cope with Diversity

The purpose of this study is to examine how workgroup diversity can be managed through specific strategic human resource management systems. Our review shows that ‘affirmative action’ and traditional ‘diversity management’ approaches have failed to simultaneously achieve business and social justice outcomes of diversity. As previous literature has shown, the benefits of diversity cannot be achieved with isolated interventions. To the contrary, a complete organizational culture change is required, in order to promote appreciation of individual differences. The paper contributes to this discussion by exploring the implications of this change for human resource management, and explaining how the systems of practices should be changed when they are directed to diverse groups. The model designed to test this notion includes: (1) demographic and human capital diversity as independent variables, (2) group performance (measured as innovation outcomes) as the dependent variable and, (3) the orientation of the strategic human resource management system as a potential moderator of this relationship. The main conclusion of the empirical analysis developed is that different patterns of human resource management practices can be used, depending on the type of diversity that the organization faces, and the specific effects that it wishes to manage. Concretely, three alternative management systems are identified in this paper, with different moderating effects. This result has interesting implications for human resource management professionals, explained in the last section. The limitations of this study are also discussed, as well as some issues that future research in this field should address.     

In the Eye of the Beholder: An Exploration of Managerial Courage

There is growing interest in the positive organizational literature in the complex interplay between the positive and negative facets of organizations, individuals, and situations. The concept of courage provides fertile ground to study this interplay, since it is generally understood to be a positive quality that is manifested in challenging situations. The empirical study presented here looks at courage in a strategic decision-making context and takes an interpretive perspective; it focuses on the cognitive structures and subjective understandings of managers and administrators involved in merger projects as a way to understand the dynamics surrounding managerial courage. Our study makes several contributions: it shows that managers consider courage to have a moral dimension, e.g., to be a positive and ethical response to a risky or difficult situation in which there is an interplay between organizational and personal interests; it identifies two kinds of managerial moral courage; it proposes a conceptual model with which to understand how evaluations of what is courageous and what is not are made; and finally, it offers four schemas developed from the data that add to our understanding of moral courage in management.     

Qualitative analysis of customer behavior in the retail industry during the COVID-19 pandemic: A word-cloud and sentiment analysis approach

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a paradigm shift in customer behavior within the retail industry. Pandemic-induced restrictions and fear of product scarcity led to a change in purchasing frequency, with customers stockpiling non-perishable products such as basic foods and hygiene items. Media and social networks also played a significant role in fueling panic-buying behavior. Although sales decreased, consumption in all food categories increased due to the closure of restaurants and the need to prepare meals at home. The pandemic had a significant impact on both customers and retailers, resulting in staff reductions and a change in business strategies.To explore how Romanian food retailers’ representatives responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and adjusted to changing consumer behavior, the authors employed a qualitative research approach based on an interview guide. The data collected were analyzed using the statistical software R. In data analysis with R, the choice of functions used depends on various factors, such as the type of data, research questions, and analysis methods. Generally, commonly used functions in R for data analysis include data cleaning and manipulation functions such as subset, merge, and transform, data visualization functions such as ggplot2, and statistical modeling functions such as lm and glm, resulting in world clouds and a sentiment analysis.The results show that to develop effective business strategies, qualitative analysis helps identify the root causes of these changes. Sentiment analysis can reveal how retail chains representatives perceived the safety measures implemented in stores, such as social distancing and mask-wearing mandates, and how these measures affected customers’ shopping behavior. It also sheds light on how customers shopped and whether they planned to continue using these methods post-pandemic. Understanding these insights is crucial for retail companies to adapt their operations and better serve their customers in the post-pandemic world.     

Corporate Citizenship: How to Strengthen the Social Responsibility of Managers?

Corporate citizenship challenges the foundations and working of the basic institutions market, state and civil society. These institutional changes complicate the work of the manager, because the responsibilities of management are not only increasing, they are also becoming vaguer and more elusive. In this paper, I will analyze the new, complex responsibilities of management in terms of the scope and the legitimizationof corporate citizenship. What may we expect of individual organizations? Which wishes of which stakeholders should be honored? How can we legitimize the new societal and public role of business firms? The outcome of this analysis will be translated to the practice of management; how can we strengthen the social responsibility of managers? Four options will be discussed. (1) Market regulation, which binds the actions of managers. (2) Professionalization of management, which seeks for better information. (3) Moral management, which incorporates norms and values from outside the market. (4) Stakeholder management, which leaves room for the participation of stakeholders. These options can be schematized according to an internal-external axis and an objective-subjective axis. I will show that stakeholder management fits the best with the idea of corporate citizenship, but has serious risks of failing.     

Applying Behavioural Theory to the Challenge of Sustainable Development: Using Hairdressers as Diffusers of More Sustainable Hair-Care Practices

The challenges presented by sustainable development are broadly accepted, yet resource use increases unabated. It is increasingly acknowledged that while technical solutions may play a part, a key issue is behaviour change. In response to this, there has been a plethora of studies into how behaviour change can be enabled, predominantly from psychological and sociological perspectives. This has resulted in a substantial body of knowledge into the factors that drive behaviour change and how they can be manipulated to achieve desired social goals. In this paper, we describe a study that draws on this body of knowledge to design an intervention to drive behaviour change across the hairdressing sector, and by the process of diffusion, across the vast social networks of this occupational group to influence domestic hair-care practices. The intervention was successful: hairdressers indicated positive intentions to adopt more sustainable practices within their salons and pass them onto their customers. The customer survey (N = 776) confirms this: customers surveyed after their hairdresser attended the Green-Salon-Makeover intervention were significantly more likely to report that environmental issues had been considered in their salon visit and that they themselves would consider such issues in their hair-care practices at home than customers who were surveyed before the intervention.     

Corporate sustainability in action

Recent developments in management have highlighted the need for research on corporate sustainability strategies at the value chain level and in particular in the context of franchising. Although franchising is a widespread phenomenon, there is little empirical evidence of how companies approach the issue. By employing a multi-method research approach, this study explores the importance that franchisors assign to sustainability and the way they deal with it. Our findings show that franchisors adopt three main different sustainability strategies, with an increasing relevance of social sustainability as an enabler of environmental sustainability. The study sheds some light also on the interplay between the franchisor–franchisee relationship features and the company's approach toward sustainability. Preliminary propositions are presented as a starting point for further research in this area.     

Stock and Mobility of Researchers and Industrial Leadership

We propose an evolutionary model which shows the relevance of the stock and mobility of researchers in explaining industrial leadership and catch‐up. Likewise, it shows how leading firms and nations may benefit from their competitors' investments in scientific training. On the other hand, international knowledge diffusion may jeopardize apparently solid leadership positions. Thus, under certain conditions, technological convergence at a worldwide level mitigates the migrant‐sending role of emergent nations. In fact, taking advantage of knowledge diffusion to make the transition from migrant‐sending to migrant‐receiving nation proves to be a source of leadership in the model.     

The fairyland of Second Life: Virtual social worlds and how to use them

Virtual social worlds, such as the Internet site Second Life, have acquired a high degree of popularity in the popular and business press. In this article we address the increasing importance of virtual social worlds, and discuss how companies can make use of their potential. We first present how virtual social worlds evolved historically, how they fit into the postmodern paradigm of our time, and how they differ from other social media, such as content communities (e.g., YouTube), social networking sites and blogs (e.g., Facebook), collaborative projects (e.g., Wikipedia), and virtual game worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft). We subsequently present how firms can make use of virtual social worlds in the areas of advertising/communication, virtual product sales (v-Commerce), marketing research, human resources, and internal process management. We also highlight the points companies should pay particular attention to in their activities, the 5Cs of success in virtual social worlds, and the future evolutions that we expect to shape this sector over the next 5-10 years: a trend toward standardization and interoperability, improvements in software usability, increasing interconnection between reality and virtual worlds, establishment of law and order, and the transformation of virtual social worlds to business hubs of the future.     

The Coevolution of Relationship Dominant Logic and Supply Risk Mitigation Strategies

How and why do risk mitigation strategies evolve? And which resources are needed for engaging in such changes? This paper contributes to the understanding of risk management in supply chains by developing theory about the interplay between supply risk mitigation strategies and the purchasing team's relationship dominant logic (RDL), which we define as the purchasing team's orientation toward and shared cognitive map of the management of its supply chain relationships. Specifically, we propose that RDL and supply risk mitigation strategies are fundamentally intertwined. Following a Straussian approach to grounded theory, this study analyzes data generated from the purchasing teams of Western green‐tech firms trying to mitigate supply risk for technically indispensable rare earth metals from China. Our findings from this context that is heavily shaped by state‐influenced supply chain members show that the firms chose their mitigation strategies in line with their RDL. Human capital, social capital, and financial capital seem to moderate the link between RDL and mitigation strategies. We link our findings with the strategic management literature in deriving theoretical propositions concerning these relationships.     

Retail stores as brands: performances,theatre and space

The scholars of Consumer Culture Theory studies as well as practitioners have recognised the potential power of spatial design in stores in constructing and communicating retail brands. Retail space and the aesthetic structuring of a range of expressive artefacts have become the stage on which shop attendants perform. This paper focuses on how management and shop attendants of Dutch menswear fashion house Oger communicate and construct the Oger brand, with a special focus on the spatial settings of the retail store. This study shows how the management carefully combines elements generally found in Italian ateliers, English gentlemen's clubs and boardrooms. The symbolic message behind the spatial design of the Oger flagship store is that of human quest for wealth and fame removed from the everyday life. In addition to this earlier observed interplay between design, display and consumption processes, this study indicates the important role of shop attendants in constructing and communicating retail brands. By forging links with organisation studies, we show how retail management carefully designed, managed and orchestrated retail space, objects and shop attendants’ roles to construct and communicate the Oger brand. The selling of products through performances in designed theatres connects organisation and economic and aesthetic realms. Finally, the paper introduces “internal design proxemics” as an extra analytical concept of spatial settings.