How does financial performance affect marketing? Studying the marketing-finance relationship from a dynamic perspective

In this article, the authors provide a dynamic framework for understanding the relationship between marketing and financial performance. They suggest that firms market to financial markets as well as to consumption markets and that some mixture provides superior long-term performance. The authors discuss the potential pitfalls of overemphasizing one market to the detriment of another and then provide a theoretical model of the factors that influence the extent of marketing to financial markets. This is followed by a discussion of implications for theory, practice, and future research. Mitchell J. Lovett (mitchell.lovett@duke.edu) is a Ph.D. student in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. His current research interests include consumer and seller learning in dynamic environments, competitive and dynamic marketing strategies, and the role of marketing in innovation. Jason B. MacDonald (jmacdona@boisestate.edu) is an associate professor of marketing in the College of Business and Economics at Boise State University. His current research interests include the role of marketing in investor relations and Internet marketing strategy.     

Mind the Gap: A Journey to Sustainable Supply Chains

Many companies still view Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as solely philanthropy rather than addressing their material issues. A few companies that have began to see the strategic advantages of being socially responsible and addressing their social, environmental and economic challenges. Developing an effective strategy can reward companies with reputation enhancement, license to operate, avoiding litigation, recruitment and retention of employees and developing process, product and strategic innovations. One company who has realized the value of investing and integrating CSR into the business model is the apparel retailer Gap Inc. This article will examine the evolution of Gap Inc. and its work developing an effective labor standards assurance program and stakeholder engagement strategy transformed historically adversarial relationships with key stakeholders into collaborative multi-stakeholder partnerships. Particular attention is put towards Gap Inc.’s learnings in the process and how these new insights innovated the company’s CSR strategy over time. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Firm responses to secondary stakeholder action

In this paper, we explore the conditions under which secondary stakeholder groups are likely to elicit positive firm responses. To this end, we build upon and advance Mitchell, Agle, and Wood's (1997) stakeholder saliency and identification framework by defining saliency in terms of actions, not perceptions, and by proposing that power, legitimacy, and urgency arise out of the nature of stakeholder–request–firm triplets. To test this framework, we build a unique dataset of over 600 secondary stakeholder actions within the United States, all concerning environmental issues over the period 1971–2003. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Struggle Against Sweatshops: Moving Toward Responsible Global Business

Today’s sweatshops violate our notions of justice, yet they continue to flourish. This is so because we have not settled on criteria that would allow us to condemn and do away with them and because the poor working conditions in certain places are preferable to the alternative of no job at all. In this paper, we examine these phenomena. We consider the definitional dilemmas posed by sweatshops by routing a standard definition of sweatshops through the precepts put forward in the literature on justice and virtue ethics. We conclude that fixing on definitions is pointless and misleading and that we are better off looking at whether or not a workplace violates the basic human rights of workers and whether or not the working conditions there cohere with situations on which we have already rendered judgments. In the end, we suggest guidelines for businesses that operate in the global workplace to help them avoid charges of running sweatshops. These recommendations account for the harsh living conditions in certain developing and emerging countries as well as the norms of societies in developed countries. * A summer research grant from the Frank G. Zarb School of Business at Hofstra University contributed toward making this research possible. Tara J. Radin is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department at the Wharton School and Assistant Director of The American College Center for Ethics in Financial Services. She earned a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law and an M.B.A. and Ph.D. in Management from the Darden School at the University of Virginia. Her research encompasses topics such as employment, global labor practices, technology, privacy, corporate governance, and stakeholder theory, and includes publications in journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, and American Business Law Journal. She is also co-author of Employment and Employee Rights, published by Blackwell Publishers, Ltd. Martin Calkins is Assistant Professor in the College of Management at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He earned a Ph.D. in management from the University of Virginia, M.Div. and Th.M. degrees in theology from the Weston School of Theology, and an M.I.M. in international management from the American Graduate School of International Management. His academic interests include moral theory (in particular, casuistry and virtue theory) as well as contemporary international business issues such as international codes, whistleblowing, sweatshops, and the impact of computer and Internet technologies on societies.     

Defining a Post-Conventional Corporate Moral Responsibility

The stakeholder approach offers the opportunity to consider corporate responsibility in a wider sense than that afforded by the stockholder or shareholder approaches. Having said that, this article aims to show that this theory does not offer a normative corporate responsibility concept that can be our response to two basic questions. On the one hand, for what is the company morally responsible and, on the other hand, why is the corporation morally responsible in terms of conventional and post-conventional perspectives? The reason why the stakeholder approach does not offer such a definition, as we shall see, is because the normative stakeholder approaches tend to confuse the social validity with the moral validity or legitimacy. It leads us to a conventional definition of corporate moral responsibility (CMR) that is not relevant to the pluralistic and global framework of our societies and economies. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate this intuition.     

企业社会回应管理

社会环境在企业的生存和发展方面始终扮演着极其重要的角色。与过去企业被动地适应环境不同,今天的企业越来越倾向于对重要的社会事项和关键利益相关者作出反应。使企业与社会环境联盟的战略被称为企业社会回应。本文介绍和分析了企业如何进行社会回应管理。     

企业环境信息供求分析

鉴于我国环境问题日益突出的现实,企业层次环境信息的重要性日益突出.本文从需求与供给的角度分析了企业环境信息披露行为.在需求角度,投资者、政府,社会公众等是企业环境利益的重要相关者;在供给角度,企业管理层可能在披露成本及行为合法化、竞争策略影响等因素之间进行权衡.由此需要增加环境利益相关者的影响力,从而提升企业的环境信息披露水平.     

西方公司治理模式的比较及其在我国的选择

文章首先从公司治理的理论渊源及其内涵入手,进而论述了西方发达国家两种不同的公司治理模式并对其进行了比较,在此基础上,笔者结合我国的具体国情,借鉴西方公司治理的经验,认为我国公司治理模式的最佳选择是利益相关者模式。     

强化公司社会责任

公司社会责任是经济全球化公司发展的主潮流。本文通过对跨国公司以及国内公司的社会责任现状进行分析,并从公司自身建设与加强政府职责两方面提出对策来强化公司的社会责任。     

基于利益相关者理论的企业E-learning管理研究

作为现代企业培训的主要方式,E-learning在得到普遍应用的同时,其管理中存在的问题也日益暴露出来。只有通过利益相关者理论实现"以人为本"的理念,才能充分发挥企业E-learning的作用,让员工在自己的工作岗位上获得成功的同时,实现共同的商业目的。