Ethical assessment in radioactive waste management: a proposed reflective equilibrium‐based deliberative approach

Radioactive waste management facility siting has often been surrounded by political controversy. By attempting to overcome accusations of technocracy, radioactive waste management organisations are reframing the problem in terms of socio‐technical issues requiring the integrative assessment of complex scientific, political and ethical issues and establishing analytic‐deliberative decision‐making processes involving public and stakeholder involvement. One important aspect of a publicly supportable radioactive waste management strategy is that adequate ethical assessment is incorporated throughout the process. There are, however, certain incompatibilities between pluralistic public and stakeholder‐led engagement processes and the types of ethical justification stemming from normative ethical theory and the input of ethical expertise. An evaluation of previous work on ethics by the UK Committee on Radioactive Waste Management highlights some of the pitfalls of utilising these types of ‘top‐down’ inputs in a primarily ‘bottom‐up’ decision‐making process. This paper then proposes the development of a new approach inspired by John Rawls's concept of ‘reflective equilibrium’, to better bridge the divide between pluralistic analytic‐deliberative decision‐making and ethical assessment.     

论利益相关者利益最大化财务目标--基于利益相关者理论及系统科学的视角

利益相关者利益最大化的财务目标观点,理论基础来源于利益相关者理论。它摒弃了传统财务目标研究中单目标函数的思维方式,转而从多目标函数的角度来考虑,并注重以实务为导向,因而与具有明显经济学特征的传统财务目标观点在研究方法及思维方式上有着很大差异。本文从概念的界定入手,指出当前对于利益相关者利益最大化财务目标认识上的一些偏差,并运用耗散结构论与协同学作为分析的框架与工具,通过对经理可协调与不可协调冲突的分析,得出应采用利益相关者利益最大化作为公司财务目标的结论。     

Biosecurity risk and peri‐urban landholders – using a stakeholder consultative approach to build a risk communication strategy

This article presents a straightforward and highly participatory methodology for addressing government agencies’ concerns with effective communication strategies for biosecurity when stakeholders are diverse and there is uncertainty about their levels of knowledge. The case study was among peri‐urban landholders in an area where serious animal disease infestation has occurred within the last 10 years. Initially we engaged stakeholders in a consultative process that included establishing a stakeholder influence and interest map for both weeds and animal diseases. This was followed with a mental model approach involving surveys and in‐depth interviews. We elicited information about landholders’ knowledge, practices, values and beliefs regarding biosecurity risk. Our consultative process generated examples that indicate that effective risk communication relies on establishing and affirming mutual levels of trust and credibility between landholders and agencies. While this finding is not surprising, we argue that attention to stakeholder consultative processes is central to overcoming barriers to changing practices and building awareness. Secondly, our data confirmed that while smaller landholders were the initial target for the communication, all landholders represented a similar level of biosecurity risk. Therefore, our approach was critical in overcoming external assumptions about particular actors. Finally, our data pointed to the need to develop a whole of landscape approach to biosecurity risk communication strategy in consultation with local stakeholders.     

Environmental scenarios and local-global level of community engagement: Environmental justice, jams, institutions and innovation

National climate change policy currently operates on a continuum from the local community to the supra-national level. These initiatives include local deliberative processes of low-carbon futures as well as local-global interactions in ‘eco-innovation jam’ dialogues carried out in a virtual space, but founded on communicating with local stakeholder groups. Experiences from national processes and international examples of these structured dialogues of community engagement raise important questions of environmental justice and deliberative processes that facilitate participation by some groups, but perhaps also neglect others. This is particularly relevant since the environmental justice discourse traditionally frames environmental concerns in a place-bound manner that includes local responses to environmental questions. In this paper we argue the importance of local and global forums and deliberative processes for community engagement in order to incorporate stakeholders’ perceptions of future options for low-carbon living, travelling and consuming services and products. Important policy transformations in planning for low-carbon societies are outlined and results from cases are discussed. We conclude with three remarks about the importance of citizen participation for understanding local conditions for change, processes of localized internationalization, and new roles for nation states facing the climate change challenge. We also recognise the importance of the local and global level of deliberative processes targeting sustainable urban futures.     

Planning of strategic innovation aimed at environmental sustainability: actor-networks, scenario acceptance and backcasting analysis within a polymeric coating chain

This paper addresses a new way of influencing and stimulating technological innovations towards sustainability. Sustainability is operationalised as function fulfilment with a factor of 20 reduction on environmental burden over the entire lifecycle. The method, which is derived from the earlier developed sustainable technological development (STD) and SusHouse methods, includes future visioning together with stakeholder participation, followed by action planning. Future visioning has been carried out in workshops with all relevant stakeholders; action planning is also performed in workshops. As a case study a polymeric coatings chain in the Netherlands and in Portugal, has been chosen. Initially data has been gathered about production, environmental aspects, and technological innovations and applications; later interviews with stakeholders have been carried out followed by the visioning and action planning workshops. The paper shows that the methodology works in a situation in which innovative activity is already under way, identifying new and unexpected ways of making the polymeric coatings chain more sustainable. It discusses further implementation of new ideas of function fulfilment.     

How do policymakers and think tank stakeholders prioritize the risks of the nuclear fuel cycle? A semantic network analysis

In recent years, the importance of stakeholder involvement and of integrating diverse perspectives into risk management has gained increasing recognition. However, it remains a challenging task to identify all potentially relevant stakeholders and to reliably describe their deeply held beliefs regarding the risks associated with complex industrial systems. For example, the development of advanced nuclear fuel cycles presents such a case. Based on a review of policy-making literatures and a content analysis of congressional records, we identify federal agencies and nonprofit policy institutes (also known as ‘think tanks’) as key stakeholders that are representative of those actively involved in making high-level decisions on the US nuclear energy policy. Using a semantic network analysis approach, we visually delineate the thematic areas of each party’s perceptions concerning fuel cycle risks. The results show that although governmental and think tank stakeholders share common concerns in areas such as nuclear waste management, the economics of nuclear facilities, and proliferation, they tend to focus on distinct aspects of each area. Moreover, while governmental stakeholders are primarily concerned with the environmental and local impacts of nuclear fuel cycles, think tank stakeholders focus more on the relative advantages and disadvantages of nuclear energy compared to other alternative energy options. Implications for risk management and risk communication are discussed.     

Multi-scale narratives from an IA perspective: Part II. Participatory local scenario development

This paper builds on Part I, where three European and Mediterranean scenarios were introduced. Theses scenarios can be typified as qualitative, integrated narrative storylines that describe three possible directions of future change until 2030. The main purpose of the paper is to summarise the methods and results of a series of stakeholder workshops held in the Guadalentín (Spain) and the Val d'Agri (Italy) to develop local scenarios, using the Mediterranean scenarios as boundary conditions. Two workshops were organised in both watersheds, employing different methods to develop short-term and long-term future outlooks. During the first workshop an exploratory forecasting methodology was employed. By means of a collage of images, stakeholders constructed three future images linked to three Mediterranean scenarios. In the second workshop, a discussion on the short-term outlook based on current trends was followed by a backcasting exercise. The various methods yielded highly complementary results, with detailed short-term developments, rather general yet highly creative visions of the long-term future, and a set of desirable futures. It is argued that such a mix of methods has increased the quality and comprehensiveness of the results. In any case, these efforts should be but the onset of long-term stakeholder participation.     

Quo vadis integrated testing strategies? Experiences and observations from the work floor

Integrated testing strategies (ITSs) have received much attention as promising tools for more resource-efficient hazard and risk assessment of chemicals and for reducing animal use in toxicological testing. The usage of ITSs crucially depends on their acceptance and application by various stakeholder groups, for example chemical industry, scientific organisations and regulatory authorities. However, little is known about stakeholders’ views on the use and application of ITSs. In this study, we present results from semi-structured interviews with different stakeholder groups. Interviewees were asked to express their personal views and opinions about what an ITS is or should be, about ITS advantages and limitations, about ITS implementation and acceptance and about needs for further research. Using qualitative data analysis, we identified a set of core themes that stakeholders considered most relevant with respect to these six topics. Our results illustrate that stakeholder perspectives differed considerably for each of the topics addressed. We found particularly diverging views across stakeholder groups with respect to ITS limitations and acceptance. This underlines that improving stakeholder integration and intensifying the dialogue about useful and successful ITS applications should receive more attention for strengthening ITSs as effective decision-support tools.     

Conflicting interests but filtered key targets: Stakeholder and resource-dependency analyses at a University of Applied Sciences

Stakeholder theory (SHT) emphasizes that different stakeholders and their interests need to be identified and addressed to maximize firm performance. This emphasis can make the design of performance measurement systems (PMS) challenging because the interests of stakeholders are often in conflict. Based on previous research and using stakeholder and resource dependency theories, we develop a theoretical model suggesting that resource dependency acts as a “filter” in selecting which of the PMS design measures are emphasized for decision making. We find various conflicting interests between stakeholders in our case organization (a unit of University of Applied Sciences in Finland) that affected PMS design. Contrary to the earlier studies, however, we found that despite conflicting interests, all of the different stakeholders considered one nonfinancial indicator to be the most important: attractiveness, or the number of applicants divided by number of new students. As suggested by resource-dependency theory (RDT), the stakeholder providing the most resources had the most significant impact on the selection of the key performance indicators used. The key resource provider may also have had some effect on the expectations of other stakeholders.     

Environmental management control systems: The role of contextual and strategic factors

This study examines the role of contextual and strategic factors in the development of environmental management control systems in manufacturing companies. In particular, the authors test the roles of perceived ecological environmental uncertainty, perceived stakeholder pressures, and the degree of corporate environmental proactivity on the development of environmental management control systems. The main results from a survey of 256 manufacturing companies suggest that companies that perceive greater ecological environmental uncertainty are less inclined to develop a proactive environmental strategy, environmental information system, or formal environmental management control system. Market, community, and organizational stakeholders motivate environmental proactivity, as well as the development of different environmental management control systems. Regulatory stakeholders only encourage the development of an environmental information system.     

EXPLORING THE AMBIGUITY OF HYBRID ORGANISATIONS: A STAKEHOLDER APPROACH

This paper focuses on hybrid organisations, which have both public and private sector elements. Therefore, stakeholders of hybrid organisations have different views regarding what to expect from the organisation and the role of stakeholders tend to be multifaceted. This creates ambiguity that imposes demands on the management of hybrid organisations. In this paper a stakeholder approach is used in order to explore the ambiguity of hybrid organisations and the demands this imposes on managers.     

Towards Analytic‐deliberative Forms of Risk Governance in the UK? Reflecting on Learning in Radioactive Waste

While participatory forms of risk assessment and management have been the focus of much conceptualisation, experimentation, and evaluation, relatively less effort has gone into understanding how so called ‘analytic‐deliberative’ processes are developing across policy‐for‐real decision contexts. This paper develops a novel typology of citizen‐science interaction as a basis for analysing the nature and extent of recent participatory risk assessment practice in the UK. It draws on the reflections of professional actors operating across the UK environmental risk domain, focusing down on practice in the area of radioactive waste between 1998 and 2003. Compared with past science‐centred approaches, analysis shows an ‘opening up’ of risk decision processes to extended actors, knowledges, and values, with particular importance placed on public involvement in front‐end framing. This is being constrained by a failure to integrate engagement throughout decision processes, the exclusion of publics from assessing/evaluating environmental risks, and the upholding of a strict separation between citizens/science. These patterns of analytic‐deliberative practice — determined by contextual influences, barriers and challenges operating across UK environmental risk issue‐areas — highlight the need for further methodological development and systematic evaluation of relations between processes and outcomes.     

Stakeholder welfare and firm value

Using data from the independent social choice investment advisory firm Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini (KLD), we construct a stakeholder welfare score measuring the extent to which firms meet the expectation of their non-shareholder stakeholders (such as employees, customers, communities, and environment), and find it to be associated with positive valuation effects: an increase of 1 in the stakeholder welfare score leads to an increase of 0.587 in Tobin’s Q. Furthermore, the valuation effects vary across stakeholders and the aforementioned positive effects are driven by firms’ performance on employee relations and environmental issues. These results suggest that stakeholder welfare (in particular, employee welfare and environmental performance) represents intangibles (such as reputation or human capital) crucial for shareholder value creation rather than private benefits managers pursue for their own social or economic needs.     

Contract costs,stakeholder capitalism,and ESG

Observed contract structures are competitive solutions to the problem of maximizing stakeholder welfare when contracting is costly. Winning contract structures typically set fixed payoffs for most stakeholders, with residual risk borne by shareholders, who then get most of the decision rights. With rising interest in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, there is sentiment for replacing the max shareholder wealth decision rule with max shareholder welfare. This view does not recognize that investors view max welfare in terms of their overall consumption-investment portfolios. Since firms are not privy to the total ESG exposures of shareholders, max shareholder wealth is the appropriate decision rule.     

Intangibles Disclosure on Entrepreneurial Small Businesses’ Websites to Influence Stakeholders’ Impressions

This study examines the ways in which entrepreneurs influence stakeholders to form perceptions using intangibles disclosed on business websites. Interviews were conducted with 10 entrepreneurs, each representing an entrepreneurial business, and 17 intangible capabilities disclosed to impress three stakeholder groups using five impression‐management tactics were uncovered. The study uses an entrepreneurship perspective to investigate entrepreneurs’ motivation to share their beliefs with stakeholders, and resource‐based theory to posit that intangibles combined with business capabilities are competencies for such communication, in addition to stakeholder theory for targeting specific stakeholders.     

Perceived stakeholder influences and organizations’ use of environmental audits

While the use of internal, external, and both types of environmental audits are becoming more pervasive in society, little is known about the stakeholder influences associated with their use, in large part because previous research has viewed them as a uniform type of management practice. This study draws on stakeholder theory to explore organizations’ use of different types of environmental audits. It uses international manufacturing data to show that significant variations in the use of environmental audits are associated with differences in stakeholder influences, and that a more nuanced treatment is needed when evaluating these audits.     

Shareholder Value Maximization—Is There a Role for Corporate Social Responsibility?

Although often viewed as inconsistent with the corporate goal of value maximization, the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement can add value by helping companies develop and maintain their reputations for fair dealing with each of their important non-investor stakeholder groups, including employees, suppliers, and local communities. Such "reputational capital" in turn helps reinforce the commitment of those stakeholders through what amount to informal or implicit contracts—contracts that are often critical to a company's long-run success.
Nevertheless, the importance and difficulty of balancing stakeholder interests against the overarching goal of efficiency and value maximization cannot be overstated. As with any corporate investment, each dollar of investment in a corporate stakeholder group should be justified by at least a dollar of expected return over a finite time horizon. By practicing this kind of "enlightened value maximization," to borrow Michael Jensen's phrase, management is likely to end up increasing not only its returns to shareholders, but the size of the corporate pie that is divided among all its stakeholders. Viewed in this light, CSR and value maximization have the potential to be complementary undertakings that result in a virtuous circle in which "doing good" helps companies do well, and doing well provides the wherewithal to do more good.     

Does stakeholder orientation matter for earnings management: Evidence from non-shareholder constituency statutes

Using a difference-in-differences methodology, this paper finds that greater stakeholder orientation due to the adoption of non-shareholder constituency statutes, which allow directors to consider non-shareholder stakeholders' interests in decision making, significantly reduces discretionary accruals. The main effect is more pronounced for firms with greater tension between shareholders and stakeholders, and with higher information acquisition costs for the board. Further analysis shows that stakeholder orientation increases the value-relevance of earnings, and curtails real earnings management to some extent. Overall, my findings indicate that improved financial reporting quality can be a specific channel through which stakeholder orientation increases shareholder value.     

American Enterprise Institute Roundtable: Was Milton Friedman Right about Shareholder Capitalism?*

In this look back at Milton Friedman's famous essay in The New York Times 50 years ago organized by the American Enterprise Institute, three well‐known panelists discussed whether executives should continue to be guided by Friedman's oft‐cited statement that the “social responsibility of business is to increase its own profits.” One pretext or prompt for this discussion is the Business Roundtable's recent rethinking of the corporate mission, with its emphasis on all corporate stakeholders, employees and local communities as well as shareholders. Among the panelists, Marty Lipton takes the most enthusiastic view of this alternative to shareholder primacy. Now often identified as “stakeholder capitalism,” this alternative is embraced by Lipton as part of a “New Paradigm” in which large, universal owners act more or less in concert to pressure private companies to play a greater role in protecting the environment and lifting people out of poverty. By contrast, fund manager Cliff Asness and former Bush advisor and Columbia Business School dean Glenn Hubbard find considerable relevance and resilience in the old shareholder paradigm. Hubbard, for example, emphasizes the impossibility of maximizing long‐run value in highly competitive product and labor markets without taking care of all important stakeholders. And while sympathetic to the intent of the Business Roundtable—and the value of ensuring enough investment in corporate stakeholders—both Hubbard and Asness are troubled by the prospect of a corporate governance system trying to hold corporate managers accountable in a stakeholder‐centric world.     

Stakeholders and the composition of the voting rights of the board of directors

We propose a new approach to dynamic representation of different groups of stakeholders on the board of directors. This approach is based on a simple economic model of the firm, with an objective function to maximize its market value. We look at the marginal claim of each stakeholder on the assets of the firm. It divides the voting rights based on the change in value of each stakeholder with a one dollar change in the value of the firm as a whole. We translate these conditions to relative voting powers on the board. While there are many claims in the academic and popular literature on sharing voting rights on the board, our paper is the first to propose a quantitative dynamic model of the power sharing in the corporation.