Beyond Legitimacy: A Case Study in BP’s “Green Lashing”

This paper discusses the issue of legitimacy and, in particular the processes of building, losing, and repairing environmental legitimacy in the context of the Deepwater Horizon case. Following the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in 2010, BP plc. was accused of having set new records in the degree of divergence between its actual operations and what it had been communicating with regard to corporate responsibility. Its legitimacy crisis is here to be appraised as a case study in the discrepancy between symbolic and substantive strategies in corporate greening and its communication. A narrative analysis of BP’s “beyond petroleum”-rebranding and the “making this right”-campaign issued in response to the Gulf of Mexico disaster discusses their respective implications for (green) corporate change. Further, the question is addressed why BP’s green image endeavors were so widely accepted at first, only to find themselves dismissed as corporate greenwashing now. The study concludes that where a corporation’s “green narrative” consistently evokes established narratives, its legitimacy will be judged against narrative, rather than empirical truth. Thus, the narrative will be more willingly accepted as speaking for the issuing company’s legitimacy, irrespective of whether it reflects substantive greening or not.     

Europe’s Place in the Global Economy — What Does the Last Half Century Suggest for the Future?

When Intereconomics was founded 50 years ago, the world was very different. In this contribution, we describe some of the major developments in the global economy and provide an outlook for the medium-term future until 2030. We assess broad demographic trends for major regions of the world, then look at GDP growth and trade, before we turn to human capital and innovation.     

Deans’ Forum on the Globalization of Business Education and Development: Reflections and Directions for the Future

In this special issue of the Journal of Teaching in International Business, a number of deans reflect on the growth and development in global business education and development. The objective of the special issue is to provide insight into where the field originated and where it needs to move to continue advancement. Seven articles, written by current and former business school deans and their colleagues, are presented from a strategic perspective that cover the curricular, research, and business community outreach issues as they relate to international business academic and professional development programs. Through the presentation and discussion of these related issues, a dialogue will be started to set the agenda for continued advancement and sustainability of international business education across the globe.     

Setting the conditions for going global: Dubai’s transformations and the Emirati women

Abstract

This study investigated how the rapid transformation of Dubai has affected the forms and shape of Emiratis’ consumption. Analysis of participant observations, projective techniques and existential phenomenological interviews with Emirati women living in Dubai uncovered ambivalence about economic power and loss of traditions and strategies for going global including embracing local capital, brand selection and spatiotemporal restrictions. The discussion notes that the global is something that is locally constructed whereby the locals play a key role in developing global structures of common difference.     

EU Agricultural Policy Reform: Evaluating the EU’s New Methodology for Direct Payments

The Common Agricultural Policy has changed significantly over time. Major changes are now introduced every seven years, with the last fundamental change agreed upon in 2013 for the period 2014-2020. Policymakers also agreed to a mid-term review in order to evaluate the performance of numerous new regulations. The Commission has elaborated a methodology for the evaluation and has already published some documents with initial results for past periods. This article reviews whether the methodology and database used by the Commission are in line with the highest standards for policy evaluation.     

Transformational Leadership and Follower’s Unethical Behavior for the Benefit of the Company: A Two-Study Investigation

Although the ethical dimension of transformational leadership has frequently been discussed over the last years, there is little empirical research on employees’ ethical behavior as an outcome of transformational leadership. This two-study investigation examined the relationship between transformational leadership and unethical yet pro-organizational follower behavior (UPB). Moreover, mediating and moderating processes were addressed. Our research yielded a positive relationship between transformational leadership and employees’ willingness to engage in UPB. Furthermore, both studies showed employees’ organizational identification to function as a mediating mechanism and employees’ personal disposition toward ethical/unethical behavior to moderate the relationship between organizational identification and willingness to engage in UPB. Altogether, results indicate transformational leadership to entail a certain risk of encouraging followers to contribute to their company’s success in ways that are generally considered to be unethical. Implications regarding the ethical dimension of transformational leadership are discussed.     

Let’s Talk Rights: Messages for the Just Corporation–Transforming the Economy Through the Language of Rights

Neoliberal globalization has not yielded the results it promised; global inequality has risen, poverty and hunger are still prevailing in large parts of this world. If this devastating situation shall be improved, economists must talk less about economic growth and more about people’s rights. The use of the language of rights will be key for making the economy work more in favor of the least advantaged in this world. Not only will it provide us with the vocabulary necessary to reframe such pressing global problems and to find adequate economic solutions; it will also deliver the basis for deriving according duties and duty-bearers – the language of rights is congruent with the language of justice and as such it is inevitably and at the same time the language of obligations. The language of obligations exposes the multinational corporation as one of the main agents of justice in the global economy. Taking distributive justice as a starting point for reflection, a consistent derivation of the multinational’s moral obligations must focus on capabilities rather than on causality. This will lead to a shift from merely passive to active duties and accordingly to a stronger emphasis on the corporation’s contribution to the realization of positive rights. Biography: Florian Wettstein is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethics and Business Law at University of St.␣Thomas. Before that, he taught in the Business and Society Program at York University (Toronto). Also, he was a research associate at the Institute for Business Ethics at the University St. of Gallen (Switzerland), a visiting scholar at Carroll School of Management at Boston College, and a research fellow in the Program on Human Rights and Justice at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).     

Internet and consumer privacy: Considering the FTC’s “do not track” proposal

The digital economy relies on the collection of personal data on an ever-increasing scale. Regulations have to be found which can provide an optimal balance between consumers’ interest in privacy and the benefits from innovations that rely on the largely invisible collection, retention and sharing of consumer data. The following article discusses current US reform proposals and their relevance for the ongoing debate in Europe.     

The U.S. immigration debate: what’s all the shouting for?

Potential GDP growth has slowed by 1.3% a year. The main culprit is labor force decline. It follows logically that a more welcoming immigration policy would be responsive to our demographic challenges and thereby complementary to macroeconomic growth. Ironically, anger at immigration has grown in inverse proportion to actual immigration flows. There is little evidence that immigrants have negative impacts on the wages of native-born workers, and increased immigration would likely have a net positive fiscal impact. Based on these economic considerations, the U.S. immigration debate seems driven by much more heat than light.     

Fair Division Approach for the European Union’s Structural Policy Budget Allocation: An Application Study

Fairness of resource allocation remains one of the basic criteria of public choice. Taking fairness into account in public resource allocation is critically important when decision-making creates conflicts of interest among potential stakeholders. The European Union’s structural policy budget allocation is especially prone to such conflicts, mainly due to its complexity and lack of commonly accepted indexes to measure its effects. The objective of this paper is to evaluate if a fair-division algorithm can be effectively implemented in practice to diminish conflicts and provide a fair allocation of resources. The practical application involves a problem of the EU’s rural-development policy budget in Poland. The algorithm provides a simple formal framework for budget allocation and utilizes structural program evaluation questionnaires of the key stakeholder groups. The provided example demonstrates that the implementation of a fair division algorithm is feasible in practice. The algorithm is flexible, robust to variation in pre-set budget constraints, and results in a sensible solution that achieves consensus among the stakeholder groups.     

Discussion of “A Theoretical Framework of Professional Accountants’ Identity Formation and Directions for Future Research”

Many researchers believe the tremendous industrial development over the past two centuries is unsustainable because it has led to unintended ecological deterioration. Despite the ever-growing attention sustainable supply-chain management (SSCM) has received, most SSCM research and models look at the consequences, rather than the antecedents or motives of such responsible practices. The few studies that explore corporate motives have remained largely qualitative, and large-scale empirical analyses are scarce. Drawing on multiple theories and combining supply-chain and business ethics literature, we purport that instrumental, relational, and moral motives are behind a firm’s engagement in SSCM practices. Specifically, we examine the links between corporate motives, SSCM practices, and firm performance. Using a sample of 259 supply-chain firms in Germany, we empirically test five hypothesized relationships. Our results reveal that relational and moral motives are key drivers, and that firms exhibiting high levels of moral obligations tend to outperform those primarily driven by amoral considerations. Findings of this study contribute to multiple literatures espousing sustainability management and can help policy makers, stakeholder groups, and scholars develop more robust strategies for encouraging firms to practice SSCM.     

“Moral Distance” in Organizations: An Inquiry into Ethical Violence in the Works of Kafka

In this paper, we demonstrate that the works of Franz Kafka provide an exemplary resource for the investigation of “moral distance” in organizational ethics. We accomplish this in two ways, first by drawing on Kafka’s work to navigate the complexities of the debate over the ethics of bureaucracy, using his work to expand and enrich the concept of “moral distance.” Second, Kafka’s work is used to investigate the existence of “ethical violence” within organizations which entails acts of condemnation and cruelty purportedly in the name of ethics. Kafka’s work provides insight into the processes of moral distancing across a range of organizational contexts including highly formal as well as more informal settings. The paper enriches the concept “moral distance” by identifying the existence of facilitators of moral distance beyond the mechanisms of formal rationality that have been the focus of existing studies. We argue that Kafka’s intense portrayal of “ethical violence” points to an aporia at the very heart of organizational ethics.     

Greece:Strategic Partner for China s“Go Global”Policy

China and Greece have both made,great contributions to the world s cultural heritage.As the Chinese economy has become an economic powerhouse in the global economy,the Greek economy has proven capabilities and is constantly improving. Today,bilateral economic and business relations are advancing,and there is a steady increase in trade,along with many opportunities for investment.     

Stakeholder’s Preference and Rational Compliance: A Comment on Sacconi’s “CSR as a Model for Extended Corporate Governance II: Compliance, Reputation and Reciprocity”

Lorenzo Sacconi’s recent re-statement of his social contract account of business ethics is a major contribution to our understanding of the normative nature of CSR as the expression of a fair multi-party agreement supported by the economic rationality of each participant. However, at one crucial point in his theory, Sacconi introduces the concept of stakeholders’ conformist preferences – their disposition to punish the firm if it defects from the agreement, refusing to abide by its own explicit CSR policies and norms. We take issue with him over this concept: we show that the assumption of conformist preferences is a moral premise, and it arguably weakens the normativity of the theory as a whole. As an alternative, we propose an evolutionary game theoretic approach. We draw upon recent applications of evolutionary game theory to moral philosophy (Skyrms, Danielson), and we use a computer simulation of the trust game. According to this approach, the failure of the logic of reputation, which is the problem conformist preferences were introduced to solve, is overcome through the dynamics of interaction.     

“Apple: Good Business,Poor Citizen”: A Practitioner’s Response

This paper was written in response to Etzioni’s “Apple: Good Business Poor Citizen” (J Bus Ethics, 2016, doi: 10.1007/s10551-016-3233-4). It argues that Etzioni is correct in seeing the recent conflict between Apple and the FBI over cracking the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone as requiring that considerations of national security be balanced against the rights of those it might impact. There are nonetheless critical questions about one must still ask: whose rights are curbed, to what degree, and how does a society decide which side to favor? More attention needs to be paid to the privacy of other iPhone users and, importantly, the burden that hacking the phone might impose on Apple, either impairing its brand value or compromising its business potential. Finally, by asking ‘who judges the balance?’, it questions whether labeling Apple a poor citizen is premature, as they had only begun challenging the FBI’s judgment through the judicial process.     

China’s “Socialist Market Economy”: A Systemic Trade Issue

The socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics has turned into a systemic trade and investment issue both bilaterally and multilaterally. The hope that WTO membership would eventually transform China into a market economy with distortions that would gradually become tolerable and negotiable has not been borne out.     

Consumer Responses to Femvertising: A Data-Mining Case of Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” on YouTube

Adopting a combination of qualitative textual analysis, human-based content analysis, and machine learning–based data mining, we propose a procedure to analyze user-generated content (UGC) on social media using Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” as a case for demonstration. We provide a guideline to explicate all six steps of the analysis procedure: topic identification through qualitative textual analysis, generation of labeled data through human coding, data preprocessing, evaluation of machine learning–based classifiers, topic classification of unlabeled data, and conducting research. The study has important methodological implications for advertising scholars and practitioners.     

Country of Origin Principle in the EU Market for Audiovisual Media Services: Consumer’s Friend or Foe?

The country of origin principle, the cornerstone of the EU Television Without Frontiers Directive – to become the Audiovisual Media Services Directive – is often criticised as being insensitive to the legitimate national public interest to protect viewers – and consumers – of audiovisual media content. This paper seeks to demystify this pessimistic perception of the country of origin rule from the perspective of the consumer interest. It demonstrates that the possible negative repercussions of the country of origin logic for consumer welfare are mitigated in three ways: by specific derogations possibilities foreseen in the Directive in case of violations of the fundamental rules on protection of minors and of human dignity; through the margin of broadcasting control left to the Member States in the areas beyond those coordinated by the Directive, and by means of a new two-step anti-circumvention procedure introduced by the new Directive.

Towards a Handbook on European Contract Law and Beyond: The Commission’s 2004 Communication “European Contract Law and the Revision of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Acquis</Emphasis>: The Way Forward”

The European contract law project has crossed the threshold between an intellectual exercise and concrete policy. The 2004 Communication on the way forward describes the procedure to implement the policy suggested by the 2003 Action Plan, and so it would now be timely to give some thought to the likely impact of the Common Frame of Reference (CFR) on future Community law. It is submitted that the CFR is indispensable for the planned crafting of full harmonisation consumer contract law. This article therefore focuses on the possible uses of the CFR for consumer legislation and attempts to make the case for a recasting of Community law on consumer protection as a first priority in the implementation of the project. Based on policy papers and policy considerations, this article suggests making a test case of the travel and tourism sectors. It also reflects further on the potential virtues of an optional instrument for consumer legislation.