Let Them Eat (Genetically Re-engineered) Cake and the Little Purple Pill: A Rejoinder to Miles, Munilla and Covin

This paper critiques a recent article in this journal in terms of its use of persuasive techniques. The central issue of the original article by Miles, Munilla and Covin and this paper is whether there should be a change in intellectual property rights to address the needs of impoverished people who are HIV positive or have full blown AIDS and the countries that do not have the means to buy AIDS medication in the absence of subsidies. This paper argues that patents are state sanctioned monopolies that worked effectively for nearly a century. However, new circumstances and a globally interdependent world represent a new environment calling for an adjustment in the conventional public policy premises underlying patents. Most of the meaning and complexity of this issue is lost to the persuasive techniques of the original article.Dennis Ray teaches and researches international and comparative entrepreneurship, technology entrepreneurship and business in Asia. He teaches the international business strategy capstone course.     

Personal Values as A Catalyst for Corporate Social Entrepreneurship

The literature acknowledges a distinction between immoral, amoral and moral management. This paper makes a case for the employee (at any level) as a moral agent, even though the paper begins by highlighting a body of evidence which suggests that individual moral agency is sacrificed at work and is compromised in deference to other pressures. This leads to a discussion about the notion of discretion and an examination of a separate, contrary body of literature which indicates that some individuals in corporations may use their discretion to behave in a socially entrepreneurial manner. My underlying assumption is that CSR isn’t solely driven by economics and that it may also be championed as a result of a personal morality, inspired by employees’ own socially oriented personal values. A conceptual framework is put forward and it is suggested that individuals may be categorized as Active or Frustrated Corporate Social Entrepreneurs; Conformists or Apathetics, distinguished by their individualistic or collectivist personal values. In a discussion of the nature of values, this paper highlights how values may act as drivers of our behavior and pays particular attention to the values of the entrepreneur, thereby linking the existing debate on moral agency with the field of corporate social responsibility.     

The Social Commitment of Brazilian Managers: The Concept,a Scale,and an Empirical Study of Corporate Social Responsibility

The purpose of this study is to analyze the attitudes of Brazilian managers toward Corporate Social Responsibility, defined as their willingness to simultaneously meet the economic, legal, and ethical commitments that bind business companies to society. A Managers' Social Commitment Index (SCI) is proposed and a new scale is presented and confirmed as a reliable research instrument in a field study involving 252 Brazilian business managers. Results revealed that managers prioritize economic commitment, even though as they get older and more experienced they tend to sacrifice this commitment to comply with the law. Women showed greater willingness to integrate ethical interests in management decision making, revealing a higher degree of social commitment.     

Social Marketing and Privately Held Companies: The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility Activities on Romanian Consumers

The notion of corporate social responsibility has evolved into a fairly complex concept that can influence the very world we live in. Today's society is interested not only in companies' financial results but also in the way they conduct their businesses. Corporations everywhere try to respond to new environmental challenges by actively engaging in the life of the community and by developing relationships based on mutual trust with consumers. This article introduces the corporate social responsibility domain by underlining the importance of this concept to the later development of a company. The article denounces the results of research conducted on Romanian consumers regarding corporate social responsibility campaigns undergone by firms in Romania. Its purpose is to bring insight into Romanian consumers' perceptions of recent social campaigns, reviewing the extent to which these consumers are willing to become involved in society's well-being. The survey conducted here attempts to provide answers to issues that concern the companies' involvement type, their purview, the reasons for participating in society's welfare, as well as the social campaigns' most common action areas. The results gathered show that corporate social responsibility is not only a promotion method, but a method that implies the effective involvement in the life of the community and in its subsequent issues, therefore representing a real means of support for the economic development of the community in question. In conclusion, companies must put their social conscience into use when dealing with their clients and stakeholders, by offering solutions to environmental concerns, resource management, mutual aid, and welfare rising from corporate support.     

An Ethical Framework for the Marketing of Corporate Social Responsibility

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop an ethical framework for the marketing of corporate social responsibility. Methods The approach is a conceptual one based on virtue ethics and on the corporate identity literature. Furthermore, empirical research results are used to describe the opportunities and pitfalls of using marketing communication tools in the strategy of building a virtuous corporate brand. Results/conclusions An ethical framework that addresses the paradoxical relation between the consequentialist perspective many proponents of the marketing of CSR adopt, and ethical perspectives which criticize an exclusive profit-oriented approach to CSR. Furthermore, three CSR strategies in relation to the marketing of CSR are discussed. For each CSR strategy it is explored how a corporation could avoid falling into the promise/performance gap.     

Mining, Corporate Social Responsibility and the "Community": The Case of Rio Tinto, Richards Bay Minerals and the Mbonambi

Mining companies have long had a questionable reputation for social responsibility, especially in developing countries. In recent years, mining companies operating in developing countries have come under increased pressure as opponents have placed them under greater public scrutiny. Mining companies have responded by developing global corporate social responsibility strategies as part of their larger global business strategies. In these strategies, a prominent place is given to their relationship with local communities. For business ethics, one basic issue is whether such an approach to corporate responsibility is likely to effectively address the development concerns of local communities in developing countries. This paper addresses this question by investigating how the corporate social responsibility agenda of a major minor company has been implemented by one of its subsidiaries in South Africa.     

The Meaning of Entrepreneurship: A Modular Concept

Entrepreneurship has been characterised as one of the most intriguing but equally elusive concepts in economics. This critical review first surveys its major intellectual roots and then proposes a modular concept of entrepreneurship that preserves essential distinctions along its behavioural, functional, and occupational dimensions. It argues that the behavioural definition identifies the only attribute that is both comprehensive and unique to the nature of entrepreneurship, while the functional and occupational definitions add the specificity required for many analytical purposes. To validate the concept, the paper discusses the appropriate empirical units of observation and maps a general policy framework.

基于众创生态视角的大学生创新创业环境建设研究

我国现阶段正处于创新驱动的环境中,从生态层面对大学生创新创业环境进行系统性研究,将大学生作为生态化的主要驱动力量,实施多种创新要素同时驱动,以推动创新服务环境的优化升级,进而在教育中逐渐塑造和培养学生创新创业的能力。在大众创业创新的环境下,高校积极培养创新型人才,引入开放式的教育思维,借助于产学研多种资源的合理利用,构建了有机生态链,实现动态化发展,形成多元化的教育环境。本文讨论了大学生创新创业的发展环境,然后进一步提出了开展创新创业环境建设的有效策略,对于大学生今后的创新创业活动发挥了积极的推动作用。     

Modelling the Impact of Environmental and Organizational Determinants on Green Supply Chain Innovation and Performance

Both customers and suppliers are becoming increasingly concerned about environmental issues in modern food chains. A firm’s decision to implement green supply chain management is based on the social objectives of the firm and its management, its desire to pursue corporate social responsibility, its relationships with channel partners, and environmental determinants such as government legislation. The speed at which green supply chain management is implemented within an organization depends on its agility and its ability to facilitate innovation. Innovation may take the form of new product development or new process development, including the introduction of environmental management systems and total quality management in both production and purchasing. This article presents a conceptual model to explain how the various theoretical constructs are related and how innovation effects green supply chain management and performance.     

TMT社会网络、公司创业与企业绩效关系研究

拥有大量内外部信息资源的高管团队(TMT),其社会网络不但可以提供公司创业的机会来源,也是企业现在绩效和未来绩效的影响因素。TMT的社会网络只有通过公司创业机制才能转化为企业绩效的价值创造过程。中国背景下的实证研究显示:TMT社会网络、公司创业都与企业绩效正相关,对于企业而言,要高度重视通过管理手段激励整个高管团队的所有成员去构建有效的内外部社会网络;公司创业的价值增值中介作用也得到证实,公司创业发挥着重要的资源整合作用,有价值的TMT内外部社会网络只有充分融入企业的产品或服务创新,以及深层次的战略更新过程中,为企业的价值增值服务,才能转变为企业绩效。     

Professional Ethical Standards,Corporate Social Responsibility,and the Perceived Role of Ethics and Social Responsibility

This study explored several proposed relationships among professional ethical standards, corporate social responsibility, and the perceived role of ethics and social responsibility. Data were collected from 313 business managers registered with a large professional research association with a mailed self-report questionnaire. Mediated regression analysis indicated that perceptions of corporate social responsibility partially mediated the positive relationship between perceived professional ethical standards and the believed importance of ethics and social responsibility. Perceptions of corporate social responsibility also fully mediated the negative relationship between perceived professional ethical standards and the subordination of ethics and social responsibility. The results suggested that professions should develop ethical standards to encourage social responsibility, since these actions are associated with enhanced employee ethical attitudes. Sean Valentine (D.B.A., Louisiana Tech University) is an Associate Professor of Management in the College of Business at the University of Wyoming. His research interests include ethical decision making, organizational culture, and job attitudes. His research has appeared in journals such as Human Relations, Behavioral Research in Accounting, Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, and Journal of Business Research. Gary Fleischman (Ph.D., Texas Tech University) is an Associate Professor of Accounting and the McGee Hearne and Paiz Faculty Scholar in Accounting at the University of Wyoming. His teaching expertise is in accounting and entrepreneurship, and his research interests are in business ethics and behavioral business research. He has published in journals such as Behavioral Research in Accounting, The International Journal of Accounting, and Journal of Business Ethics.     

The Reasons Behind Non-Ethical Behaviour in Business and Entrepreneurship

Despite the recent increase in interest in corporate social responsibility and the propagation of corporate governance in both business and academic literature, from observations of actual practice, the author has seen at all company levels, in everyday operations, instances of non-ethical behaviour vis-à-vis the whole gamut of stakeholders. This state of affairs is linked with: pressure from stakeholders, short-term tactics, hegemony of financial considerations, ‘juridisation’ of business, the tyranny of communications and the media and the difficulties in translating strategy into practical implementation. The paper scrutinises the motivation and the psychology of entrepreneurs and business people, and their behaviour is compared to other professional groups and confronted with the decline in ethics in society as described by some important observers. The conclusion drawn is that the recent positive evolutions do not provide sufficient ethical guidelines for the day-to-day activities of middle managers and entrepreneurs in the present competitive environment. Managers will always be confronted by difficult choices with ethical dilemmas. There will always be a tension between theory and pragmatism, but progress can be made with the effective implementation of the ethical discourse in companies. To achieve this, ethical management should not be confined to the large strategic issues but also applied to the small practical matters of everyday business life. Ethics in business and entrepreneurship requires more than corporate governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR).     

Revisiting the Concept of a Societal Orientation: Conceptualization and Delineation

Marketers have traditionally evaluated products and practices on the basis of whether something could be sold. It is also important to evaluate products and practices from a societal perspective, “Should a product be sold?” The first idea reflects a managerial orientation and what must be done to sell a product; the second idea reflects a societal orientation and the impact of selling a product. In relation to the second idea, the societal marketing concept was introduced in 1972. There has been little advancement in our understanding of a societal orientation since that time. The current study presents a conceptualization of a societal orientation based on a review of literature and qualitative interviews. The construct was conceptualized as “attention to the long-term well-being of individuals and society at large by enhancing positive impacts from and reducing negative effects associated with production and consumption of a product.” Five domains comprising a societal orientation are proposed: physical consequences, psychological well-being, social relationships, economic contribution, and environmental consciousness.     

The Effects of Person–Organization Ethical Fit on Employee Attraction and Retention: Towards a Testable Explanatory Model

An exploratory model is presented as a heuristic to indicate how individual perceptions of corporate reputation (before joining) and corporate ethical values (after joining) generate specific individual organizational senses of fit. The paper suggests that an ethical dimension of person-organization fit may go some way in explaining superior acquisition and retention of staff by those who are attracted to specific organizations by levels of corporate social performance consonant with their ethical expectations, or who remain with them by virtue of better personal ethical fits with extant organizational ethical values. Specifically, the model suggests that individual misfits that arise from ethical expectations that either exceed or fall short of perceived organizational ethical performances lead to problematic acquisition and retention behavioural outcomes.     

Ethics Programs, Perceived Corporate Social Responsibility and Job Satisfaction

Companies offer ethics codes and training to increase employees’ ethical conduct. These programs can also enhance individual work attitudes because ethical organizations are typically valued. Socially responsible companies are likely viewed as ethical organizations and should therefore prompt similar employee job responses. Using survey information collected from 313 business professionals, this exploratory study proposed that perceived corporate social responsibility would mediate the positive relationships between ethics codes/training and job satisfaction. Results indicated that corporate social responsibility fully or partially mediated the positive associations between four ethics program variables and individual job satisfaction, suggesting that companies might better manage employees’ ethical perceptions and work attitudes with multiple policies, an approach endorsed in the ethics literature. Sean Valentine (D.B.A., Louisiana Tech University) is an Associate Professor of Management in the college of Business at the University of Wyoming. His teaching and research interests include business ethics, organizational behavior, and human resource management. He has published in journals such as Behavioral Research in Accounting, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, and Journal of Business Ethics. Gary Fleischman (Ph.D., Texas Tech University) is an Associate Professor and is the McGee Hearne and Paiz Faculty Scholar in Accounting at the University of Wyoming. His teaching expertise is in accounting and entrepreneurship and his research interests are in business ethics and behavioral business research. He has published in journals such as Behavioral Research in Accounting, The International Journal of Accounting and Journal of Business Ethics.     

非正式制度安排促进企业创新机理研究

非正式制度安排在企业发展中的作用日益显现,从企业文化、企业家精神两个层面来分析非正式制度安排作用于企业创新的机理中,可以看出在企业创新过程中,在关注正式制度安排的同时,不能忽视非正式制度安排对企业创新的重要促进作用。     

Reasoning about Responsibilities: Mining Company Managers on What Stakeholders are Owed

Stakeholder theories propose that managers are responsible not only for maximizing shareholder value, but also for taking into account the well being of other parties affected by corporate decisions. While the language of stakeholder theory has been taken up in industries like mining, controversy remains. Disagreements arise not only about the apportionment of costs and benefits among stakeholders, but about who counts as a stakeholder and about how "costs" and "benefits" are to be conceived. This paper investigates these questions empirically by examining how managers in one mining company talk about corporate responsibilities and by analysing the explicit and implicit values systems and moral logics which inform this talk. The investigations discovered that while some claims by stakeholder groups were readily accommodated by managers, others were not. Analysis of the value frameworks employed by the mangers confirms the views of leading stakeholder theorists that stakeholder theory is grounded in the realities of management practice and behaviour.     

Corporate Social Strategy and the Generation of Benefits: Case Studies in the Brazilian Electricity and Supermarket Industries

In recent years, scholars and executives alike have devoted attention to the implications of Corporate Social Responsibility policies and practices as well as their relationship to strategy. The objectives of the present article are to investigate the interaction between corporate social responsibility and strategy and the benefits that this relationship can yield to companies. For this purpose, a qualitative multiple case study was made of four Brazilian corporations, two in the supermarket sector and two in the energy distribution sector, comparing a competitive and a monopolized sector in Brazil. The data were collected through interviews with executives from social and environmental areas and through secondary sources. The study finds that corporate social strategy provides several benefits, among them attracting and retaining valuable human resources and enhancing company image and reputation     

Broadening the Concept of International Entrepreneurship: Internationalisation, Networks and Politics

In this article, the situation where a company internationalises over an extended period without changing operation mode is explored. The focus of the empirical research is the Australian company CSR and its large-scale sugar exporting operations, which developed over a period of about 75 years. Because of the highly politicised nature of the sugar industry in many countries, CSR was called upon to make extensive investments in political networks in order to achieve its global sugar exporting operations. Overall the CSR experience demonstrates that it is possible to stretch the use of a given mode, although this may demand considerable creativity in market, network and policy responses of a kind which illustrate that international entrepreneurship may come in many guises, and may need to be viewed in a broader way.     

Strategic consequences of being unsympathetic: For‐profit companies benefit more than individuals from focusing on responsibility

Previous research has found that consumers ascribe mental states to for‐profit companies that enable them to elicit anger more easily than sympathy. The current study applies these findings to demonstrate how this evaluative asymmetry in consumer perceptions favor different strategies for individuals and companies managing conflicts and crises. First, it is shown that the mental states consumers ascribe to for‐profit companies enable them to elicit anger and admiration more easily than sympathy. Second, due to their ability to elicit anger more easily than sympathy, it is found that in conflicts between for‐profit companies and individuals, companies are evaluated more favorably when they focus attention on which side perpetrated the most harm, while individuals are evaluated more favorably when they focus on which side was most victimized. Third, due to their ability to elicit admiration more easily than sympathy, it is found that for‐profit companies derive greater benefits than individuals do from proactively taking responsibility to resolve crises rather than deflecting responsibility through claims of victimhood. Discussion focuses on marketing applications for companies managing conflicts and crises.