Working with Corporate Social Responsibility in Brazilian Companies: The Role of Managers’ Values in the Maintenance of CSR Cultures

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) refers to the duty of management to consider and respond to issues beyond the organization’s economic and legal requirements in line with social and environmental values. However, ‘management’ is constituted by real people responsible for routine decisions and formulation and implementation of policies. It can be said therefore that the ethical ideals and beliefs of these individuals – in particular their personal values – play an important role in their decisions. It is contended in this article that the personal values of managers may contribute to the creation and maintenance of ‘CSR cultures’ in their organizations; that is, organizational cultures focused on ensuring environmental and social sustainability. Based on an exploratory study carried out in Brazil in 2008, this article explores the perceptions of five CSR managers in relation to the influence of their personal values on their work. The first part discusses the notion of CSR within the context of Brazilian society, the second provides a brief literature review on the link between values and organizational cultures and the third explores the perceptions of the participating managers, identifying the main thematic patterns that emerged in the study.     

Global Standards and Ethical Stock Indexes: The Case of the Dow Jones Sustainability Stoxx Index

The increased scrutiny of investors regarding the non-financial aspects of corporate performance has placed portfolio managers in the position of having to weigh the benefits of ‘holding the market’ against the cost of having positions in companies that are subsequently found to have questionable business practices. The availability of stock indexes based on sustainability screening makes increasingly viable for institutional investors the transition to a portfolio based on a Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) benchmark at relatively low cost. The increasing share of socially responsible investments may play a role in providing incentives towards a continuous upgrading of sustainability standards to the extent that their performance is not systematically inferior to that of the other funds. This article examines whether these incentives have been so far detectable with particular reference to the Dow Jones Sustainability Stoxx Index (DJSSI) that focuses on the European corporations with the highest CSR scores among those included in the Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index. The aim of the article is twofold. First, we analyse the performance of the DJSSI over the period 2001–2006 compared to that of the Surrogate Complementary Index (SCI), a new benchmark that includes only the components of the DJ Stoxx 600 that do not belong to the ethical index to evaluate more correctly the size of possible divergent performances. Second, we perform an event study on the same data set to analyse whether the stock market evaluation reacts to the inclusion (deletion) in the DJSSI. In both cases, the results suggest that the evaluation of the CSR performance of a firm is a significant criterion for asset allocation activities.     

Sulla dinamica dell'allocazione della ricchezza

Le teorie tradizionali di selezione del portafoglio e di equilibrio sui mercati finanziari con informazione perfetta non spiegano né l'esistenza di flussi di capitale, né il volume degli scambi sui mercati stessi. Lo scopo di questo lavoro, che segue il contributo di Dumas (1986), è di giustificare e caratterizzare la dinamica dei mercati finanziari, ossia gli scambi in essi effettuati. In contrasto con il lavoro di Dumas, aui a) dal punto di vista matematico, sono date soluzioni in forma chiusa; b) dal punto di vista della finanza è messo in chiaro il ruolo degli investitori che non hanno comportamenti dihedging. L'ottenimento di soluzioni in forma chiusa apre la strada allo studio della dinamica dei mercati finanziari e dei corrispondenti prezzi, in opposizione al consueto approccio statico.

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Summary Traditional theories of portfolio selection and market equilibrium with rational symmetric information explain neither the existence of capital flows, nor the volume of trade on financial markets. The purpose of this paper, which follows the work by Dumas (1986), is to justify and characterise the dynamics of capital markets. As opposed to Dumas's paper, here two goals are attained: i) from the mathematical point of view, analytic solutions are provided; ii) as for financial theory, the role of investors with no hedging behaviour is clarified. The achievement of explicit solutions opens the way to further developments in the study of financial market flows and indicators in a dynamic framework, instead of the usual static one.

     

An empirical test of the cultural capital hypothesis

Using data from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality, an exploratory, empirical analysis of the cultural capital hypothesis was conducted. The analyses indicate that, while the types of cultural influences cited by proponents of this thesis clearly have negative effects on employment when viewed in isolation from other factors, they are not significant when statistical controls for human capital variables are incorporated into the model. Our findings suggest the need to invest more resources in the public education system and in efforts to combat racial discrimination in the labor market.     

Factors of production,productivity, institutions,and development: Evidence from Brazil

The economic growth and development literature emphasizes that investment in technology and physical and human capital is essential for achieving higher levels of development. Political and economic institutions are also relevant in this process. With a sample of 5,503 Brazilian municipalities, this study carries out a development accounting exercise and measures the effects of institutional quality on per capita gross domestic product (GDP), physical capital intensity, human capital stock, and productivity. The empirical results indicate that institutional quality affects GDP per capita mainly through human capital accumulation and total factor productivity.     

The effect of spouses' relative education on household time allocation

Does spouses' relative education explain their household's distribution of labor? This paper analyzes the effect of spouses' education on time allocated to housework and paid work. To address endogeneity concerns, I exploit changes in spouses' relative education due to remarriage to identify its effects on their time allocation. I find that when a husband marries a wife with a higher relative education than their previous spouse, his share of time on housework increases while his share of time on paid work decreases. In contrast, I find nonsignificant results when a wife remarries a more educated husband than her previous one. I also find that changes in the spouse's education reduce the probability of a spouse staying at home. These findings show that relative human capital plays a role in household labor distribution and motivates a more gender-neutral division of labor within households due to a more evenly distributed time allocation.     

Algorithms and their Affordances: How Crowdworkers Manage Algorithmic Scores in Online Labour Markets

On online labour platforms, algorithmic scores are used as indicators of freelancers' work quality and future performance. Recent studies underscore that, to achieve good scores and secure their presence on platforms, freelancers respond to algorithmic control in different ways. However, we argue, to fully understand how freelancers deal with algorithmic scores, we first need to investigate how they interpret scores and, more specifically, what scores can do for them, i.e., perceived algorithmic affordances and constraints. Our interviews and other qualitative data collected with knowledge intensive gig workers on a major platform allow us to explain how the perceived affordances of algorithms (i.e., barrier, individual visibility, self-extension, rule of the game) act as mechanisms that explain different behavioural and emotional responses over time. Our work contributes to the current debate on the positive and negative consequences of algorithmic work by portraying the fundamental role paid by the individual interpretation of algorithmic scores and by integrating the affordance perspective into our understanding of algorithmic work.