Managing contradictions of corporate social responsibility: the sustainability of diversity in a frontrunner firm

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has attracted increasing attention in business and research. Studies have documented how management concepts such as diversity management are translated and adapted to differential local sociocultural contexts outside their countries of origin. More research is needed concerning how CSR concepts are translated and practiced locally within particular organizations. This research is based on an organizational ethnography of the management of multiple social, ethical and business logics of CSR in a Danish frontrunner firm. The study contributes with insights into the ongoing organizational management of potentially opposing logics in CSR. Findings show that managing contradictions of CSR is an ongoing challenge and accomplishment influencing whether ethical, social and business logics collide or reinforce each other. The study shows that when ethics are framed as means to economic ends, some social responsibilities have a tendency to be disregarded in practice.     

The devil dwells in the tails

This paper explores firm growth rate distribution in a Gibrat’s Law context. It is novel in two respects. First, rather than limiting the analysis to a focus on the conditional mean, we investigate the entire shape of the distribution. Second, we show that differences in the firm growth rate process between large and small firms are highly circumstantial and depend on the industry dynamics. The data used include more than 9,000 Danish manufacturing, services and construction firms. We provide robust evidence indicating that firm growth studies should concentrate less on explaining means and instead focus on other parts of the firm growth rate distribution.     

The taxman tools up: An event history study of the introduction of the personal income tax

The introduction of income taxation was a landmark in the historical development of the fiscal state of the now developed world. This paper presents an event history study of the adoption of the income tax in 17 countries from western Europe, north America, Oceania and Japan between 1815 and 1939. We find evidence that spending pressures, reductions in tax collection costs and to a lesser extent social learning played a significant role for the adoption decision. We also find evidence that the extension of the franchise at first reduced the likelihood of adoption of the income tax, but eventually as universal suffrage was approached increased the likelihood.     

WHY DO WE LIE? A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO THE DISHONESTY LITERATURE

Over the last decade, a massive body of research has been devoted to uncovering human dishonesty. In the present paper, we review more than a hundred papers from this literature and provide a comprehensive overview by first listing the existing theoretical frameworks, and then covering the common empirical approaches, synthesizing the demographic and personal characteristics of those who cheat, identifying the behavioural mechanisms found that affect dishonesty and finally we finish by discussing how the empirical evidence fit theory. Overall, the review concludes that many people behave dishonestly, but also that it is a highly malleable behavior sensitive to elements such as decision contexts, behaviour of others, state of mind and depletion. The review can be used as an overview of the dishonesty literature or as a guide or work of reference for selected topics of interest.     

How institutional conditions impact university–industry search strategies and networks

A wide range of research has studied interactions between academic and industrial organisations. Less research has combined institutional theory and the terminology of social networks in order to investigate how different institutional conditions across scientific fields impact university–industry search strategies and networks in various ways. Based on a comparative analysis of the institutional conditions in two different scientific fields, we argue that the UI search processes and network formations of a high-tech small firm are shaped by these different institutional conditions within which they are embedded. The study contributes to knowledge about how the significance of weak and strong ties is relative to varying institutional conditions in general high-tech vs. life sciences and why embeddedness in pre-existing ties is not necessarily the most effective means for firms to optimise UI search and network-formation strategies.