CSR in SMEs: do SMEs matter for the CSR agenda?

In this paper we argue that the collective grandness of small business is often underestimated in CSR research and policy-making. We emphasize the importance of understanding the contexts and the ways in which small- and medium-sized companies engage in CSR and how they differ from multinational companies. We suggest that it might be that researchers and practitioners are asking the wrong questions in their ambitions to prove 'the business case for CSR'. Perhaps we should rather focus on the 'how' and the 'with what impact' questions to understand better the SME engagement in CSR.     

Parental perception of lunch schemes in Danish kindergartens: A cross-sectional survey

Children’s daily consumption of food in childcare institutions has an impact on their public health nutritional status. The collaboration of parents and employees of kindergartens is important to ensure healthy eating habits among the next generation. Consequently, evaluations of lunch schemes are important to provide a good foundation for enhancing communication between home and institutional settings. The aim of this article is to assess parental satisfaction and identify themes related to parental perceptions of lunch schemes in Danish kindergartens. A survey was developed and distributed in four kindergartens with lunch schemes. A combination of closed and open questions were used to evaluate satisfaction and identify positive and negative aspects of the lunch schemes. Parents of 93 children participated in the study and the response rate was 55%. Eighty-nine percent expressed satisfaction with their children’s lunch scheme. According to parents, the most positive aspects were that lunch schemes serve a variety of food, their ability to prevent neophobia, that children learn that eating is a social occasion, and that the arrangements offer convenience to parents. The negative aspects identified were the lack of communication between the kindergarten childcare institutions and the parents regarding the food. Overall, parents are very satisfied with their children’s lunch schemes; however, the information between institutions and parents could be improved.     

The superefficient company

Most companies do a great job promoting efficiency within their own walls, streamlining internal processes wherever possible. But they have less success coordinating cross-company business interactions. When data pass between companies, inconsistencies, errors, and misunderstandings routinely arise, leading to wasted work--for instance, the same sales, order entry, and customer data may be entered repeatedly into different systems. Typically, scores of employees at each company manage these cumbersome interactions. The costs of such inefficiencies are very real and very large. In this article, Michael Hammer outlines the activities and goals used in streamlining cross-company processes. He breaks down the approach into four stages: scoping--identifying the business process for redesign and selecting a partner; organizing--establishing a joint committee to oversee the redesign and convening a design team to implement it; redesigning--taking apart and reassembling the process, with performance goals in mind; and implementing--rolling out the new process and communicating it across the collaborating companies. The author describes how several companies have streamlined their supply-chain and product development processes. Plastics compounder Geon integrated its forecasting and fulfillment processes with those of its main supplier after watching inventories, working capital, and shipping times creep up. General Mills coordinated the delivery of its yogurt with Land O'Lakes; butter and yogurt travel cost effectively in the same trucks to the same stores. Hammer says this new kind of collaboration promises to change the traditional vocabulary of corporate relationships. What if you and I sell different products to the same customer? We're not competitors, but what are we? In the past, we didn't care. Now, we should, the author says.     

How executives can shape their company's information systems.

When a big New York bank expanded in London, technical specialists in the two cities disagreed about which vendor's information system was best. The debate continued for several months until finally the technical experts took the issue to a senior-management policy committee. But the senior managers didn't understand the terminology and kept postponing the decision. Meanwhile, the London office complained loudly that the slowdown was threatening the unit's growth. Like the bank, most companies need a new approach to making decisions about information technology (IT), especially since it now affects so many aspects of the business. The company's technical experts seldom understand the overall business, and the senior managers who understand the business are usually lost when it comes to computers. One way to blend both perspectives is to establish a task force that solicits input from top management and creates a set of principles to guide subsequent investments in information technology. By drawing on 10 to 15 statements that reflect management's basic beliefs about how the company should use IT, the task force translates the language of corporate strategy into computerese. For instance, an electronics company wanted various functions to act more like one company. It created a principle that said, "Information systems will provide application that support cross-functional integration of business processes." Managers making subsequent decisions about computers could immediately rule out any technologies that contradicted that statement. Principles thus speed up the decision-making process, but more important, they ensure that every investment in IT helps the corporation achieve its strategic goals.     

Economic Analysis for the UK National Ecosystem Assessment: Synthesis and Scenario Valuation of Changes in Ecosystem Services

We combine natural science modelling and valuation techniques to present economic analyses of a variety of land use change scenarios generated for the UK National Ecosystem Assessment. Specifically, the agricultural, greenhouse gas, recreational and urban greenspace impacts of the envisioned land use changes are valued. Particular attention is given to the incorporation of spatial variation in the natural environment and to addressing issues such as biodiversity impacts where reliable values are not available. Results show that the incorporation of ecosystem services and their values within analyses can substantially change decisions.     

The Construction of Corporate Social Responsibility in Network Societies: A Communication View

The paper introduces the communication view on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), which regards CSR as communicatively constructed in dynamic interaction processes in today’s networked societies. Building on the idea that communication constitutes organizations we discuss the potentially indeterminate, disintegrative, and conflictual character of CSR. We hereby challenge established mainstream views on CSR such as the instrumental view, which regards CSR as an organizational instrument to reach organizational aims such as improved reputation and financial performance, and the political-normative view on CSR, which highlights the societal conditions and role of corporations in creating norms. We argue that both the established views, by not sufficiently acknowledging communication dynamics in networked societies, remain biased in three ways: control-biased, consistency-biased, and consensus-biased. We discuss implications of these biases and propose a future research agenda for the communication view on CSR.     

When Philosophy and Business Professors Talk: Assessment of Ethical Reasoning in a Cross Disciplinary Business Ethics Course

Can instructors with apparently divergent approaches to the goals and methods of teaching business ethics agree upon a core set of course objectives? Can they agree upon a common method of assessment for measuring student performance against shared standards? This paper reports the results of a project intended to address these questions. The goals of the project were threefold: (1) to identify a shared set of core competencies for all students in business ethics; (2) to adopt a common assessment of ethical reasoning (neutral to disciplinary bias) for measuring student performance in core competencies; (3) to determine whether students show improvement in core competencies over the course of a semester. Our findings suggest that it is possible to find common ground in measurable objectives and to expect instructors to interpret, apply, and teach to these objectives effectively without infringing upon their disciplinary differences.