The Strategic Cognition View of Issue Salience and the Evolution of a Political Issue : Landis & Gyr, the Hungarian Uprising and East-West Trade, 1953–1967

Why do firms facing similar stakeholder issues respond quite differently? The recently introduced strategic cognition view of issue salience and firm responsiveness (hereinafter: issue salience model) seeks to tackle this core question of stakeholder theory. I extend the nascent theorizing with a historical case study in order to rethink the model’s firm-centric perspective. The firm under examination in this historical case study is the Swiss multinational Landis & Gyr (LG) during the Cold War period. Like many other Swiss exportoriented companies in the 1950s and early 1960s, LG was challenged by Swiss pressure groups, which were highly effective at putting an issue on the public agenda: …

A Case Study on the Implementation of Stakeholder Management in Organizational Practice

Recent research makes a strong argument for studying how organizations can implement a strategic stakeholder management approach. In this paper, we analyze an empirical case study in order to gain refined knowledge and develop ‘best’ implementation tactics, building on Plaza-Ubeda et al., (A case study of stakeholder identification and prioritization by managers, Journal of Business Ethics, 75: 1–23, 2010) conceptualization of the implementation of stakeholder integration (SI). The case study draws on a project concerning our own university, a private higher-education provider, which faces a new regulatory environment. In response to new legal measures, which include accounting for stakehol…

Facing the Normative Challenges : The Potential of Reflexive Historical Research

This article explores methodological problems of qualitative research templates, that is, the Eisenhardt and the Gioia case study approaches, which are relevant for the business and society (B&S) scholarship and outlines a reflexive historical research methodology that has the potential to face these challenges. Building on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, we draw critical attention to qualitative B&S research and frame the methodological problems identified as the normative challenges of qualitative research, that is, to productively deal with both the researchers’ norms and the research subjects’ norms. We then introduce the reflexive historical case study (RHCS), a distin…

Counter-Clock World: How Planning Backwards Helps in Moving Forward in Collapsing Environments

Research on corporate decline and turnarounds as well as the strategic use of history have so far remained two separate research fields. We integrate these two fields with a thought experiment, proposing ways in which strategists can work with, and through time in managing and turning around declines. Our thought experiment involves two very different types of analogies: a textual one from Philip K. Dick’s science fiction novels, on the one hand, and a visual one from Einsteinian relativity science, on the other hand. Inspired and informed by these different conceptualizations of the past and time, we develop four forms of backward strategizing to successfully manage a struggling corporatio…

The Strategic Cognition View of Issue Salience and the Evolution of a Political Issue: Landis & Gyr, the Hungarian Uprising and East-West Trade, 1953–1967

Why do firms facing similar stakeholder issues respond quite differently? The recently introduced strategic cognition view of issue salience and firm responsiveness (hereinafter: issue salience model) seeks to tackle this core question of stakeholder theory. I extend the nascent theorizing with a historical case study in order to rethink the model’s firm-centric perspective. The firm under examination in this historical case study is the Swiss multinational Landis & Gyr (LG) during the Cold War period. Like many other Swiss export-oriented companies in the 1950s and early 1960s, LG was challenged by Swiss pressure groups, which were highly effective at putting an issue on the public agenda:…

Zukunftsfähige Unternehmen in der VUCA-Welt : Commitment der Mitarbeitenden als wesentlicher Erfolgsfaktor

Previous research has emphasized the importance of an effective interaction between innovation and efficiency for the future viability of companies (ambidexterity). Less clear, however, is what drives employees to work for a company in this sense. Based on the latest findings in the field of organizational psychology and our own practical research, we propose »commitment« as the decisive micro-determinant for this type of engagement. The commitment of an employee describes his/her psychological state that encompasses the type of attachment to the company and implies intrinsic work motivation. On the one hand, this paper explains the relation between commitment and future viability of organi…

Facing the Normative Challenges : The Potential of Reflexive Historical Research

This article explores methodological problems of qualitative research templates, that is, the Eisenhardt and the Gioia case study approaches, which are relevant for the business and society (B&S) scholarship and outlines a reflexive historical research methodology that has the potential to face these challenges. Building on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, we draw critical attention to qualitative B&S research and frame the methodological problems identified as the normative challenges of qualitative research, that is, to productively deal with both the researchers’ norms and the research subjects’ norms. We then introduce the reflexive historical case study (RHCS), …

History in corporate social responsibility : Reviewing and setting an agenda

The integration of historical reasoning and corporate social responsibility (CSR) theorising has recently received remarkable cross-disciplinary attention by business historians and CSR scholars. But has there been a meaningful interdisciplinary conversation? Motivated by this question that presumes significant limitations in the current integration, I survey existing research for the purpose of sketching and shaping historical CSR studies, ie an umbrella that brings together diverse approaches to history and CSR theorising. Drawing from the recent efforts to establish historical methodologies in organisation studies, I first reconcile discrepant disciplinary and field-level traditions to c…

Using the past responsibly: what responsible managers and management academics can learn from historians professional ethics

The Past, History, and Corporate Social Responsibility

An emerging body of research recognizes the importance of the past and history for corporate social responsibility (CSR) scholarship and practice. However, the meanings that scholars and practitioners can ascribe to the past and history differ fundamentally, posing challenges to the integration of history and CSR thinking. This essay reviews diverse approaches and proposes a broad conceptualization of the relationship between the past, history, and CSR. We suggest historical CSR as an umbrella term that comprises three distinct theoretical perspectives. The “past-of-CSR” perspective is concerned with the history of CSR and business ethics as a set of concepts and practices. The “past-in-CSR…

Stakeholder Engagement: Practicing the Ideas of Stakeholder Theory

Stakeholder theory has become one of the major ways to conceptualize and comprehend business organizations in the fields of strategy and management.