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Managing Mental Standards with Corporate Citizenship Profiles

Stakeholder expectations of corporate responsibility are growing and thus understanding the dynamics of expectations is becoming important for companies. Stakeholder expectations that are met open doors for stakeholder favor, whereas unmet expectations may hinder or even prevent collaboration. While all companies are expected to be responsible enough to keep away from causing harm to others, a competitive edge can only be achieved if the minimum expectations are exceeded. The paper suggests that companies can both exceed and manage stakeholder expectations in practice by building up a corporate citizenship profile that gives direction to their specialization in responsibility. This niche ca…

Online authority communication during an epidemic : A Finnish example

Social media is creating new challenges for authority communications during crises, such as a pandemic. This study examined Finnish citizens’ opinions about authorities as crisis managers during the swine flu epidemic of 2009-2010 and examined the success of authority intervention to online discussion forums. Through a content analysis carried out at the discussion forums, the study showed that though authorities are highly trusted in general in Finland, this trust is not extended to the online environment. Online, civilians did not trust authorities and the protective actions taken. Moreover, the authorities’ intervention to the discussion forums aimed at correcting false information and s…

Added Value of Intangibles for Organizational Innovation

The purpose of this paper is to present the theoretical basis for a measurement and improvement system that will help organizations create a more innovative climate. The role of intangible assets in contributing to organizational innovativeness is clarified within six hypotheses on the basis of a cross-disciplinary literature review combining studies from psychology, human resources management, communication, information technology, and marketing. These factors range from the individual level to interaction with the environment surrounding the organization, and involve (a) individual psychological flexibility, (b) institutional and interpersonal trust, (c) diverse human resources, (d) strat…

Corporate Reputation and the News Media in Finland

Finland makes an interesting case study for the news media on public’s images and opinions (Carroll & McCombs, 2003) for several reasons. First, the news media in Finland is dominated by one major newspaper (cf. Ainamo, 2003), and it is interesting to see whether there is great consensus in public opinion due to this homogeneity (for opposing views, see Moring 2005). Second, Finland is a relatively small country (5 million inhabitants) for both business and media, and it could be speculated that the news media’s effects are less visible than in larger countries (where diffusion of news occurs directly via social contagion). Third, Finland has been a breeding ground for top innovations and s…

Stakeholder relations as social capital in early modern international trade

Stakeholder relations that are available through networks of various sorts are one benefit from social capital. According to the stakeholder approach to organizations, those relationships that contain most of the important attributes—such as power, legitimacy, frequency of contact, and urgency—hypothetically dominate the business environment. This has caused modern corporations to view chiefly the dominant stakeholders as important. This study tests the importance of these attributes in early modern international trade; in other words, which attributes played a major role in the relations between Finnish tradesmen and their foreign contacts? The archives of two major Finnish trading houses …