Search results for "Social responsibility"
showing 10 items of 369 documents
The association between microfinance rating scores and corporate governance: A global survey
2014
Abstract The global microfinance industry has experienced high growth rates over the past decades, and the World Bank foresees a future market with billions of customers. However, the industry's continued growth is contingent on its ability to create a governance structure that supports microfinance institutions' long-term performance. Because microfinance institutions' performance is multidimensional and difficult to measure, prior research has not been successful in establishing consistent associations between governance structures and microfinance institutions' performance. We apply microfinance rating scores – a unique innovation of the microfinance industry – as a summary performance m…
Ownership, responsibility and leadership – a historical perspective
1999
The aim of this article is to present the great lines of managerial thoughts concerning ownership, business, social responsibility and leadership. The perspective of consideration is historical, and especially conceptual. We noticed that in the twentieth century a modern business ideology began to take form. Old suppositions according to the classical economic theory about the nature of economic activities started to give way when the modern professional manager type came into the management of the firm. At that time also there developed the idea of the firm as an institution with many targets. The position of the firm in society changed, people started to make demands for a wider social re…
Understanding Stakeholder Thinking: Themes from a Finnish Conference
1997
Discussion and debate on stakeholder theory continues unabated, but not a lot of people know that it first began in Finland in the 1960s, as this report of a recent Conference there shows. Archie B. Carroll, the well-known writer on corporate social responsibility, is Robert W. Scherer Professor of Management at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA (e-mail acarroll@uga.cc.uga.edu); and Juha Nasi is Professor of Management at the University of Jyvaskyla, Jyvaskyla, Finland.
Ethical preferences for influencing superiors: A 41-society study
2009
With a 41-society sample of 9990 managers and professionals, we used hierarchical linear modeling to investigate the impact of both macro-level and micro-level predictors on subordinate influence ethics. While we found that both macro-level and micro-level predictors contributed to the model definition, we also found global agreement for a subordinate influence ethics hierarchy. Thus our findings provide evidence that developing a global model of subordinate ethics is possible, and should be based upon multiple criteria and multilevel variables. Journal of International Business Studies (2009) 40, 1022–1045. doi:10.1057/jibs.2008.109
Business in society or business and society: the construction of business–society relations in responsibility reports from a critical discursive pers…
2013
In this article, we analyse the discursive construction of business–society relations in Finnish businesses’ social and environmental responsibility reports. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, we examine how these discursive constructions maintain and reproduce various interests and societal conditions as a precondition of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Our study contributes to the recent discussion on discursive struggles in business–society relations and the role various interests play in this struggle. We find that not only are power asymmetries between actors veiled through the universalization of interests, but reporting can also be seen as a communicative action that prov…
Individual, Collective and Social Responsibility of the Firm
2000
The main concern of this paper is the moral responsibility of the firm, as well as of the individuals in a firm, to uphold environmental protection. Much of the business ethics literature defines corporate social responsibility in terms of stakeholder relationships, and the emphasis is frequently on collective as opposed to individual responsibility. This paper has three objectives. The first is to clarify the nature of moral responsibility, and the distinction between legal and moral responsibility. The second objective is to steer academicians and others towards a new vision of the firm. We argue that a firm is not just a singular legal entity but also a collectivity of morally responsibl…
Approaching virtuousness through organizational ethical quality: toward a moral corporate social responsibility
2015
Today, in both theory and practice, the concepts of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ethics are not necessarily related. Organizations can demonstrate high levels of social proactivity in their CSR policies with or without having laudable levels of ethical quality or virtuousness. This article introduces the concepts of organizational ethical quality (OEQ) to evaluate the moral excellence of CSR actions and policies, identifying and categorizing varying levels ranging from the absence of ethical virtuousness, termed immoral CSR (ICSR), to high levels of moral CSR (MCSR), or ethical virtuousness. High MCSR is the product of both high levels of OEQ in conjunction with more proactive …
Does doing good do well? An investigation into the relationship between consumer buying behavior and CSR
2022
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has emerged globally as an important field of study as corporations increasingly recognize the positive consequences of ethical behavior in their business operations. However, despite a growing body of literature, results and definitions remain somewhat contradictory and fractured. Taking a marketing business ethics perspective, this article examines the influence of CSR in firms and its impact on consumer buying behavior through a systematic examination of state of the art literature over the past two decades (2000–2020). Our review identifies a theoretical connection between CSR initiatives and positive consumer reaction yet a lack of material relevan…
Work–Family Practices and Complexity of Their Usage: A Discourse Analysis Towards Socially Responsible Human Resource Management
2020
AbstractThe question of work–family practices commonly arises in both theory and daily practice as a matter of responsibility in today’s organisations. More information is needed about them for socially responsible human resource management (SR-HRM). In this article our interest is in how work–family practices, serve as an important element of SR-HRM, constructed as (un)helpful for employees’ work–family integration, are realised in organisational life. We investigate the discursive ways in which members of two different organisations working at different organisational levels construct the issue in the Finnish context. Three discourses were interpreted: (1) a discourse of compliance with e…
One Rule to Rule Them All? Organisational Sensemaking of Corporate Responsibility
2015
Corporate responsibility (CR) has often been criticised as a decoupled organisational phenomenon: a publicly espoused rule that is not followed in daily organisational practices. We argue that a crucial reason for this criticism arises from the dominant in-house assumption of CR literature, which mitigates tensions and contradictions in organisational life by claiming that integrated rules result in coupled practices. We aim to provide new insights by problematising this in-house assumption and by examining how members of two organisations discursively make sense of CR, as a daily rule-bound practice, via three strategies: integration, differentiation and fragmentation. We elaborate the con…