Corporate social responsibility in an era of economic crisis: Empty gesture or tool for corporate learning?

The social legitimacy of business actors in EU member states has waxed and waned over the past two decades. Levels of trust in business, as recorded in public opinion polls, tend to increase in good economic times and decrease during recessions. After the financial crisis began in 2007 and mushroomed into the Euro crisis in 2009 and a double-dip recession in 2012, the European public’s confidence in business plummeted

Mixing business with politics: does corporate social responsibility end where lobbying transparency begins?

Scholars increasingly have argued that the future effectiveness and legitimacy of firms' corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities are dependent on more transparent forms of lobbying to ensure firms' policy positions are aligned with their CSR commitments. Very little empirical work, however, has systematically analyzed firms' lobbying disclosures or examined how these firms coordinate their lobbying and CSR activities. We address these empirical questions by analyzing the CSR reports of 150 corporations from Germany, the UK and the US over an 18‐year period and by conducting interviews with the CSR managers of these firms. We find that corporations have become more transparent about their public policy advocacy over time, thus acknowledging that lobbying is a CSR issue. For most firms, however, this commitment to transparency appears to be largely ceremonial. Few firms disclose the specific policy positions they advocate or sufficiently coordinate the work of their lobbying and CSR units to foster greater alignment of these activities. These modest changes in lobbying transparency appear to be driven by legitimacy concerns and, in a few instances, by governance gaps firms perceive to be relevant to their future business interests

From Seedlings to Ships: Supply Chain Management in the Venice Arsenale, 1320-1800

The Venice Arsenale was one of the earliest large industrial complexes, started in 1104 with expansions in 1320 and after 1660. It made many of the warships and much of the commercial shipping used by Venice. It is reputed to have innovated producing standardized parts enabling the mass-production of galleys. Preliminary investigations show a rich data set for the period 1665-1779 revealing how the Arsenale was managed. This research provides a significant insight into one aspect of the Arsenale’s activities: the management of the wood used and the forests supplying it. A historical investigation will show how its production activities were planned, organized and controlled from the Arsenale’s inception until Napoleon’s conquest of Venice in 1797 and its independent operations gradually ceased. We anticipate finding historic management policies and processes that were effective and compatible with modern theory and practice, and observe how those evolved over time

From seedlings to ships: supply chain and production management in the Venice Arsenale, 1400-1800

Purpose: The Arsenale was the largest medieval industrial enterprise, famous for its assembly line. Management faced extreme variations between peace-time and war-time demands. Satisfying these unpredictable and sudden demands for a large, complex product with a multiple years–long production cycle was challenging. The purpose of this study is to analyze the Arsenale’s operations and supply chain arrangements, and to identify and assess their management policies. We also track its development and investigate its influence on other countries. Design/methodology/approach: The research methodology used is archival research with content analysis of text and graphic representations of production processes. Findings: These reveal that Venice’s supply chain management evolved from simply exploiting woodlands as needs arose, to a managed forest with planned planting, cultivation and harvesting, ending with the active modification of growing trees so their natural growth was artificially shaped to satisfy production requirements. Instead of fabricating components in their factory, the Venetians formed them by shaping the trees while they were still growing. These arboriculture techniques then provided a planned and regular supply of high-quality components that purely natural processes provided only randomly. Research limitations/implications: There may be undiscovered archival documents despite the authors’ best efforts. The development of this historic supply chain reflects modern managerial concerns. Practical implications: Modern restorations of historic ships and buildings use some of the fabrication methods identified, although the more intensive techniques would require higher volume production. Social implications: This reveals historical forestry practices emphasised long-term needs and sustainable use. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is a unique long-term investigation of an integrated production system and considers its influence on Iberian, French, British and American forestry and ship building. The close integration of production requirements with forestry practices was a novel finding

When rights enter the CSR Field: British firms’ engagement with human rights and the UN Guiding Principles

The adoption of the Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights by the United Nations (UNGPs) in 2011 created a new governance instrument aimed at improving the promotion of human rights by business enterprises. While reaffirming states duties to uphold human rights in law, the UNGPs called on firms to promote the realization of human rights within global markets. The UNGPs thus have sought to embed human rights more firmly within the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and to use CSR practices to improve corporate human rights accountability. In this paper, we explore how this incorporation of human rights into the CSR field has affected the business practices and public commitments British firms have made to promote human rights. We analyse the CSR reports published by the 50 largest British firms over a 20-year period starting in the late 1990s and interview senior CSR managers of these firms. We find that these firms have expanded how they articulate their responsibility for human rights over time. These commitments however remain largely focused on improving management practices such as due diligence and remediation procedures. Firms are often both vague and selective about which substantive human rights they engage with in light of their concerns about their market competitiveness and broader legitimacy. These outcomes suggest that, while firms cannot completely resist the normative pressures exerted by the CSR field, they retain significant resources and agency in translating such pressure into concrete practices

New development: management control for emergent risks in the public sector—a levers of control perspective

To what extent are competing notions of risk captured by management control systems (MCS) in public service organizations (PSOs)? The authors revisit the conceptual underpinnings of the levers of control framework and argue that it offers a point of departure for theorizing the dynamic interplay between risk and control in PSOs. At both intra- as well as inter-organizational levels, the framework can reflect competing notions of risk and uncertainty, offering valuable insights for practice

Engaging firms : The global organisational field for corporate social responsibility and national varieties of capitalism

This paper is the outcome of a workshop ‘The Causes and Consequences of Private Governance: The Changing Roles of State and Private Actors’ held on 6/7 November 2014 at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) and funded by the COST Action IS1309 ‘Innovations in Climate Governance: Sources, Patterns and Effects’ (INOGOV), MZES, and the Lorenz von Stein Foundation. The research on which the paper is based was funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council in the United Kingdom (RES-062-23-3258). In addition to the participants of the Mannheim workshop, we would like to thank Jale Tosun, Sebastian Koos, Jennifer Shore, Lukas Giessen, Sarah Burns, Tim Werner, Karen Wright and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this article. The remaining faults are all our own.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

An expanding conception of social responsibility? Of global norms and changing corporate perceptions

Since the 1990s, notions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have been shaped by the global diffusion of citizenship practices and the advent of a corporate sustainability community that encourages firms to improve their environmental and social performance. These understandings of CSR have recast corporate responsibility away from a liability model to one that places a moral obligation on firms to address the societal ills connected to global markets. We analyse the CSR reports of large German and US firms published from the mid-1990s to 2013 to gauge how multinational firms’ understandings of their obligations have evolved in light of this changing normative environment. We find that many firms have expanded how they define their responsibilities, but these global CSR norms have been grafted onto nationally determined notions of to whom corporations are responsible and on what basis. Despite these national differences, firms in both countries have engaged more substantively with environmental than social sustainability and are more likely to describe their responsibilities for the environment in terms of an ethics of care

Industrial topiary: bending trees for building ships

No abstract available

Boundary-spanning leadership in hybrid networks: a case study of English local safeguarding children boards

This chapter reviews the conditions leading to the emergence of hybrid network structures involved in public service delivery, analyses opportunities for boundary-spanning by network members and frames these against different manifestations of leadership in such collaborative contexts. It addresses a gap in knowledge around leadership in hybrid networks, on the one hand, and around effectiveness of hybrid networks, on the other hand. Following researc of an in depth case-study of a hybrid network (LSCB) in England, UK, we advance a researchable proposition according to which, in turbulent times, the effectiveness of such networks is enhanced through one particular leadership type rather than others