The Ethics of Corporate Governance

How should corporate directors determine what is the right decision? For at least the past 30 years the debate has raged as to whether shareholder value should take precedence over corporate social responsibility when crucial decisions arise. Directors face pressure, not least from ethical investors, to do the good thing when they seek to make the right choice. Corporate governance theory has tended to look to agency theory and the need of boards to curb excessive executive power to guide directors' decisions. While useful for those purposes, agency theory provides only limited guidance. Supplementing it with the alternatives - stakeholder theory and stewardship theory - tends to put directors in conflict with their legal obligations to work in the interests of shareholders. This paper seeks to reframe the discussion about corporate governance in terms of the ethical debate between consequential, teleological approaches to ethics and idealist, deontological ones, suggesting that directors are - for good reason - more inclined toward utilitarian judgments like those underpinning shareholder value. But the problems with shareholder value have become so great that a different framework is needed: strategic value, with an emphasis on long-term value creation judged from a decidedly utilitarian standpoint

A Literature Review on Cloud Computing Adoption Issues in Enterprises

Part 3: Creating Value through ApplicationsInternational audienceCloud computing has received increasing interest from enterprises since its inception. With its innovative information technology (IT) services delivery model, cloud computing could add technical and strategic business value to enterprises. However, cloud computing poses highly concerning internal (e.g., Top management and experience) and external issues (e.g., regulations and standards). This paper presents a systematic literature review to explore the current key issues related to cloud computing adoption. This is achieved by reviewing 51 articles published about cloud computing adoption. Using the grounded theory approach, articles are classified into eight main categories: internal, external, evaluation, proof of concept, adoption decision, implementation and integration, IT governance, and confirmation. Then, the eight categories are divided into two abstract categories: cloud computing adoption factors and processes, where the former affects the latter. The results of this review indicate that enterprises face serious issues before they decide to adopt cloud computing. Based on the findings, the paper provides a future information systems (IS) research agenda to explore the previously under-investigated areas regarding cloud computing adoption factors and processes. This paper calls for further theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to the research area of cloud computing adoption by enterprises

What we stand for: Reputation platforms in Scandinavian higher education

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Sustainability disclosure and reputation: a comparative study

“This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Corporate Reputation Review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Corporate Reputation Review 14(2), pp.79-96 is available online at: http://www.palgrave-journals.com/crr/index.html”Drawing on legitimacy theory, we discuss that a company’s reputation is a determinant of sustainability disclosure. Specifically, we consider the concept of reputation into three dimensions for analysis: stakeholders’ commitment, financial performance and media exposure. This paper differs from previous social and environmental reporting studies in that it investigates both internal and external contextual factors that influence disclosure practice. We claim that companies with a good financial performance, that are adopting an active strategic position towards stakeholders and that are exposed to significant public pressure are more likely to use sustainability disclosure in order to communicate their legitimacy to operate to stakeholders. Moreover the paper analyses a wide range of corporate reports for their social and environmental content using an international sample that allows for a comparison of disclosure practices among Continental European, UK and USA companies. Our results show that stakeholder commitment and media exposure are positively associated with sustainability disclosure. Moreover, we find evidence that the drivers of disclosure vary by information type

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND INVESTORS' PERCEPTIONS OF FOREIGN IPO VALUE: AN INSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVE

We build on sociology-grounded research on financial market behavior and suggest a “nested” legitimacy framework to explore U.S. investor perceptions of foreign IPO value. We draw on a fuzzy-set theoretic approach to demonstrate how different combinations of monitoring and incentive-based corporate governance mechanisms lead to the same level of investor valuations of firms. We also argue that institutional factors related to the minority shareholder protection strength in the foreign IPO’s home country represent a boundary condition that affects the number of governance mechanisms required to achieve U.S. investors’ high value perceptions. Our findings, drawn from a unique, hand-collected dataset of foreign IPOs in the U.S, contribute to the sociological perspective on comparative corporate governance and the inter-dependencies between organizations and institutions

The Impact of Symbolic and Substantive Actions on Environmental Legitimacy

Drawing on institutional theory and insights from stakeholder theory and impression management, we empirically analyze the impact of both environmental symbolic polices (participation in voluntary environmental programs, green trademarks, environmental-dedicated board committees, environmental pay policies and community communication) and substantive actions (environmental patents and pollution prevention practices) on environmental legitimacy. We show that (1) symbolic actions have a weaker positive effect on legitimacy than substantive actions, (2) that the impact of symbolic actions is greater when they are combined with substantive actions, (3) that this impact is only short-term while substantive actions have both short- and long-term effects

Corporate ethical identity as a determinant of firm performance : a test of the mediating role of stakeholder satisfaction

In this article, we empirically assess the impact of corporate ethical identity (CEI) on a firm’s financial performance. Drawing on formulations of normative and instrumental stakeholder theory, we argue that firms with a strong ethical identity achieve a greater degree of stakeholder satisfaction (SS), which, in turn, positively influences a firm’s financial performance. We analyze two dimensions of the CEI of firms: corporate revealed ethics and corporate applied ethics. Our results indicate that revealed ethics has informational worth and enhances shareholder value, whereas applied ethics has a positive impact through the improvement of SS. However, revealed ethics by itself (i.e. decoupled from ethical initiatives) is not sufficient to boost economic performance.Publicad

Corporate reputation past and future: a review and integration of existing literature and a framework for future research

The concept of corporate reputation is steadily growing in interest among management researchers and practitioners. In this article, we trace key milestones in the development of reputation literature over the past six decades to suggest important research gaps as well as to provide contextual background for a subsequent integration of approaches and future outlook. In particular we explore the need for better categorised outcomes; a wider range of causes; and a deeper understanding of contingencies and moderators to advance the field beyond its current state while also taking account of developments in the macro business environment. The article concludes by presenting a novel reputation framework that integrates insights from reputation theory and studies, outlines gaps in knowledge and offers directions for future research

Exploring CRM effectiveness: an institutional theory perspective

This study identifies the potential contribution that institutional theory can make to understanding the success of marketing practices. Based on institutional theory, we argue that the effectiveness of marketing practices decreases when firms are motivated to adopt such practices under the influence of institutional pressures originating in firms' environments. However, alignment between a practice and a firm's marketing strategy may buffer against these negative effects. We apply these insights to the case of customer relationship management (CRM). CRM is considered an important way to enhance customer loyalty and firm performance, but it has also been criticized for being expensive and for not living up to expectations. Empirical data from 107 organizations confirm that, in general, adopting CRM for mimetic motives is likely to result in fewer customer insights as a result of using this practice. Our study suggests that institutional theory has much to offer to the investigation of the effectiveness of marketing practices