Much Ado About Nothing: A conceptual critique of CSR

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a nominal term clearly resonates with scholars and practitioners alike. As a scientific concept, however, it has often been criticized for its lack of definitional precision and poor measurement. In this paper we review and assess intensional and extensional definitions of the concept, as they have figured in the prior CSR literature. But we also go beyond these traditional review exercises by assessing the role (if any) of the concept in positive theorizing. The upshot of this analysis is that since the CSR concept adds nothing of value to existing frameworks in the field of management and organization, such as the economizing and legitimizing perspectives, it is best to discard it altogether

Does shareholder voting matter in Europe?

Every year, publicly held companies ask their shareholders to vote on several proposals. Generally, the proposals endorsed by the board pass by overwhelming margins, while those the board doesn’t endorse fail – also by enormous margins

The effect of blockholders in corporate governance

Unlike the Anglo-Saxon model, whereby ownership of publicly traded companies is typically in the hands of dispersed shareholders, in continental Europe ownership often lies in the hands of what are known as ‘blockholders’. But how does this affect corporate governance, especially when employees, protected by strong labour institutions, are also powerful

Contracts to Communities: A Processual Model of Organizational Virtue

In the face of systemic challenges to corporate legitimacy, scholars and managers alike have been rethinking traditional answers to the question: What does it take to be a good company? We approach this question in two novel ways. We offer a normative answer, grounded in virtue ethics, by introducing a threefold typology of organizational forms. The moral goodness of each form depends on the congruence between its purpose and virtues. But we also offer a positive answer in the form of a processual model which traces corporate goodness to its empirical antecedents and consequences. The model defies a view of organizations as innately good or evil, but rather portrays virtue as the sediment of a value infusion process. We predict that if managers succeed in establishing in their organizations the kind of virtues necessary to support collective moral agency, they can expect to reap gains like enhanced effectiveness and legitimacy. However, when they neglect their moral responsibilities, the result will likely be organizational demise

Correction to: Winning at a Losing Game? Side-Effects of Perceived Tournament Promotion Incentives in Audit Firms

The spelling of the name of the third author was incorrect in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected

Career stage dependent effects of law firm governance

Are governance practices employed by professional service firms equally effective in preventing professional-client misconduct for professionals at different stages of their career? Drawing upon professional-agency theory and the literature documenting professional career patterns, we develop a multilevel theoretical model to answer this question. We test our model in the empirical context of the Dutch legal profession, using firm-level survey data on 142 law firms and individual-level archival data from the 2994 lawyers working for these firms to explain 97 formally adjudicated complaints of professional-client misconduct committed by individual lawyers registered with the Amsterdam Bar Association. We find that the ‘orthodox’ distinction between informal behavioral and formal outcome-based governance practices is too course-grained to receive empirical support, and that firm-level governance practices only reduce professional-client misconduct when they are specifically targeted at the career stage of the lawyers employed. Our findings not only allow us to develop a finer-grained version of Sharma’s professional-agency model, but may also be practically useful in developing firm-level governance practices targeted at different strata of professionals

Business Group Affiliation, Performance, Context, and Strategy: A Meta-analysis

Research on business groups—legally independent firms tied together in various formal and informal ways—is accelerating. Through meta-analytical techniques employed on a database of 141 studies covering 28 different countries, we synthesize this research and extend it by testing several new hypotheses. We find that affiliation diminishes firm performance in general, but also that affiliates are comparatively better off in contexts with underdeveloped financial and labor market institutions. We also trace reduced affiliate performance to specific strategic actions taken at the firm and group levels. Overall, our results indicate that affiliate performance reflects complex processes and motivations

Estimating the Capacity for ART Provision in Tanzania with the Use of Data on Staff Productivity and Patient Losses

BACKGROUND: International targets for access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) have over-estimated the capacity of health systems in low-income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The WHO target for number on treatment by end 2005 for Tanzania was 10 times higher than actually achieved. The target of the national Care and Treatment Plan (CTP) was also not reached. We aimed at estimating the capacity for ART provision and created five scenarios for ART production given existing resource limitations. METHODS: A situation analysis including scrutiny of staff factors, such as available data on staff and patient factors including access to ART and patient losses, made us conclude that the lack of clinical staff is the main limiting factor for ART scale-up, assuming that sufficient drugs and supplies are provided by donors. We created a simple formula to estimate the number of patients on ART based on availability and productivity of clinical staff, time needed to initiate vs maintain a patient on ART and patient losses using five different scenarios with varying levels of these parameters. FINDINGS: Our scenario assuming medium productivity (40% higher than that observed in 2002) and medium loss of patients (20% in addition to 15% first-year mortality) coincides with the actual reported number of patients initiated on ART up to 2008, but is considerably below the national CTP target of 90% coverage for 2009, corresponding to 420,000 on ART and 710,000 life-years saved (LY's). Our analysis suggests that a coverage of 40% or 175,000 on treatment and 350,000 LY's saved is more achievable. CONCLUSION: A comparison of our scenario estimations and actual output 2006-2008 indicates that a simple user-friendly dynamic model can estimate the capacity for ART scale-up in resource-poor settings based on identification of a limiting staff factor and information on availability of this staff and patient losses. Thus, it is possible to set more achievable targets

Four Design Criteria for Any Future Contractarian Theory of Business Ethics

This article assesses the quality of Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT) as a social contract argument. For this purpose, it embarks on a comparative analysis of the use of the social contract model as a theory of political authority and as a theory of social justice. Building on this comparison, it then develops four criteria for any future contractarian theory of business ethics (CBE). To apply the social contract model properly to the domain of business ethics, it should be: (1) self-disciplined, i.e., not aspire results beyond what the contract model can realistically establish; (2) argumentative, i.e., it should seek to provide principles that are demonstrative results of the contractarian method; (3) task-directed, i.e., it should be clear what the social contract thought-experiment is intended to model; and (4) domain-specific, i.e., the contractarian choice situation should be tailored to the defining problems of business ethics

Corporate boards and the performance of Asian firms: A meta-analysis

The prevalence of ownership concentration in Asian firms presents a challenge to the influential agency theory-based understanding of the role of corporate boards. In this paper we develop and test hypotheses about board attributes and firm performance that reflect Asian institutional conditions. We present the first meta-analysis of the relationship between board attributes and performance of Asian firms using a varied set of meta-analytical techniques on a database of 86 studies covering nine Asian countries. First, we find that board structure and composition preferences are influenced by the identity of the concentrated owner. Second, consistent with US data, we find very limited evidence of a direct relationship between board attributes and firm financial performance in the Asian context. Third, we find that the relationship between board structure and composition and firm performance is mediated by the revealed strategic preferences of Asian firms specifically by the level of R&D investment