The Influence of Ceo Decision-Making and Corporate Strategy on Corporate Social Performance

In this dissertation, I examine the role of CEOs and corporate diversification on corporate social performance (CSP). In the first essay of the dissertation, I evaluate the financial implications of corporate social performance and assess the validity of a widely used measure of social performance, the KLD social ratings. In the first part of this essay, I examine the relationship between CSP and financial performance. The results show that CSP has a negative relationship with short-term financial performance, but a positive relationship with long-term financial performance. In addition, I examine whether introducing the Sarbanes-Oxley Act had a substantial impact on the relationship between CSP and financial performance. The results show that enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act may have caused changes in social perceptions about the importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR). In the second part of this essay, I examine the validity of the KLD social ratings. The analysis shows that the KLD social ratings effectively summarize the past CSP information of firms, but they predict future CSP less effectively. In the second essay of the dissertation, I examine how CEO retirement may influence CSP. I propose that CEOs reduce investment in social issues when they are approaching retirement, resulting in a negative relationship between CEO retirement and CSP. To understand why CEOs close to retirement reduces CSR investment, I compare two possible CEO motivations. The results suggest that CEOs may reduce investment in CSR in order to improve profit figures, which will eventually improve their post-retirement career continuation chances. In further support of this finding, the results show that CEOs who remain on the board of directors after retirement are less likely to reduce investment in CSR than CEOs who do not. In the third essay of the dissertation, I examine the influence of corporate diversification strategy on CSP. Previous work in this topic has ignored the important difference between firms pursuing unrelated and related diversification: the range of stakeholders and transferability of a brand. In this work, I note that unrelated diversifiers are likely to face much more diverse stakeholder demands than related diversifiers; moreover, they are likely to face bigger challenges in transferring the brand across subsidiaries. I propose that such differences will influence a firm’s investment in social issues, and eventually will result in varying levels of CSP

Changes in students’ knowledge, values, worldview, and willingness to take mitigative climate action after attending a course on holistic climate change education

Though the need for holistic climate change education has been realized around the world, there is a lack of studies that examine the multidimensional impact of climate change education in higher education. To amend for this gap in literature, this paper uses a pre- and post-questionnaire (N = 245) to examine how students' knowledge, values, worldview and willingness to take mitigative climate actions change during a course on climate change. Though the course was designed to be multidisciplinary and holistic, the results show that the course had limited impact. First, the pre-post tests showed a significant increase in science knowledge, but knowledge on mitigative actions remained unchanged despite related course assignments. Second, though participants' worldview seemed to change or strengthen during the course, minimal changes were seen in students’ willingness to take mitigative actions. However, an increase in biospheric values -a strong predictor of pro-environmental behavior - was seen in some segments of participants, potentially predicting a lower carbon footprint for those students in the future. Furthermore, the findings suggest that during the course, individuals found new, environmentally friendly ways to address their hedonic pleasures, also potentially having long-term positive effects. Some differences in gender and field of study were noted. Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to planning and implementing holistic climate change education.Peer reviewe

Balance Within and Across Domains: The Performance Implications of Exploration and Exploitation in Alliances

Organizational research advocates that firms balance exploration and exploitation, yet it acknowledges inherent challenges in reconciling these opposing activities. To overcome these challenges, such research suggests that firms establish organizational separation between exploring and exploiting units or engage in temporal separation whereby they oscillate between exploration and exploitation over time. Nevertheless, these approaches entail resource allocation trade-offs and conflicting organizational routines, which may undermine organizational performance as firms seek to balance exploration and exploitation within a discrete field of organizational activity (i.e., domain). We posit that firms can overcome such impediments and enhance their performance if they explore in one domain while exploiting in another. Studying the alliance portfolios of software firms, we demonstrate that firms do not typically benefit from balancing exploration and exploitation within the function domain (technology versus marketing and production alliances) and structure domain (new versus prior partners). Nevertheless, firms that balance exploration and exploitation across these domains by engaging in research and development alliances while collaborating with their prior partners, or alternatively, by forming marketing and production alliances while seeking new partners, gain in profits and market value. Moreover, we reveal that increases in firm size that exacerbate resource allocation trade-offs and routine rigidity reinforce the benefits of balance across domains and the costs of balance within domains. Our domain separation approach offers new insights into how firms can benefit from balancing exploration and exploitation. What matters is not simply whether firms balance exploration and exploitation in their alliance formation decisions but the means by which they achieve such balance

Climate Competencies of Finnish Gifted and Average-Ability High School Students

In the face of global issues such as climate change, the world needs action competent, transformationally gifted citizens, who are willing to step up and take responsibility for a better future. However, empirical evidence on what supports the development of transformational giftedness is limited. Furthermore, the relationship between academic giftedness and transformational giftedness has not been clearly pronounced. The purpose of this study is to address this research gap by examining students’ climate competencies. A total of 1703 students from five Finnish high schools (grades 10–12) participated in this study. Using a questionnaire, students’ climate change knowledge, values, willingness to take action, sense of responsibility, environmental concern, and perceptions on how climate change issues are dealt with in school were examined. Four of the schools were general education high schools, while one was for students formally identified as gifted students. The findings indicate that academically gifted students in both general education schools and the gifted school show more climate competencies than average-ability students. Furthermore, gifted students that attended the school for gifted students show more climate competencies than the gifted students from general education schools. Based on the findings, the paper discusses how the development of transformational giftedness can be better supported in education

Where does ESG pay? The role of national culture in moderating the relationship between ESG performance and financial performance

This study investigates the moderating role of a country’s culture as an external contingency factor in the relationship between a firm’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance and financial performance. Using ESG performance data of 4978 firms from 48 countries for 17 years, we argue that the financial return from engaging in ESG varies depending on the countries’ cultural aspects because stakeholder evaluations and appreciations for a firm’s ESG performance differ across nations. We find that a country that espouses a culture of high individualism or masculinity tends to appreciate and reflect on this more explicitly, strengthening the relationship between a firm’s ESG performance and financial performance. Contrastingly, in a country with a culture of high power distance or uncertainty avoidance, firms’ ESG efforts are less likely to be associated with financial performance. Our findings have important implications for multinational enterprises facing various cultural environments when dealing with heterogeneous stakeholder demands across countries

Optimizing Reinforcement Learning Control Model in Furuta Pendulum and Transferring it to Real-World

Reinforcement learning does not require explicit robot modeling as it learns on its own based on data, but it has temporal and spatial constraints when transferred to real-world environments. In this research, we trained a balancing Furuta pendulum problem, which is difficult to model, in a virtual environment (Unity) and transferred it to the real world. The challenge of the balancing Furuta pendulum problem is to maintain the pendulum’s end effector in a vertical position. We resolved the temporal and spatial constraints by performing reinforcement learning in a virtual environment. Furthermore, we designed a novel reward function that enabled faster and more stable problem-solving compared to the two existing reward functions. We validate each reward function by applying it to the soft actor-critic (SAC) and proximal policy optimization (PPO). The experimental result shows that cosine reward function is trained faster and more stable. Finally, SAC algorithm model using a cosine reward function in the virtual environment is an optimized controller. Additionally, we evaluated the robustness of this model by transferring it to the real environment