Stakeholder Theory and Marketing: Moving from a Firm-Centric to a Societal Perspective

This essay is inspired by the ideas and research examined in the special section on “Stakeholder Marketing” of the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing in 2010. The authors argue that stakeholder marketing is slowly coalescing with the broader thinking that has occurred in the stakeholder management and ethics literature streams during the past quarter century. However, the predominant view of stakeholders that many marketers advocate is still primarily pragmatic and company centric. The position advanced herein is that stronger forms of stakeholder marketing that reflect more normative, macro/societal, and network-focused orientations are necessary. The authors briefly explain and justify these characteristics in the context of the growing “prosociety” and “proenvironment” perspectives—orientations that are also in keeping with the public policy focus of this journal. Under the “hard form” of stakeholder theory, which the authors endorse, marketing managers must realize that serving stakeholders sometimes requires sacrificing maximum profits to mitigate outcomes that would inflict major damage on other stakeholders, especially society

The Editors

Luxury industry and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activates are generally considered as incompatible concepts by consumers. This because luxury is generally related to hedonism, excess, and ostentation, while CSR is generally based on sobriety, moderation and ethics. However, nowadays more and more luxury companies seem highly committed toward sustainability. For example, Tiffany started certifying its diamonds as “conflict free”, Chanel incorporated “earthy materials” in its 2016 collection, and Bulgari has recently funded restoration of Rome's Spanish Steps. Therefore, it seems plausible the presence of a certain compatibility degree between luxury and CSR activities. However, this issue has received very limited empirical investigation from marketing literature. As a consequence, the present research aims to empirically test whether and under what conditions consumers react to different kinds of luxury companies’ CSR initiatives. Using the Carroll’s four dimensions model of internal vs. external CSR, we argue and demonstrated that luxury companies’ internal (versus external) CSR initiatives increase willingness to buy luxury products, but mainly for those customers who buy luxury for internal motivations and not for status ostentation, as for example individual style and personal taste

A Twenty-First Century Assessment of Values Across the Global

This article provides current Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) data from samples of business managers and professionals across 50 societies that are culturally and socioeconomically diverse. We report the society scores for SVS values dimensions for both individual- and societallevel analyses. At the individual-level, we report on the ten circumplex values sub-dimensions and two sets of values dimensions (collectivism and individualism; openness to change, conservation, self-enhancement, and self- transcendence). At the societal-level, we report on the values dimensions of embeddedness, hierarchy, mastery, affective autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and harmony. For each society, we report the Cronbach’s a statistics for each values dimension scale to assess their internal consistency (reliability) as well as report interrater agreement (IRA) analyses to assess the acceptability of using aggregated individual level values scores to represent country values. We also examined whether societal development level is related to systematic variation in the measurement and importance of values. Thus, the contributions of our evaluation of the SVS values dimensions are two-fold. First, we identify the SVS dimensions that have cross-culturally internally reliable structures and withinsociety agreement for business professionals. Second, we report the society cultural values scores developed from the twenty-first century data that can be used as macro-level predictors in multilevel and single-level international business research

Ethical preferences for influencing superiors: A 41-society study

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

Societal-level versus individual-level predictions of ethical behavior: a 48-society study of collectivism and individualism

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed

Organizational citizenship and corporate citizenship : Two constructs, one research theme

The marketing and management literatures have investigated the notion of citizenship from an organizational perspective with the organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) construct, and from a social perspective with the notion of corporate citizenship (CC). Research on these two related aspects of citizenship has developed significantly over the past few years. Yet, studies of OCB and CC have grown independently of each other. This isolation is likely to result in (1) a confusion in terms, (2) no fruitful cross-fertilization of the two research streams, and (3) little insights into citizenship behaviors in general, regardless of their exact initiators and beneficiaries. In other words, an integration of these two bodies of research may enhance our understanding of citizenship initiatives in general, a knowledge which may then be applicable to various actors and contexts. Against this backdrop, the paper (1) examines the behaviors characteristic of citizenship in the OCB and CC literatures respectively, (2) compares OCB and CC, and (3) investigates potential linkages between these two concepts