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To alert broker-dealers to several regulatory developments relating to cybersecurity threats.

Reviews four regulatory developments in the cybersecurity area and provides several steps broker-dealers should undertake to review and improve their cybersecurity and information technology protocols and practices.

While FINRA’s new cybersecurity sweep appears to be an exploratory and learning exercise to obtain regulatory knowledge and intelligence, firms should be cognizant of the fact that both FINRA and the SEC have imposed significant sanctions against Firms when it has found inadequate cyber security policies and procedures.

Broker-dealers should review the White House’s recent Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity and evaluate their own cybersecurity preparedness under the key areas of the Framework.

Practical guidance from experienced privacy and securities regulatory lawyers that consolidates several recent developments in one piece.

The purpose of this paper is to operationalize context in diversity management research.

A case analysis provides an example of the influences of context at macro, meso and micro levels. Country context (macro) and professional and organization contexts (meso) are analysed in relation to the micro individual experiences of gender and indigeneity at work.

Tensions and inconsistencies at macro and meso levels impact on diversity management at a micro level. The authors demonstrate how power and context are intertwined in the biopolitical positioning of subjects in terms of gender and indigeneity. The contested legacy of indigenous-colonial relations and societal gender dynamics are “played out” in a case from the accounting profession.

Within critical diversity studies context and power are linked in a reciprocal relationship; analysis of both is mandatory to strengthen theory and practice. The multi-level analytical framework provides a useful tool to understand advances and lack of progress for diversity groups within specific organizations.

While many diversity scholars agree that the analysis of context is important, hitherto its application has been vague. The authors conduct a multi-level analysis of context, connecting the power dynamics between the levels. The authors draw out implications within one profession in a specific country socio-politics. Multi-level analyses of context and power have the potential to enhance the theory and practice of diversity management.

The aim of this study is to shed light on the mechanisms involved in, and consequences of, developing a sustainability report in a small to medium enterprise.

Action research is used to provide insights into the initial stages of the development of the sustainability report and its consequences. “Mike” is an Italian small organisation with a sustainability orientation selling products and services about wellness and health. It decided to develop a sustainability report in 2013.

The authors find that the organisation’s initial aim to report on its sustainability later extended beyond disclosure to using the information to enhance its sustainable development approach and awareness, consider long-term planning, support strategy-making based on the sustainable development concept and establish and enhance its reputation.

This research is limited to the analysis of only one small Italian organisation and as such cannot claim generalisability of its findings.

The findings indicate that the sustainability initiative of this organisation, while originally focussed on reporting, evolved into strategy and planning. Managers in similar organisations may learn from this experience to focus on strategy-making and social and environmental value creation.

The study examines sustainability reporting in the previously overlooked area of small and medium enterprises.

The main purpose of this conceptual paper is drawing up a framework to assess the company responsibility regarding culture and fine arts. Since a rich cultural life requires variety and commitment to innovative and bold forms of cultural activity, the model should measure the corporate commitment to fostering axiological pluralism in the cultural sphere. A subordinate purpose is testing that model using primary data on the biggest Spanish listed companies. First, we define the corporate cultural responsibility (CCR) as a specific field of the corporate social responsibility. Second, we defend that corporate citizenship involves accepting some risks to be in line with the public expectations on arts and culture. Third, it is proposed an assessment model that takes into account the kind of cultural activities promoted by the firms, from conventional and uncommitted to innovative and provoking. The model makes possible to rank the companies according to the quality of their CCR and take into account the influence of size and sector. The model reveals whether firms support conventional versus challenging cultural activities. This should be taken into consideration both by CSR managers and policy makers. In spite of the mounting economic significance of symbols and creativity, there is still little literature that specifically addresses the role of firms regarding arts and culture as another facet of their responsibility as corporate citizens.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the question of whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be used as a link of trust between business and society, and which role CSR plays in recovering distrust in businesses. It uses a mixed methods study of processes of moving businesses within the Danish water sector from a general trust-breakdown to trust recovery from 2003 to 2013.

Trust recovery is found to depend on stakeholders’ mutual engagement with each other and their willingness to share knowledge and learn from each other’s professional and institutional cultures and languages. An alignment of vocabularies of motives between regulation and voluntary CSR is found to be useful for building trust between conflicting parties. Furthermore the findings shows that the more stakeholders’ languages, motives and logics can coexist, the more trust can be recovered.

The research is limited by a study of one business sector in one country and the findings have implications greater than the local contexts of which it is researched, because it is usable in other sectors that suffer from severe trust-breakdowns such as government systems in both the public and private sectors.

This chapter suggests a theoretical extension of Bogenschneider and Corbett’s (2010) Community Dissonance Theory to embrace multiple stakeholders each having their own complex and unique culture and communication modus based on their institutional, professional or individual comprehensive language universes. This includes knowledge-sharing and educative diffusion of the stakeholders’ language universes’ vocabularies including its important nouns, verbs, terminologies, semantics, taxonomies and axioms as well as the stakeholders’ motives and logics implemented into these universes.

Although companies are increasingly embracing the sustainability discourse in their external reporting and disclosures, little is known about how management control systems support sustainability within organizations. This is unfortunate, given the important role that properly designed Sustainability Control Systems (SCS) may play in helping firms to better face their social and environmental responsibilities. Starting from these premises, the aim of this essay is twofold. On the one hand, we present a review of the emerging stream of research on sustainability and management control mechanisms, in order to identify and discuss the link between the two. On the other hand, we try to illustrate the main unaddressed issues in this literature as a premise to exploring one possible way to advance research in this area. Specifically, we make a call for a more holistic approach to the study of SCS, which considers also their organizational and cultural dimensions in addition to their technical properties. A framework for informing future work on the topic is proposed, based on the concept of ‘control package’ (Malmi & Brown, 2008; Sandelin, 2008) complemented with notions from the complementarity-based approach developed in organizational economics (Grandori & Furnari, 2008; Milgrom & Roberts, 1995). By enhancing our understanding on how SCS operate as a package, the application of our framework should allow researchers to develop better theory of how to design a range of controls to support organizational sustainability objectives, control sustainability activities, and drive sustainability performance.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise how future changes in corporate social disclosure (CSD), aimed at improving accountability for corporate performance to key stakeholder groups, might be brought about.

Drawing on the work of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises with respect to human (and organisational) action and the work of Leon Festinger and Kurt Lewin with respect to human (and organisational) change, the paper examines how academics and other corporate stakeholders might effect changes in CSD.

Managers act in a way which maximises their formal happiness (from von Mises) and change occurs following the creation of cognitive dissonance (Festinger) which leads to “unfreezing” (Lewin). Stakeholders can effect change by creating cognitive dissonance. With specific reference to Anglo‐American limited liability and publicly traded corporations, such cognitive dissonance and unfreezing normally involves a perceived threat to profitability.

Research and theorising in corporate social disclosure patterns should take as given: that the managers of Anglo‐American limited liability and publicly traded corporations continue to be strongly encouraged, via both legal and remunerative means, to maximize shareholder wealth; and that this state of affairs significantly influences the information which management choose to disclose. Future research might instead examine and consider means of creating sources of dissonance significant enough to result in managerial concern for change within the constraints imposed on managers of Anglo‐American corporations. Such research might be conducted by engaging with organisations and their stakeholders.

The findings have implications for the manner in which corporate stakeholders act and interrelate with others in order to effect change towards more complete and credible sustainability reports which demonstrate accountability for material impacts to key stakeholder groups.

The paper focuses on how change in corporate behaviour might be brought about given the personal motivations and institutional constraints imposed on the behaviour of corporate actors.

Public health measures implemented early in the COVID-19 pandemic brought the idea of essential work into the public discourse, as the public reflected upon what types of work are essential for society to function, who performs that work, and how the labour of essential workers is rewarded. This chapter focusses on the rewards associated with essential work. The authors develop an intersectional lens on work that was officially deemed essential in 2020 to highlight longstanding patterns of devaluation among essential workers, including those undergirded by systemic racism in employment and labour law. The authors use quantitative data from the CPS-MORG to examine earnings differences between essential and non-essential workers and investigate whether the essential worker wage gap changed from month to month in 2020. The authors find that patterns of valuation among essential workers cannot be explained by human capital or other standard labour market characteristics. Rather, intersectional wage inequalities in 2020 reflect historical patterns that are highly durable and did not abate in the first year of the global pandemic.