Over the last several decades, businesses have faced mounting pressures from diverse stakeholders to alter their corporate operations to become more socially and environmentally…
Abstract
Over the last several decades, businesses have faced mounting pressures from diverse stakeholders to alter their corporate operations to become more socially and environmentally responsible. In turn, many firms appear to have responded by implementing more sustainable practices — measuring, documenting, and publishing annual CSR or sustainability reports to showcase how they are addressing important issues in this area, including: resource stewardship, waste management, greenhouse gas emission reductions, fair and safe labor practices, amongst other stakeholder concerns. And yet, research in this domain has not yet systematically examined whether businesses have, on the whole, changed their practices in tandem with the important changes in its institutional context over time. Have corporate CSR initiatives, in fact, been growing over the last 25 years or has the increased attention to CSR actually been much ado about nothing? In this chapter, we review the empirical literature on CSR to uncover that common measures of CSR such as the KLD do not support the concept that CSR practices have increased substantively over the last 25 years. We supplement this historical review by modeling the growth curves of CSR implementation in practice and find that the pace of positive change has indeed been glacial. More alarmingly, we also look at corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) and find that, contrary to expectations, businesses have become more, not less, irresponsible during this same time period. Implications of these findings for theory are presented as are suggestions for future research in this domain.
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The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains…
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The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.
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Emily C. Bouck, Holly Long and Larissa Jakubow
Assistive technology can support and enhance the learning, independence, and daily living skills of students with disabilities, including students with intellectual disability…
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Assistive technology can support and enhance the learning, independence, and daily living skills of students with disabilities, including students with intellectual disability (ID). Assistive technology is not generally disability dependent; however, for students with ID we decided to focus on assistive technology across two areas: instructional aids – with a focus on reading, writing, and mathematics – and transition and independence. Throughout our focus on these two categories of assistive technology, we discuss low-tech, mid-tech, and high-tech options to support students with ID.
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Today, governance of food safety and quality as well as environmental aspects of food chains increasingly operates through public and private standards. This governance, as led by…
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Today, governance of food safety and quality as well as environmental aspects of food chains increasingly operates through public and private standards. This governance, as led by retail power, is often interpreted to undermine farmer’s agrarian independence by dictating detailed agricultural practices on the farm, thereby conditioning access into the food chain. Focusing on farmers’ discursive resources, agrarian writing implies an alternative social force, constructed here as farmer’s freedom. By analysing qualitative data from Finland along the theoretical axes of farmers’ interest in socio-economic achievement and willingness to comply with standards, a more nuanced understanding of farmers’ occupational freedom emerges. Freedom in economic interests and organic farming represents farmers as standard takers as standards supported values most important for them. Realizing freedom in economic creativity can be antagonistic to (public) standards and lead to contestations and negotiations for feasibility. Finally, freedom in self-sufficiency is antithetical to the commercial food chain; however, dissenting from standards displays a strong capacity to close the metabolic rift, along with organic farming. The evidence from the study suggests that farmers’ freedom has the character of a social force to modify food chains and to increase their socio-economic and environmental sustainability and to call for consumers’ freedom to join farmers’ efforts.
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In a computer-based experimental study, we explored intensity of pleasant and unpleasant emotional experiences (affect), following immediate outcomes of risky choices over time…
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In a computer-based experimental study, we explored intensity of pleasant and unpleasant emotional experiences (affect), following immediate outcomes of risky choices over time under three levels of uncertainty (80%, 50%, 20%). We found that the intensity of pleasant affect initially increased linearly before suddenly reducing after the seventh task, and then resumed the linear upward trend. In contrast, the intensity of unpleasant affect cyclically changed after every five decision tasks, displaying a wave-like pattern. Interestingly, the 50% probability (maximum information entropy) group demonstrated patterns quite different to the other two groups (20%, 80%). For pleasant affect, this group reduced in positive affect significantly more than the other two groups after the seventh decision task. For unpleasant affect, the 50% group displayed an increasing negative affect trend, while the other two groups displayed a reducing negative affect trend. In sum, our findings reveal different temporal patterns of pleasant emotions from correct decisions and unpleasant emotions resulting from wrong decisions. We conclude that, consistent with the self-organization theory, these differences reflect nonlinear changes in the emotional system to cope with the challenge of uncertainty (or entropy).
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Mirko Perano, Gian Luca Casali, Maria Vincenza Ciasullo, Claudio Del Regno and Marco Pellicano
The relationship between entrepreneurship and ethics explores dimensions that entrepreneurs should consider to face ethical dilemmas. One of the controversial points in this…
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The relationship between entrepreneurship and ethics explores dimensions that entrepreneurs should consider to face ethical dilemmas. One of the controversial points in this relationship is the human complexity and the balance between ethics and profit that characterize the decisions. The external pressure and the scarcity of the resources create entrepreneurs' ethical challenges impacting on strategic and governance decisions from which value should be obtained. Therefore, the nexus between entrepreneurship and ethics should be investigated to understand possible ways to leverage human values in the entrepreneurial actions. To this aim a bibliometric analysis has been carried out and Citespace, VOSviewer and Bibliometrix software have been used. Data have been extracted from Web of Science database in the timespan 1986–2023 generating 583 documents. The analysis shows the current literature published on the relationship between entrepreneurship and ethics by highlighting the main authors, (co)citations, countries, and journals that published papers on the topic. The findings from the four research questions defined shown that the top author publishing on the topic is Prof. Dr Fassin Yves. The most cited scholar is Prof. Spence Laura J. It was also found that the Journal of Business Ethics has the most publications on the topic. The top countries to publish articles on the topic are USA and UK. Five clusters have been found by grouping the main actors, countries and relevant research themes. The cluster on social entrepreneurship research is the main representative the topic. Limitations and future research have been discussed.
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Body weight has a long history of functioning as a symbol of one’s beauty, social status, morality, discipline, and health. It has also been a standard inflicted much more…
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Body weight has a long history of functioning as a symbol of one’s beauty, social status, morality, discipline, and health. It has also been a standard inflicted much more intensely on women than men. While US culture has long idealized thinness for women, even at risky extremes, there is growing evidence that weight standards are broadening. Larger bodies are becoming more visible and accepted, while desire for and approval of a thin ideal has diminished. However, the continued widespread prevalence of anti-fat attitudes and stigma leaves uncertainty about just how much weight standards are changing. This study used an online survey (n = 320) to directly compare evaluations of thin, fat, and average size women through measures of negative stereotypes, prejudicial attitudes, and perceptions about quality of life. Results indicated that, as hypothesized, thin women were perceived less favorably than average weight women. However, fat women were perceived less favorably than both average and thin women. Men were harsher than women in their evaluations of only fat women. Additionally, participants being underweight or overweight did not produce an ingroup bias in their evaluations of underweight and overweight targets, respectively. That is, participants did not rate their own group more favorably, with the exception of overweight participants having lower prejudice toward overweight targets. These findings add to the emerging evidence that women’s weight standards are in transition, marked by an increasingly negative perception of thin women, though not necessarily growing positivity toward fat women. This evidence further points toward the need for more extensive research on attitudes of people across the entire weight spectrum.