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This paper aims to explore how directors understand the “how” and “why” of their personal moral values in their task of governing the organisation.

This paper is based on a qualitative study. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews of 33 New Zealand directors.

Three major themes emerged: Directors’ personal moral values are a powerful driver in ethical decision-making of directors; codes of ethics are seen to be effective to the extent that individuals have a strong moral compass; great value is placed on their personal moral code as being consistent with it, defines who they are.

This study reveals how and why directors’ personal ethics are important in their task of governance and demonstrates that they are extremely influential in their ethical decision-making.

Appraisal processes could also make sure this factor is given equal importance along with other skills and competencies. In the area of director selection, proven moral integrity could become a point to investigate prior to the appointment of a director.

There have been very few studies investigating the subjective ethical experience in ethical decision-making. Investigating the antecedents of ethical or unethical outcomes only provides a partial understanding of the ethical experience.

In a recent article, Schaefer et al. (2015) argue that cultivating appropriate beliefs and values, cultivating systems thinking and encouraging responsibility are the stages to be followed to achieve sustainability-as-flourishing from an organizational perspective. This analysis forms the basis for the development and discussion of a conceptual model to educate undergraduate business students at a New Zealand University into responsible leaders who strive to enact sustainability-as-flourishing in organizations.

This paper critiques current approaches to sustainability which often reflect a narrow understanding of human needs and do not demand necessary transformation in the way we interact with the world around us. It then provides an overview of sustainability-as-flourishing, and its various stages, with relevant examples from business. This is followed by a discussion of the conceptual model, the pedagogical philosophies underpinning it and the teaching methods required for shifting business students’ mindsets towards this end.

This is a conceptual paper that offers a new teaching model for sustainability-as-flourishing. The paper concludes with suggestions for sustainability educators in business.

To date, sustainability-as-flourishing is underdeveloped in the business literature. This conceptual paper unpacks this notion further. Additionally, it provides a model for business educators to teach sustainability-as-flourishing. While some of these ideas and features have been described in the literature previously, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time they have been brought as a coherent whole under this broader and unique approach of sustainability-as-flourishing.

This study aims to demonstrate how critical realism (CR) can be used in spirituality at work (SAW) research and to provide a practical example of CR in SAW research.

CR is a philosophical meta-theory that allows the stratification of spirituality into different levels of reality, advocates for research methods matching the ontology of the level investigated and provides complementary methods of exploring this phenomenon’s causal power in social contexts. The authors present a study where CR was used to explain how and why SAW influences ethics in organisational contexts.

The results demonstrate that CR provides a useful approach to bridging the positivist-interpretivist difference in SAW research. Moreover, a CR approach helped explain the underlying conditions and causal mechanisms that power SAW to influence ethical decision-making and behaviour in the workplace.

While CR has been applied in the management literature, negligible SAW research has used this approach. That which exists is either conceptual or does not discuss methods of data analysis, or describe how critical realist concepts resulted in their findings. This paper addresses that lacuna. CR also provides value, as an alternative approach to SAW research, in that it allows the use of both quantitative and qualitative methods as complementary, not confrontational methods while providing a more integrated and deeper view of SAW and its effects.

This paper seeks to provide an Aristotelian alternative to the neo‐classical paradigm for the development of sustainable business research and a preliminary explanation of how to implement the assumptions on the shopfloor.

The paper presents a conceptual exploration and comparison of sustainable business, Aristotle's view of society and intra‐societal relations, and the neo‐classical model.

The paper shows how sustainable business research is supported by elements of the Aristotelian model and how this is not the case with the neo‐classical paradigm. Practical implications for corporate governance strategies are detailed.

This paper shows how Aristotelian philosophy may provide a rationale for the normative claims of sustainable business research.

Directors play a hard-to-quantify but critical role in the success of corporations. Outside directors supplement the firm-specific knowledge of inside directors by providing expertise and monitoring. Prior research finds that outside directors who are commercial bankers can be both beneficial and costly to large, non-financial corporations. Smaller, bank-dependent corporations should benefit more than large firms from the services banker directors provide, but may also be more prone to the costs they can impose. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of bank dependency on appointments of banker directors.

The author estimates models relating the probability of a first-time banker-director appointment to proxies of bank dependency on data for a matched sample of firms with and without banker directors drawn from a size-representative sample of Compustat firms.

Bank-dependent firms are less likely to appoint bankers as directors than bank-independent firms. Bank-dependent firms are also less likely to appoint bankers whose employers are firms’ creditors (i.e. affiliated bankers). Bank-dependent and bank-independent firms are indistinguishable in their probabilities of appointing unaffiliated bankers as directors.

Bank-dependent firms with unexploited growth opportunities appear unable to ameliorate their financial constraints by having banker directors. Appointing retired bankers to boards may give firms the benefits of banker directors without the costs.

This paper is the first to: document the prevalence of banker directors at smaller corporations; present econometric evidence on banker-director appointments at firms ranging from small to large; and identify bank dependency as a factor limiting appointments of affiliated banker directors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the complex and shifting relationship between the Anglo American Corporation (Anglo) and the South African State (“the State”) as reflected in Anglo’s annual reports.

This paper builds on research on the role of annual reports in ideological conflict. To examine the ongoing relationship between Anglo and the State, the authors read all the annual reports published by Anglo American from 1917 to 1975, looking for instances in which the corporation appeared to be attempting to address, criticise, compliment, or implore the State.

During the period under study, despite the apparent struggles between the South African State and Anglo American, the relationship between the two was primarily symbiotic. The symbolic confrontation engaged in by these two behemoths perpetuated the real, physical violence perpetrated on the oppressed workers. By appearing to be a liberal opponent of apartheid, Anglo was able to ensure continued investment in South Africa.

The examination of decades’ worth of annual reports provides an example of how these supposedly neutral instruments were used to contest and sustain power. Thereby, Anglo could continue to exploit workers, reap enormous profits, and maintain a fiction of opposition to the oppressive State. The State also benefited from its support of Anglo, which provided a plurality of tax revenue and economic expansion during the period.

This paper provides insights into the ways the State and other institutions sustain each other in the pursuit of economic and political power in the face of visible and widely condemned injustices. Although they frequently contested each other’s primacy, both benefited while black South African miners suffered.

The purpose of this study is to examine motivation for grant writing among academic librarians.

Librarians identified as successful grant authors were sent invitations to an online survey.

The data collected were analyzed in the context of existing studies of librarian motivation, especially those relating to academic publishing and entrepreneurship, as well as the theoretical frameworks of motivation, including those of Maslow and Herzberg.

Results of the study should be useful to those in the library field interested in grant writing. No previous studies on this topic were located.

During a visit to a biotech company, Patricia Cloherty noticed a can opener attached to a wall, enabling the user to open a container without any reflex action. In the “clean room” atmosphere of these facilities, where handling volatile materials is commonplace, it made sense. But her initial reaction was decidedly low‐tech. “I thought, 'What a great product for people with arthritis,” she recalls. Over time, the can opener's inventor did, indeed, market it to disabled people who couldn't get a grip on a tool whose maneuverability is taken for granted.

Extending the argument made in Bushe and Marshak (2009) of the emergence of a new species of Organization Development (OD) that we label Dialogic, to differentiate it from the foundational Diagnostic form, we argue that how any OD method is used in practice will be depend on the mindset of the practitioner. Six variants of Dialogic OD practice are reviewed and compared to aid in identification of a Weberian ideal-type Dialogic Mindset, consisting of eight premises that distinguish it from the foundational Diagnostic Mindset. Three core change processes that underlie all successful Dialogic OD processes are proposed, and suggestions for future research offered.