This project investigates critical issues and events related to Trek Therapeutics experience as a public benefit corporation. We will present and discuss how Trek differentiates itself in an industry where the attention is on high prices supporting high investor returns. Trek’s benefit corporation status helped it garner favorable attention in some respects, but has also presented challenges, particularly when it comes to attracting new capital.

Have you ever felt nervous, inappropriate, insecure or worried when trying to communicate in a foreign language? Have you ever feared to make mistakes, being negatively judged or misunderstood when talking to foreigners? Do you know someone who has experienced those situations? If yes, please, keep on reading. All these negative feelings are common in many and diverse situations when using a foreign language. They are the result of experiencing Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) a situational, dysphoric and debilitating anxiety coined (...) by Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope in 1986. Nowadays, multiculturalism and multilingualism are part of our daily lives as well as communication in a foreign language and with foreigners. Hence, FLA is not a problem restricted to foreign language learning scenarios anymore. This innovative session aims to inform and raise awareness of FLA presence and effects in professional and educational contexts, beyond FL classrooms and learning settings. (shrink)

The emerging changes in global societies challenge businesses as teams work across borders. Consequently, higher education promotes student interaction from diverse cultural backgrounds using technological tools without restricting time, cost, motivation or mobility. In this regard, telecollaboration engages students in a learning process that develops 21st century skills with peers from diverse language, socio-cultural, and educational backgrounds. This article presents a telecollaboration project designed and implemented by Queens College, City University of New York, and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, an online (...) university in Barcelona, in which 196 Economics and Business undergraduate students from the United States and Mexico enhanced intercultural communication. The aim of this study was to identify the effectiveness of telecollaboration as a tool for advancing diversity and transversal skills. The results showed a positive effect but detected the need to raise awareness on the importance of intercultural skills as part of 21st century skills sought by employers. (shrink)

Though possible influences of a stakeholder’s fairness or equity perceptions on its inclination to impose sanctions upon a firm or, conversely, to support it, have received a modicum of attention from researchers in stakeholder theory, the limited work in this area of inquiry assumes that stakeholders are homogeneous in their sensitivity to unfairness or inequity in the firm-stakeholder relationship, though research on equity sensitivity suggests that this assumption likely will not hold. Based on work in stakeholder theory, equity theory, and (...) equity sensitivity theory, in this paper I present and test hypotheses relating a stakeholder’s equity preferences – or equity sensitivity – to its propensity to take action against, or to support, the firm. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the debate on how nature can be understood as a stakeholder and to develop the idea of nature-inclusive stakeholder engagement. While acknowledging the arguments against the stakeholder status of nature, we build on a growing stream of literature that argues that nature should and can have stakeholder status. To move beyond the arguments for and against the stakeholder status of nature, we suggest the idea of nature-inclusive stakeholder engagement that builds (...) on the ideas of strong sustainability and ecocentrism. We suggest, first, that urban nature as an ideal context for the empirical examination of the nature-inclusive stakeholder engagement. Second, we claim that multidisciplinary research is needed to understand the nature-inclusive stakeholder engagement. Third, we highlight that specification of the particularities of nature is needed when speaking about the nature-inclusive stakeholder engagement. (shrink)

The person-organization fit (P-O fit) literature suggests that job seekers are attracted to organizations that match their personal values; but, to date, little is known about how individuals’ personal values might affect their preferences for particular job attributes when seeking a job. In this paper, using data from 351 job seekers at several employment agencies in Haute-Normandie, France, we examine possible connections between certain personal values and job attribute preferences among job seekers.

Benefit corporations are a new corporate form with legal requirements to account for the interests of social or environmental stakeholders. In this paper we discuss the perceived advantages of benefit corporations and critically review the need for this new corporate form. We suggest traditional C-corporations can legally engage in the activities promoted by adherents of benefit corporations and also present evidence of a potential harm arising from benefit corporations’ existence. Analysis of an original survey of over 500 respondents reveals knowledge (...) of benefit corporations dramatically decreased the percentage of people who thought C-corporations’ directors may legally consider the community or the environment when making decisions. However, exposure to benefit corporations did not alter belief in the widely held myth companies are legally required to maximize profit Overall, benefit corporations may represent a pyrrhic victory for those seeking to integrate values, ethics, and sustainability principles into corporate decision making. (shrink)

Thus far, the academic focus has been limited to understand how hybrid organizations balance goal plurality. However, the question how hybrids engage (or fail to engage) local communities in this process and the potential challenges involved has remained unaddressed. Relying on an inductive multiple case study of six Canadian community forest enterprises (CFEs), we describe dilemmas that arise between community engagement and CFEs’ other goals that form their social mission, as well as a distinct set of compromise tactics to address (...) them. We further identify a tension that arises from two distinct dimensions inherent to community engagement that are inherently interwoven yet contradicting. We add to research on paradox by showing that tensions not merely arise between outcome-focused goals that stem from organizational hybridity, but demonstrate that individual goal prescriptions in itself entail elements that cause tension, and warrant paradoxical management to ensure hybrids’ success in fulfilling their overall mission. (shrink)

This study aims to rewrite the history of the establishment period of Hamidiye Trade School without overlooking its internal structure, but, at the same time, by giving importance to the global context of the time period that had an impact on the formation of the internal structure. Hamidiye Trade School, which was a higher education institute, was founded by Abdülhamid II in 1882/83 in Istanbul and it has been subjected to several changes during its history. Today, it continues its academic (...) activities under the name of Marmara University, in Istanbul. Preliminary findings suggest that although agency shaped the organizational formation of Hamidiye Trade School in the beginning, later, during the nationalism period with Young Turks, a new mission was appointed to the school and this new mission has institutionalized by blurring the original establishment story of the school. In this process, non-Muslim agents who established the school were muted. (shrink)

This symposium created a circle of trust between IABS Fellows in attendance and other attendees around the issue of co-creating a vision for IABS 2050. A circle of trust is exploratory, inclusive, respectful of difference, open to new insights and perspectives, while being bound together by a shared commitment to co-learning and co-creation via the sense-making interaction of self and other. The session focused on four core questions: What are the major issues and obstacles to a flourishing future for business (...) in society as a field? What topics and issues should the field be emphasizing now and into the foreseeable future? How do we collectively build a flourishing future? What role(s) should IABS play in that future? (shrink)

Blue Marble or holistic systems thinking focuses on the big picture—the system as a whole. The ‘blue marble’ is Earth viewed from space, where it can be seen as an unboundaried whole. To understand the Blue Marble, we need to zoom out—and then zoom in to specific issues and systems—and then zoom back out again. Panelists outlined key issues facing the business in society field: the need to get the field “unstuck” towards the truly difficult, big picture issues facing the (...) world today. Presenters discussed: what it means to be human today, how natural sciences can inform research, implications of inequality, organizational responsibilities in the digital age, and the importance of language, narrative, and metaphors. Discussion emphasized how to move the field towards greater understanding of complexity and the roles that businesses and we as scholars play in understanding and even working towards resolving those issues? (shrink)

This paper compares three recent prescriptive proposals for practicing capitalism: Accountable Capitalism (Senator Elizabeth Warren), Responsible Capitalism (Professor R. Edward Freeman), and Political Corporate Social Responsibility (Professors Andreas Scherer and Guido Palazzo and colleagues). Warren’s Accountable Capitalism is a corporate governance reform proposal. Freeman’s Responsible Capitalism prescribes effective stakeholder management through entrepreneurial value creation. Political CSR (expanded here to Political Capitalism) is a prescription for democratization inside and outside of businesses and provision of public goods in instances of governmental incompetence. (...) The rationale for this examination is the possibility of political crisis in the relationship between democracy and capitalism. (shrink)