An emerging body of literature has highlighted a gap in our understanding of the extent to which the salience attached to human rights is likely to influence the extent to which an individual takes account of Corporate Social Responsibility in decision making. The primary aim of this study is to begin to address this gap by understanding how individuals attribute different emphasis on specific aspects of human rights when making decisions to purchase, work, invest or support the community operations for (...) socially responsible organisations. In order to achieve this objective, a survey instrument was administered to professionals in Russia and Bulgaria. Our data indicate that there is a significant correlation between individuals’ sensitivity towards different components of human rights and their perceptions of the importance of CSR in decision making. Specifically, the recognition of political rights was strongly associated with the willingness to purchase, invest, seek employment and support socially responsible firms. Our analysis also outlines significant differences between the Russian and the Bulgarian samples with regard to the manners in which individuals rate the importance of civil, political and economic human rights. (shrink)

Business & Society’s 60th anniversary affords an opportunity to reflect on the journal’s achievements in the context of the wider field. We analyze editorial commentaries to map the evolving mission of the journal, assess the achievement of the journal’s mission through a thematic analysis of published articles, and examine Business & Society’s distinctiveness relative to peer journals using a machine learning approach. Our analysis highlights subtle shifts in Business & Society’s mission and content over time, reflecting variation in the relative (...) emphasis on scholarly quality versus policy/practice relevance, and building the journal and its academic community versus addressing issues of concern to wider society. While Business & Society’s intended missions have been substantially and sequentially achieved, an increased emphasis on the society-business nexus and a critical approach to interdisciplinarity could further enhance Business & Society’s leading role within business and society research and attract new generations of contributors and readers. (shrink)

We examine whether, relative to their global peers, the financial performance of firms from developing countries leads to increases in human rights abuses. We also study the institutional conditions that qualify this relationship. Based on a combination of behavioral and neo-institutional theories, we suggest there is a positive relationship between financial performance and human rights misbehavior as home country liabilities motivate firms to misbehave to achieve their primary goal of economic leadership. We also suggest that strong regulatory and normative pressures (...) attenuate the abovementioned positive relationship, as failure to comply with norms endangers such firms’ secondary goal of achieving international legitimacy. Our analysis, based on a sample of 245 large companies from eight developing countries studied over a 20-year period, supports our hypotheses. Our empirical results suggest that such companies misbehave when they endeavor to strike a balance between maintaining their global economic leadership and sustaining their social legitimacy. (shrink)

The consequences of foreign direct investment (FDI) for human rights protection are poorly understood. We propose that the impact of FDI varies across industries. In particular, extractive firms in the oil and mining industries go where the resources are located and are bound to such investment, which creates a status quo bias among them when it comes to supporting repressive rulers (“location-bound effect”). The same is not true for nonextractive multinational corporations (MNCs) in manufacturing or services, which can, in comparison, (...) exit problematic countries more easily. We also propose that strong democratic institutions can alleviate negative impacts of extractive FDI on human rights (“democratic safeguard effect”). Using U.S. FDI broken up into extractive and nonextractive industries in 157 host countries (1999–2015), we find support for these propositions.1 Extractive FDI is associated with more human rights abuse, but nonextractive FDI is associated with less abuse, after controlling for other factors, including concerns about endogeneity. We find also that the negative human rights impact of extractive FDI vanishes in countries where democratic institutions are stronger. Our results are robust to a range of alternative estimation techniques. (shrink)

In this paper, the process for firms to decide whether or not to invest in corporate social responsibility is treated from a real option perspective. We extend the Husted framework with an important extra parameter that allows us to understand the timing of CSR investment and explain why some companies drag their feet over CSR investments. Our model explicitly allows for the impact of the opportunity cost of delaying the CSR investment decision, providing firms with tools to determine the optimal (...) moment of exercising the CSR investment option. We illustrate our timing model through a case study and analyze governmental support strategies for CSR from a real options perspective. (shrink)