Review of extant research on the corporate environmental performance (CEP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) link generally demonstrates a positive relationship. However, some arguments and empirical results have demonstrated otherwise. As a result, researchers have called for a contingency approach to this research stream, which moves beyond the basic question “does it pay to be green?” and instead asks “when does it pay to be green?” In answering this call, we provide a meta-analytic review of CEP–CFP literature in which we (...) identify potential moderators to the CEP–CFP relationship including environmental performance type (e.g., reactive vs. proactive performance), firm characteristics (e.g., large vs. small firms), and methodological issues (e.g., self-report measures). By analyzing these contingencies, this study attempts to provide a basis on which to draw conclusions regarding some inconsistencies and debates in the CEP–CFP research. Some of the results of the moderator analysis suggest that small firms benefit from environmental performance as much or more than large firms, US firms seem to benefit more than international counterparts, and environmental performance seems to have the strongest influence on market-measures of financial performance. (shrink)

Research suggests that international assignment experience enhances awareness of societal stakeholders, influences personal values, and provides rare and valuable resources. Based on these arguments, we hypothesize that CEO international assignment experience will lead to increased corporate social performance (CSP) and will be moderated by the CEO's functional background. Using a sample of 393 CEOs of S&P 500 companies and three independent data sources, we find that CEO international assignment experience is positively related to CSP and is significantly moderated by the (...) CEO's functional background. Specifically, CEOs with international assignment experience and an output functional background (e.g., marketing and sales) are positively associated with greater CSP. (shrink)

Cyberspace, the internet and vituality are widely understood in terms of poststructuralist or antiessentialist expectations that when identity is separated from physical bodies it is experienced as self-evidently performative: we might therefore expect that new kinds of identities will be enacted on-line, and that participants will frame these identities as performances rather than judging them in terms of their truth or authenticity. This article uses a long-term ethnographic engagement with one internet social setting - the `sexpics' trade on Internet Relay (...) Chat (IRC) - to argue that neither of these expectations is met there. First, the sexual act and identities performed tend to be conventional in relation to off-line heterosexual norms and (pornographic) representations. Second, authenticity is a fundamental criterion by which participants understand and manage their on-line experiences: they veer between complete cynicism (their inability to authenticate the other meant according the relationship and the other no weight or commitment) and a desire for involvement that depended on pursuing startegies for authenticating the other, for being able to treat the other's performances as real rather than merely realistic. Significantly, these strategies of authentication were attempts to fix the other in a body or body-like presence, one which persists over time and is locatable in space, and which is therefore ethically accountable and trustworthy. (shrink)

This article is intended as a critique of recent theorizations of sexuality and desire, which have led performative theorists to contend that gender is an effect of discourse, and sex an effect of gender. It results from informal discussions between the three authors on the mechanisms through which sexuality gets objectified in modernity. The ideas of influential Western thinkers are confronted with field data on sexuality - as lived and imagined - that the authors have been gathering in Amazonian societies, (...) Trinidad, and on the Internet. Ethnographic data and Western theories about the nature of eroticism are used to argue that the utopian definition of sexuality as sexual desire and will to identity is too divorced from the mundane - love, domesticity and reproduction in a broad sense - and based on a too limited sphere of social experience. Consequently, to apply this definition to how and why humans engage in sexual activity leads to erroneous generalizations. For when encountered ethnographically, sexuality consists of practices deeply embedded in relational contexts. The article concludes with the proposition that debates about the possibilities of human sexuality and of its political intervention will make no significant progress unless we stop repeating that `sexuality is socially constructed', and start looking at the ways in which it is lived as part of everyday social life. (shrink)

THE clue to the meaning and interpretation of this poem, which has long been the despair of critics, is, I believe, to be found in a variant on line 9, faithfully preserved in the Codex Sangermanensis and yet unaccountably neglected hitherto. G's text I transcribe from M. Chatelain's photo-lithograph facsimile of the manuscript.

If materiality is necessary for social order, we can usefully investigate what happens in social settings which constantly problematize materiality and are uncertain as to what exactly count as `things'. This discussion draws on an on-line ethnography of people exchanging sexually explicit material and communications over Internet Relay Chat. The paper argues that although, or because, this `sexpics' scene problematized materiality, participants went to great lengths to make `things' material. They set in motion a considerable range of `mechanisms of materialization', (...) and they did so in order to establish a sense of ongoing ethical sociality. Conversely, the kinds of materializations they produced need to be interpreted in the light of the precise ethical sociality they sought to sustain. In particular, the article explores a paradox: although sexual imagery and communications were hyperabundant, participants routinely materialized them in the form of scarce economic commodities which were exchanged within pseudo-market relations. What is at stake here is not the necessity of materiality for normative social order but rather the precedence of the normative over the material, or the `ought' over the `is'. (shrink)