Adam J. Sulkowski

Shake Your Stakeholder: Firms Leading Engagement to Cocreate Sustainable Value:

While most extant scholarship has focused on how stakeholders influence firms, we propose that firms play a critical role in “shaking” stakeholders. Shaking stakeholders means to proactively initiate cooperation with those affected by a firm to alter awareness, behavior, and networks so as to catalyze change in society and the marketplace to reward cocreated innovations in core operations of the firm that improve social and environmental impacts. Two previously underappreciated aspects of stakeholder relations are highlighted. First, the firm can be the entity that leads engagement that shakes stakeholders out of complacency. Second, firms can catalyze collaborative relationships to cocreate sustainable value that is shared with stakeholders. We offer several cases to illustrate this strategy. While stakeholder shaking may be useful in any business environment, global ecological crises, societal problems, and governance failures heighten the need for firms to take action to bring about profound and systemic changes.

Law, Management, and Strategy: Collapsing Boundaries and Managing the Interstices

Law undergirds the capitalist system and is “at the interface” of business and social relationships but remains largely walled off from many traditional approaches to management education, scholarship, and practice. Although a simple definition of law is “enforceable rules between individuals and individuals and society,” law is also a medium by which relationships among and obligations between management and internal and external stakeholders are negotiated and formalized. Law can also drive (or impede) innovation by creating new rights (or burdening new business models with undue regulation) and promote (or prevent) social change by setting the boundaries for acceptable corporate actions. Legal rules for disclosure and corporate governance can and have changed the rules of engagement between organizations and their internal and external stakeholders. Environmental regulations, complemented by responsible corporate decision-making, can profoundly affect the long-term viability of industries and of humans’ ability to coexist with the natural environment. Law, and management of legal dimensions of business, should be seen as inseparable from strategy, ethics, stakeholder engagement, and sustainability. This interdisciplinary panel includes both legal and management scholars who focus in their teaching and research on these topics. As a matter of execution, this panel will also be at the interface: roughly half the time is budgeted for Q&A and conversation with attendees, moderated with a clear goal in mind. The goal is to stimulate awareness and actionable “take-away” ideas that (1) involve law and (2) relate to the teaching, research, and practice of strategy, business ethics, stakeholder engagement, and sustainability.

Emitting Happiness? Using Model-Based Cluster Analysis to Group Countries by Wealth, Development, Carbon Emissions, and Happiness

This exploratory study uses model-based cluster analysis to group countries based on statistical similarities in terms of income, development, carbon emissions, and self-reported happiness. Several characteristics of the resulting clusters are noted. The least developed cluster, generating just 5% of the carbon emissions and earning on average 14% the income of the most developed cluster, experienced an average of 89% of the happiness of that of residents of the most developed cluster. The least developed cluster would have had an even higher level of average happiness had countries with unusually negative recent experiences such as Egypt and Iraq been excluded. Between the two clusters with the highest self-reported happiness, one emits just 57% the carbon dioxide emissions of the other. Average happiness is lowest in the two clusters with medium levels of income and development. These observations, among others, are very salient to deciding how to further happiness at the individual, firm, and societal levels while reducing emissions and other negative environmental impacts. The results should provoke further work in measuring, understanding, and fostering conditions conducive to well-being.

What Aspects of CSR Really Matter: An Exploratory Study Using Workplace Mortality Data

This work contributes to a growing and important body of research that tests whether there is any relationship between reporting positive corporate social responsibility metrics and their return-on-investment for stockholders. Following a review of key literature, this article will test the following hypothesis: whether a portfolio of stocks of companies that produce CSR reports that reveal the lowest on-the-job mortality rates produce better returns for investors than a portfolio of stocks of companies that produce CSR reports that reveal highest on-the-job mortality rates. Indeed, stocks of companies with lowest rates of workplace mortality on average increased in value more than the stocks of companies with the highest rates of workplace mortality, especially in a shorter observation period. However, somewhat disturbing, counterintuitive and thought-provoking, the difference in stock performance is found to not be statistically strong over a longer observation period. In the discussion section, the authors consider whether some CSR metrics are too granular to impact stock performance, whether the impacts of changes in some metrics become evident over a longer observation period, or whether outside factors affected the results. The study concludes by pointing to several new directions for promising research.

The Clean Water Act and Estuarian Habitat Restoration

This paper will examine how habitat restoration, such as revitalizing shellfish beds and restoring wetlands, can be used as a way to clean estuarine waters from the effects of nitrogen pollution, and, in doing so, satisfy the statutory requirements and policy intent of the Clean Water Act.The Clean Water Act (CWA) requires each state to produce a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) report for bodies of water that are impacted by pollutants, as well as a remediation plan. This report begins by identifying a specific variety of pollution, the scale of the problem, and the extent to which the pollutants must be reduced. In addition, strategies are identified to accomplish the goal of pollutant reduction.Since the 1990s, research has demonstrated the ability of oysters and other shellfish to filter the water column and therefore remove the effects of over-nitrification in coastal and estuarine waters. Other research has shown that wetlands restoration can be used as a denitrification tool as well. Both of these strategies use natural processes and have the benefits of not only removing nitrogen and its effects but also can provide benefits such as stimulating the regrowth of valuable eelgrass beds and revitalizing finfish populations and crustacean nurseries. Both have the ultimate effect of providing not only clearer estuarine waters but a potential source of sustainable food stocks.This paper discusses the feasibility of using shellfish and wetlands restoration as an integral part of an overall strategy for the removal of the effects of over-nitrification of estuarine waters in the Total Management Daily Load process and argues that these tools meet both the statutory requirements CWA and its policy objectives of restoring water quality.

Oil Users, Air Polluters, and Forest Abusers: Macro-Level Segmentation of 121 Countries Based on Resource Usage Efficiency Per Capita

This paper makes a vital contribution to the fields of sustainability studies and environmental policy making by presenting evidence that contradicts widely accepted conventional wisdom about the relative environmental efficiency of countries.Significant findings include the existence of clusters of relative resource usage efficiency that are not entirely explained by geography, stages of economic development, or other conventional theories.To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first time that a model-based three-dimensional cluster analysis has been used to address this question of ranking the relative environmental efficiency of countries.