Bidhan L. Parmar

Economic Insecurity Increases Physical Pain

The past decade has seen a rise in both economic insecurity and frequency of physical pain. The current research reveals a causal connection between these two growing and consequential social trends. In five studies, we found that economic insecurity produced physical pain and reduced pain tolerance. In a sixth study, with data from 33,720 geographically diverse households across the United States, economic insecurity predicted consumption of over-the-counter painkillers. The link between economic insecurity and physical pain emerged when people experienced the insecurity personally (unemployment), when they were in an insecure context (they were informed that their state had a relatively high level of unemployment), and when they contemplated past and future economic insecurity. Using both experimental-causal-chain and measurement-of-mediation approaches, we also established that the psychological experience of lacking control helped generate the causal link from economic insecurity to physical pain. Meta-analyses including all of our studies testing the link from economic insecurity to physical pain revealed that this link is reliable. Overall, the findings show that it physically hurts to be economically insecure.

From Intrapsychic Moral Awareness to the Role of Social Disruptions, Labeling, and Actions in the Emergence of Moral Issues

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate and extend a sensemaking view of how ethics issues emerge in and around organizations. Current research in ethical decision making relies predominantly on a definition of ethics that distinguishes moral decision-making processes from amoral or non-moral decision-making processes through the intrapsychic use of explicit moral concepts. I recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the current approach and propose a model which builds on previous empirical work to explain how morality emerges in organizations through social interaction. This sensemaking model illustrates the role of disruptions, labeling, and action in the emergence of moral issues, and recasts the emergence of ethical issues, not as the individual recognition of objective moral content, but as more or less reliable interrelating. The model developed in this paper contributes to theory about ethical decision making by: (1) moving beyond the categorization of construals as moral or amoral to examining the similarities and differences across construals and the effects of this overlap for joint action; (2) reinstating the role of action and its interpretation in the story of how moral issues emerge; (3) redescribing ethics as more or less reliable interrelating, which broadens the toolkit for improving organizational conduct; and finally, (4) highlighting how every decision frame has the potential to create a moral issue in interaction.

Stakeholder Theory as a Basis for Capitalism

For the past 25 years, a group of scholars has developed the idea that a business has stakeholders - that is, there are groups and individuals who have a stake in the success or failure of the business. There are many different ways to understand this concept, and there is a burgeoning area of academic research in both business and applied ethics on so-called ‘stakeholder theory’. This literature seems to represent an abrupt departure from the usual understanding of business as a vehicle to maximize returns to the owners of capital. This more mainstream view, call it ‘shareholder capitalism’, or ‘the standard account’, has come under much recent criticism, and the ‘stakeholder view’ is often put forward as an alternative.

Stakeholder Theory: Stakeholder theory and corporate social responsibility

This chapter focuses on the connections between stakeholder theory and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature. After more than half a century of research and debate, there is not a single widely accepted definition of CSR. Researchers in the field of CSR have claimed that “the phrase ‘corporate social responsibility’ has been used in so many different contexts that it has lost all meaning” (Sethi 1975: 58). There are many different ideas, concepts, and practical techniques that have been developed under the umbrella of CSR research, including corporate social performance (Carroll 1979; Wartick and Cochran 1985; Wood 1991); corporate social responsiveness (Ackerman 1975; Ackerman and Bauer 1976; Sethi 1975); corporate citizenship (Wood and Logsdon 2001; Waddock 2004); corporate governance (Jones 1980; Freeman and Evan 1990; Evan and Freeman 1993; Sacconi 2006); corporate accountability (Zadek, Pruzan, and Evans 1997); sustainability , triple bottom line (Elkington 1994); and corporate social entrepreneurship (Austin, Stevenson, and Wei-Skillern 2006). All these are different nuances of the CSR concept that have been developed in the last fifty years – and beyond. Each of these diverse efforts shares a common aim in the attempt to broaden the obligations of firms to include more than financial considerations. This literature wrestles with and around questions of the broader purpose of the firm and how it can deliver on those goals.

Stakeholder Theory: The development of stakeholder theory: a brief history

The purpose of this chapter is to trace the development of what has come to be known as “stakeholder theory.” We intend to accomplish this in what is perhaps an unusual manner. To begin we go back to Freemans original book and retell the story, told there, of the origins of the idea of stakeholders. We then suggest a number of additions and revisions that have been made to this history in the literature of the last twenty-five years. We move to what could be called “autobiographical” or “idiosyncratic” accounts of the development of stakeholder theory, mostly from the point of view of one of the authors, Freeman. We do this because we want to illustrate a philosophical point about the general issue of “theory development” and the importance of a role for “the author.” There are many different versions of “stakeholder theory” and we do not wish to try to synthesize all of them into something approximating “the correct version.” A viable social science has an important place for what we might call “the author.” To claim that “the author” has such a role in the development of management theory is neither to promote the self-importance of particular individuals nor to deny the role of intersubjective agreement that is so vital in science. Rather it is to claim that contextual factors and serendipity can be crucial in the process of theory development. Finally, we give an assessment of Freemans 1984 book.

Disobedience of Immoral Orders from Authorities: An Issue Construction Perspective:

The purpose of this study is to examine how disobedience to immoral orders from an authority emerges in organizations. Using organizational discourse analysis to analyze the verbal communication of the original participants in Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments, I show how participants constructed the same experimental situation differently by analyzing their communication. Disobedient participants were more likely to display two different communication patterns: assessing consequences or self-referential objections. In contrast, obedient participants were more likely to seek guidance on the experimental procedure and interrupt the learner’s protests. Overall, I present a process model of how disobedience emerges in situations. This study’s findings also expand our understanding of moral imagination, moral decision making, and employee voice in organizations primarily by demonstrating how people can exercise agency in equivocal situations by constructing the situations they face.

Stakeholder Theory: Stakeholder theory and capitalism

We live in the age of markets. While they have been around for thousands of years, we are just beginning to understand their power for organizing society and creating value. In the last two hundred years markets have unleashed a tremendous amount of innovation and progress in the West. The industrial revolution, the rise of consumerism, and the dawn of the global marketplace have each in their own way made life better for millions of people. Many of us now know comforts, skills, and technologies that our ancestors could only dream of. Alongside these great strides forward are a set of deeply troubling issues. Capitalism, understood in the sense of “how markets work,” has also notoriously increased the divide between rich and poor, both within and across nations. We have become blind to some of the consequences of our actions that are harmful to others, such as environmental degradation, dominance of less privileged groups, and the inequitable distribution of opportunities. The seeds from these deeply troubling issues are beginning to germinate. Global warming, global financial crises, and global terrorism threaten to destabilize our world. It is more imperative than ever to study carefully and understand the power of markets and capitalism, and begin the construction of a new narrative about how capitalism can be a force for good in the world.

Stakeholder Theory: The problems that stakeholder theory tries to solve

We begin this chapter by outlining the problems that stakeholder theory was originally conceptualized to solve and the “basic mechanics” that we believe underlie the development of the theory during the last thirty years. We turn in the next sections to the arguments of Milton Friedman, Michael Jensen, Michael Porter, and Oliver Williamson, often cited as opponents of stakeholder theory, and suggest that all are compatible with the main ideas of stakeholder theory. We highlight what we also take to be key differences between stakeholder theory and these largely economic approaches to business. We suggest that while these approaches are compatible with stakeholder theory, it makes more sense to return to the very roots of capitalism, the theory of entrepreneurship. We suggest how stakeholder theory needs to be seen as a theory about how business actually does and can work. We make an explicit tie to the theory of entrepreneurship and outline the basics of the stakeholder mindset. Stakeholder theory: the basic mechanics Many have argued that the business world of the twenty-first century has undergone dramatic change. The rise of globalization, the dominance of information technology, the liberalization of states, especially the demise of centralized state planning and ownership of industry, and increased societal awareness of the impact of business on communities and nations have all been suggested as reasons to revise our understanding of business.

Stakeholder Theory by R. Edward Freeman

The stakeholder perspective is an alternative way of understanding how companies and people create value and trade with each other. Freeman, Harrison and Zyglidopoulos discuss the foundation concepts and implementation of stakeholder management as well as the advantages this approach provides to firms and their managers. They present a number of tools that managers can use to implement stakeholder thinking, better understand stakeholders and create value with and for them. The Element concludes by discussing how managers can create stakeholder oriented control systems and by examining some of the important stakeholder-related issues that are worthy of future scholarly and managerial attention.

Stakeholder Theory: Contents

The stakeholder perspective is an alternative way of understanding how companies and people create value and trade with each other. Freeman, Harrison and Zyglidopoulos discuss the foundation concepts and implementation of stakeholder management as well as the advantages this approach provides to firms and their managers. They present a number of tools that managers can use to implement stakeholder thinking, better understand stakeholders and create value with and for them. The Element concludes by discussing how managers can create stakeholder oriented control systems and by examining some of the important stakeholder-related issues that are worthy of future scholarly and managerial attention.