Bradley R. Agle

The Relationship Between Social and Financial Performance Repainting a Portrait

A primary issue in the field of business and society over the past 25 years has been the relationship between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance. Recently, Griffin and Mahon (1997) presented a table categorizing studies that have investigated this relationship. Motivated by concerns with this table, as well as a desire to account for progress in research in this area, the authors reconstructed it. The authors present a portrait of this relationship that is (a) substantially different from that shown in the Griffin and Mahon table and (b) more consistent with the latest research on the topic.

Understanding Research on Values in Business A Level of Analysis Framework

Researchers in all management specialties have discussed and investigated the important role values play in personal and organizational phenomena. However, because research on values has been performed in a wide range of social science disciplines and at different levels of analysis, much of thiswork has been uninformed by other work and is neither well integrated nor systematized, resulting in a great deal of confusion concerning the topic. This article attempts to add order and clarity to this area of research by proposing a framework of values research based on level of analysis and by cataloguing and reviewing the vast theoretical and empirical research in light of this framework. It concludes with a critique of the extant literature and recommendations for further research.

Ensuring Validity in the Measurement of Corporate Social Performance: Lessons from Corporate United Way and PAC Campaigns

Building on philosophy of science literature and two original studies, this paper argues for the necessity of incorporating all three portions of Woods (1991) theoretical model of corporate social performance (CSP) into its measurement. It begins by describing the two studies of an organizational phenomenon not commonly studied – internal fund drives to employees. Insights from these studies of corporate PAC and United Way campaigns are then used to illustrate how important it is to incorporate all three portions of Woods model into the measurement of CSP to prevent drawing faulty conclusions. The paper concludes by providing a matrix for use in testing the validity of CSP measures.

Measuring Christian Beliefs that Affect Managerial Decision-Making: A Beginning

Although considerable work has been done on the measurement of religious values and beliefs, little is understood about their effect on managerial values and decision making. This paper reports on theoretical work by the authors identifying Christian religious beliefs that might affect managerial decision making; it also reports the results of empirical work validating five scales of religious beliefs that might affect managerial decision making. Future research directions are proposed.

A Study of the Cultural Effects of Industry and Career Systems on Top Executive Perceptions of Ethical Problems

While practitioner workshops and academic courses on ethics and values have traditionally focused on individual frameworks, discussion of business ethics and values as a field of study within social deviance and management often stresses the important interaction between organizational culture and ethical practices, or context rather than character. However, research on this interaction is limited. This paper reports on a study examining the effect that two antecedents of organizational culture, industry and career systems, have on top executive perceptions of various ethical issues. Two of the top officers in each of fifty-two leading firms covering four service industry sectors were surveyed concerning their firms career systems and their perceptions of the severity of several ethical problems. Results of the study provide descriptive information on the severity of ethical problems across industry sectors, and suggest that both industry and career systems affect the severity of ethical problems. Implications of this study can be applied to continued research on corporate deviance and managerial efforts to reinforce ethical conduct.

Stakeholder Prioritization Work: The Role of Stakeholder Salience in Stakeholder Research

In this chapter, we update stakeholder salience research using the new lens of stakeholder work: the purposive processes of organization aimed at being aware of, identifying, understanding, prioritizing, and engaging stakeholders. Specifically, we focus on stakeholder prioritization work — primarily as represented by the stakeholder salience model — and discuss contributions, shortcomings, and possibilities for this literature. We suggest that future research focus on stakeholder inclusivity, the complexity of prioritization work within intra-corporate markets, the integration of stakeholder prioritization with other forms of stakeholder work, and the development of managerial tools for multiobjective decision making within the strategic management context.

“He’s a Real Dude” Tributes to Tom Jones

Researchers often fail to honor luminaries in their fields of inquiry, at least while they are still alive. What follows is one such tribute, to Dr. Thomas M. Jones, the Boeing Company endowed professor in business management at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. Business & Society represents an appropriate outlet for this tribute, given that Tom was the first editor of the journal when the International Association for Business and Society (IABS) assumed editorial control of the Sage Publications journal in 1993.