Donna J. Wood

Collaborative Alliances: Moving from Practice to Theory

The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science presents two special issues on collaborative alliances that examine the contributions and limits of existing theories for explaining collaboration, and that clarify and expand our understanding of this phenomenon. In this introduction, the following major theoretical perspectives are applied to explain collaboration and collaborative alliances: resource dependence theory; corporate social performance/institutional economics theory; strategic management/social ecology theory; macroeconomics theory; institutional/negotiated order theory; and political theory. The nine case research articles in the two special issues analyze a wide variety of collaborative alliances and provide unique insights. The articles `contributions, the levels of analysis they focus on, and the ways they address three broad issues of collaborative alliances -preconditions, process, and outcomes -are discussed. No single theoretical perspective provides an adequate foundation for a general theory of collaboration, but the articles point the way to the construction of such a theory.

Measuring Corporate Social Performance: A Review

This paper reviews the literature on corporate social performance (CSP) measurement and sets that literature into a theoretical context. Following a review of CSP theory development and the literature on relationships between CSP and corporate financial performance, Woods CSP model (Wood, D.J. (1991). Corporate social performance revisited. Academy of Management Review, 16, pp. 691–718) is used as an organizing device to present and discuss studies that use particular measures of CSP. Conclusions emphasize the need for CSP scholars to refocus on stakeholders and society, and to incorporate relevant literatures from other scholarly domains.

Business Citizenship: From Domestic to Global Level of Analysis

In this article we first review the development of the concept of global business citizenship and show how the libertarian political philosophy of free-market capitalism must give way to a communitarian view in order for the voluntaristic, local notion of “corporate citizenship†to take root. We then distinguish the concept of global business citizenship from “corporate citizenship†by showing how the former concept requires a transition from communitarian thinking to a position of universal human rights. In addition, we link global business citizenship to global business strategy and to three analytical levels of ethical norms. Finally, we trace a process whereby global businesses can implement fundamental norms and learn to accommodate to legitimate cultural differences.

Social Issues in Management: Theory and Research in Corporate Social Performance

This article offers a broad developmental view of thinking in the field of social issues in management (SIM). The article reviews conceptual developments and empirical research in the context of the emerging theory of corporate social performance. After briefly describing the evolution and current status of the CSP model, the article shows how this model serves as an organizing device for research in SIM. Finally, the article discusses research implications of viewing the SIM field through the lens of corporate social performance.

Reputation as an Emerging Construct in the Business and Society Field: An Introduction

Reputation is a powerful concept for business, government, and nonprofit organizations, just as it is for individuals. Executives, administrators, external and internal stakeholders, critics, and supporters of organizations all use the concept of reputation routinely to evaluate and communicate their perceptions about organizations. Students, too, typically pay more attention when their teachers link scholarly theories and empirical studies to an organization’s reputation. Despite this high level of interest in reputation in the so-called real world, business and society scholars have not focused much explicit attention on the concept, except for Wartick (1992). The applied fields of strategic management (e.g., Fombrun, 1996; Fombrun & Shanley, 1990), marketing (e.g., Bromley, 1993; Dowling, 2001), and communication (e.g., Argenti, 1998; Morley, 1998) have developed conceptual definitions and empirical measures to a much greater extent. We wondered whether reputation is a relevant and useful construct to integrate more explicitly into theories about business and society relationships. One of the field’s central concepts, corporate social performance (Carroll, 1979; Wartick & Cochran, 1985; Wood, 1991), is a source of a firm’s reputation, and widespread consensus within the field is that managers should consider the expectations and judgments of various external and internal stakeholders when they make decisions. Many business and society scholars also conduct empirical studies of firm performance that use various sources of data that may reflect some aspects of reputation, such as survey data published in Fortune about the “most admired” corporations and evaluative data from Kinder, Lydenberg, and Domini and the Investor Responsibility Research Center. These studies, reported in Wood and Jones (1995) , Margolis and Walsh (2001), and Orlitzky and Benjamin (2001), make occasional reference to reputation but do not explicitly explore the concept. An additional problem relates to limitations in the databases currently used for gathering information about social performance and whether they are adequate and comprehensive measures of a company’s reputation (e.g., Baucus, 1995; Brown & Perry, 1994, 1995;

Transparency and social responsibility issues for Wikipedia

Wikipedia is known as a free online encyclopedia. Wikipedia uses largely transparent writing and editing processes, which aim at providing the user with quality information through a democratic collaborative system. However, one aspect of these processes is not transparent—the identity of contributors, editors, and administrators. We argue that this particular lack of transparency jeopardizes the validity of the information being produced by Wikipedia. We analyze the social and ethical consequences of this lack of transparency in Wikipedia for all users, but especially students; we assess the corporate social performance issues involved, and we propose courses of action to compensate for the potential problems. We show that Wikipedia has the appearance, but not the reality, of responsible, transparent information production.

Theory and Integrity in Business and Society

Business and society academics face an ongoing dilemma between the rigorous demands of good scholarship and the personal and pragmatic demands of constituencies and themselves. This dilemma is, above all, an ethical one, but it is partially solvable by paying closer attention to theory and methodology while acknowledging individual biases and desires and helping others in the field to do the same.

Corporate Involvement in Community Economic Development The Role of U.S. Business Education

This article reports a study of how leading U.S. business schools incorporate one important dimension of corporate citizenship—corporate involvement in community economic development (CI/CED)—in their curricula and programs. Corporate citizenship, or social responsibility, is shown to have several important and unexpected locations in business education. In addition, the authors develop a rationale forwhy and howspecific topics such as CI/CED as well as the general topic of corporate citizenship are appropriate for business school attention.

ESSAY FORUM : VOICES FROM THE SCHOLARLY GENERATIONS OF BUSINESS AND SOCIETY

A total of 36 Business & Society scholars from five intellectual generations answer questions about the fields biggest challenges and their own motivations.

Institutional Moral Hazard in the Multi-tiered Regulation of Unemployment and Social Assistance Benefits and Activation: A summary of eight country case studies

This paper studies eight countries in which the regulation of unemployment benefits and related benefits and the concomitant activation of unemployed individuals has a multi-tiered architecture. It assesses their experiences and tries to understand possible problems of ‘institutional moral hazard’ that may emerge in the context of a hypothetical European Unemployment Benefit Scheme.