Elise Perrault

Environmental Shareholder Activism Considering Status and Reputation in Firm Responsiveness

Status and reputation have recently gained traction as theoretical mechanisms that, as important parts of decision processes, influence and explain firm behavior. In this study, we examine how environmentally concerned shareholder activists vary in their status and reputation, and how these differences affect firm responsiveness to their concerns. In a sample of 420 resolutions concerning the natural environment in the period 2004 to 2008, our results indicate that firms respond positively to shareholder activists’ high status (a desirable characteristic) and also to their reputation to threaten the firm (an unfavorable characteristic). As such, our study advances a promising explanation to firm responsiveness on environmental issues, rooted in their interpretation of how activists’ status and reputation affect their firm.

What Have Firms Been Doing? Exploring What KLD Data Report About Firms’ Corporate Social Performance in the Period 2000-2010

With the blossoming of research on corporate social performance (CSP), the data produced by Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini (KLD) have become the standard to measure firms’ social and stakeholder actions. However, to date, only a few studies have focused on examining the data directly, and have done so largely in terms of validating the concepts and methods in the data set’s construction. The present study seeks to complement these efforts by contributing knowledge about what the KLD data report on firms’ actions toward primary and secondary stakeholders, and the dimensions of CSP that firms generally engage in, together or sequentially. With data on 3,073 firms over the period 2000-2010, results show that firms expend more resources on garnering strengths in primary stakeholder dimensions, although this trend is sharply deteriorating to the benefit of secondary stakeholders—notably the natural environment. Results also show that firms generally approach CSP with a mixed behavior, with strengths and concerns in the same dimensions, especially as it pertains to secondary stakeholders. These are the same dimensions in which firms show the longer, more intrinsic commitments, suggesting that secondary stakeholder strengths and concerns may be structural in nature. However, there is also evidence of relationships across dimensions, indicating that firms’ involvement in CSP can generate momentum. The rich implications of these findings are discussed.

Zombies and Originals: How Cultural Theory Informs Stakeholder Management

The question of stakeholder salience has recently resurfaced in the suggestion that the ethical foundations of corporate cultures result in stakeholder cultures that largely explain how firms allocate resources among stakeholders. The present article seeks to complement this novel approach to understanding stakeholder management by adding insights from the multilevel influences that create the corporate culture in the first place, and ultimately affect managers in their stakeholder decisions. This article draws on cultural theory to examine how the individuals who compose firms present group and grid solidarity that results in cultural biases in the corporate culture. These cultural biases - individualism, hierarchy, fatalism, and egalitarianism - are then paired with the stakeholder cultures they enable, and inferences are extracted concerning the salience managers are likely to accord to various classes of stakeholders as a result. Future research and managerial implications stemming from this new view on stakeholder management conclude this article.

Like Company, like Self: A Multilevel Argument Explaining Firms' Level of Engagement in Corporate Social Responsibility:

This conceptual paper examines how managers, acting as organisational agents, can influence their firms level of engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR). With CSR considered as a strategic choice, this paper undertakes to model the largely under-studied processes through which managers proactively pursue the enactment of their identity – their self – and their social role in their position of power in the firms management team. The study offers a new framework connecting these multilevel influences, suggesting that firms present the highest level of CSR when led by managers who intrinsically value CSR, who perceive their social role as a salient identity, and who have the ability to exercise power in their management team. Implications for managers and researchers complete this article.

Accelerating time: The effect of social pressures and regulation on board gender diversity post-IPO

Using a legitimacy lens, we theorize that changes in the firm’s board of directors parallel the evolving stakeholder audience that accords legitimacy to the firm—a key resource to the firm’s survival. Powerful new stakeholders post- initial public offering (IPO) such as the listing exchange and the securities regulators are anticipated to impact board gender diversity through their regulatory pressure, while pre-IPO investors such as venture capitalists are reducing their equity positions and thus providing opportunities for director turnover. At the same time, the firm is increasing in size and visibility, building additional sociocultural legitimacy pressures for increased gender diversity. While prior research centers on the effect of different types and intensity of legitimacy pressures on board characteristics, we explore how changes in the question of firms’ legitimacy “to whom” affects board composition, that is, we examine the comparative effect of regulation and society on board composition. We test our hypotheses by analyzing panel data for all North American technology firms doing IPOs on the NASDAQ exchange during a 12-year time frame between 1997 and 2011. Our analysis shows that regulation, although not explicitly directive, can play a key role in accelerating board gender diversity. Implications for future research on corporate governance and managerial and policy takeaways complete this article.

Who Do They Think They Are? Identity as an Antecedent of Social Activism by Institutional Shareholders:

Shareholder activists increasingly pressure corporations on social policy issues; yet, extant research provides little understanding of who these activists are and how they choose their corporate targets. In this article, we adopt an activist-centered approach and rely on hybrid organizational identity theory to determine, in a two-phase analysis, how shareholder activists define their economic and social identities and whether these identities are associated with specific target characteristics and tactical strategies. Our findings form the premise of a typology of institutional shareholder activists that is empirically derived and takes into account the wide range of hybrid organizational identities that shareholders exhibit. With a sample of 735 social policy shareholder proposals filed by 104 institutional shareholders in the 2009-2010 period, our study presents one of the first empirical tests examining the heterogeneity of identities within the broad stakeholder category of “social shareholder activists.” Our empirical evidence demonstrates that these shareholders’ mix of economic and social identities is systematically related to their targets’ characteristics and tactical strategies. The implications of our new typology for research on shareholder activism and the value of our findings for managers conclude this article.