Geoff Moore

Corporate Social and Financial Performance: An Investigation in the U.K. Supermarket Industry

The comparison of corporate social performance with corporate financial performance has been a popular field of study over the past 25 years. The results, while broadly conclusive of a positive relationship, are not entirely consistent. In addition, most of the previous studies have concentrated on large-scale cross-industry studies and often with a single variable for corporate social performance, in order to produce statistically significant results. This weakens the richness of understanding that might be obtained from a single industry study with multiple social variables, which would also allow investigation of inter-relationships between individual and sub-sets of social performance measures and between individual and sub-sets of social performance and financial performance measures. There have also been criticisms that the results lack a rigorous theoretical basis, and the paper demonstrates clearly how stakeholder theory must form the basis for this area of research. Following a review of the literature this paper presents the initial findings from a study of the U.K. Supermarket industry which suggest that contemporaneous social and financial performance are negatively related, while prior-period financial performance is positively related with subsequent social performance. Positive relationships between both age and size of the company with social performance are also found.

In Search of Organizational Virtue in Business: Agents, Goods, Practices, Institutions and Environments

In this paper we argue that MacIntyre’s virtues-goods-practice-institution schema (MacIntyre 1985) provides a conceptual framework within which organizational virtue in general, and virtue in business in particular, can be explored. A heuristic device involving levels of individual agency, mode of institutionalization and environment is used to discuss why some businesses protect practices, develop virtues and encourage the exercise of moral agency in their decision making, while others struggle or fail to do so. In relation to conventional shareholder-owned capitalist business, both the mode of institutionalization and the environment are shown to be largely antithetical to the development of practices. Other businesses may meet the necessary internal conditions for the sustenance of practice-like features but remain dependent upon features within their environments. To illustrate this, we use participant observation to show how one particular organization—Traidcraft plc—meets the relevant conditions.

On the Implications of the Practice–Institution Distinction: Macintyre and the Application of Modern Virtue Ethics to Business

After exploring Maclntyres (1985) practice?institution distinc? tion, the article demonstrates its applicability to business-as-practice and to corporations as institutions. It then considers the implications of Maclntyres schema to ethical schizophrenia, to the claim that the market is a source of the virtues and to the opposite claim that capital? ism corrodes character. A fully worked out modern virtue ethics, based on Maclntyres work, is then established and the claim is made and substantiated that such an understanding of Maclntryes work revitalises it and makes it directly applicable to business and to corporations.

Corporate Moral Agency: Review and Implications

The debate concerning corporate moral agency is normally conducted through philosophical arguments in articles which argue from only one point of view. This paper summarises both the arguments for and against corporate moral agency and concludes from this that the arguments in favour have more weight. The paper also addresses the way in which the law in the U.K. and the U.S.A. currently views this issue and shows how it is supportive of the concept of corporate moral agency. The paper concludes by considering the implications of the debate for business ethics in general, and stakeholder theory and virtue ethics in particular.

MacIntyre on Virtue and Organization

This paper introduces the work of moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in the area of virtue and organization. It aims to provide one point of entry to MacIntyre’s work for readers who have not been introduced to it and makes some novel suggestions about its development for those who have. Following some initial comments on MacIntyre’s approach to social science, it traces the development of his ideas on organization from 1953 to 1980, before outlining the general theory of virtues, goods, practices and institutions which emerged in the publication of his seminal After Virtue in 1981. Finally, the paper outlines some of the uses to which these ideas have been put in the organizational literature.

Cross‐sectional effects in community disclosure

Purpose – This paper seeks to address a gap in the literature in that it explores community disclosures in annual reports examining annual reports for 5 UK FTSE 100 sectors between, 1974 and 2000. Design/methodology/approach – The sample was bifurcated into types – those with higher public profile and those with lower public profile based on a measure of “proximity to end user”. Two approaches were adopted in the paper: longitudinal volumetric word count mean and frequency of disclosure by company. Findings – The two approaches demonstrated that community disclosure was positively associated with public profile. The findings are consistent with reporting behaviour found in other categories of voluntary disclosure, where disclosure has been found to be associated with the presumed information demands of specific stakeholders. Additionally the research supported a legitimacy theory-based explanation of cross-sectional variability in community disclosures. Illustrative disclosures from a number of companies are also presented in the paper. Research limitations/implications – Further areas of research are suggested by these findings. In addition to articulating the potential value of examining community disclosure patterns in other contexts (e.g. in other sectors and other national situations), and in other media (e.g. internet studies), the findings in this study suggest that there may be value in exploring the ways in which voluntary disclosure responds to other external structural variables. Originality/value – The contribution of this paper has been to show that a hitherto less-analysed category of voluntary social disclosure (community disclosure) is cross-sectionally responsive to the structural vulnerability of companies to issues associated with “general” social concern.

The mainstreaming of Fair Trade: a macromarketing perspective

Following a brief review of the development and underlying purposes of the Fair Trade movement, the paper introduces perhaps the key issue for the UK Fair Trade movement currently: the mainstreaming of Fair Trade food products. The macromarketing literature, with its focus on sustainable consumption, ecocentrism and a consequent need to change the dominant social paradigm, is used as a framework for analysing the findings of an empirical study of this mainstreaming process involving interviews with and case study material from both Fair Trade organisations and the major supermarkets which have engaged with Fair Trade. The key question that the paper addresses is whether Fair Trade, particularly as it enters mainstream markets, provides an exemplar, from within the existing dominant social paradigm, of the kinds of actions that the macromarketing literature suggests are necessary to enable sustainable consumption. Implications for both the Fair Trade movement and for macromarketing are drawn out.

Tinged shareholder theory: or what’s so special about stakeholders?

This paper contrasts the normative foundations of the stakeholder and shareholder theories of the firm. It demonstrates how the shareholder theory of the firm appears to have at least as much normative support as stakeholder theory and suggests that a way forward may be for a variant of pure shareholder theory to emerge.

Virtue in Business: Alliance Boots and an Empirical Exploration of MacIntyre’s Conceptual Framework

This paper contextualizes before summarizing a conceptual framework for virtue ethics in organizations that has been developed by drawing upon the work of the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. Conducting empirical work with this framework is at an embryonic stage and so, having discussed methodological issues, the paper reports on findings from a longitudinal case study-based research project into the private equity-owned organization Alliance Boots. It demonstrates the applicability of the conceptual approach and hence the presence of practices and virtues even within capitalist business organizations. It makes theoretical advances particularly in the relationship between internal and external goods. It proposes a mapping for virtue in organizations and uses this to conduct an organizational analysis of Alliance Boots and its predecessor organizations. The paper thus makes both theoretical and empirical contributions to our knowledge in the area of applied virtue ethics.

The UK supermarket industry: An analysis of corporate social and financial performance

In a previous paper (Moore, 2001), the headline findings from a study of social and financial performance over three years of eight firms in the UK supermarket industry were reported. These were based on the derivation of a 16-measure social performance index and a 4-measure financial performance index. This paper discusses the formulation of the indices and then reports on: discussions with two supermarket firms concerning the overall results; inter-relationships between individual financial performance measures; inter-relationships between individual social performance measures; stakeholder group analysis; and inter-relationships between turnover, age and gearing with social performance measures. The paper discusses these inter-relationships, incorporating comments from the interviews with the two supermarket firms, and reports on both factor and cluster analysis. The interviews lend support for Preston and O’Bannon’s (1997) Available Funding Hypothesis in both its positive and negative form. The findings show that there are individual or combinations of related measures that could be used as surrogate measures for social and financial performance, instead of deriving a full index. However, the recommendation is that a full index continues to be used until there is further corroboration of these results. The findings also provide statistically significant support for the Negative Synergy Hypothesis (Preston and O’Bannon, 1997), show a statistically significant association between pre-tax profits (both lagged and contemporaneous) with community contributions, and show that all statistically significant associations between individual social performance measures are positive – suggesting that they are mutually reinforcing. The association of size with social performance, noted in the previous paper, is also reinforced. Findings in relation to the proportion of women managers and the number of women on the Board and positive associations with other social and environmental performance measures raise interesting gender issues for business ethics. Factor analysis leads to no clear conclusions but cluster does show two or three clear clusters of firms, where size would seem to be the main but not sole factor. Further areas of research are noted.