Johan Graafland

Islam and socially responsible business conduct: an empirical study of Dutch entrepreneurs

This paper explores the relationship between the Islamic religion and the level of socially responsible business conduct (SRBC) of Islamic entrepreneurs. The authors find that the common ideas of SRBC correspond with the view of business in Islam, although there are also some notable differences. They also find that Muslim entrepreneurs attach a higher weight to specific elements of SRBC than do non-Muslims. However, they also find that Muslims are less involved with applying SRBC in practice than non-Muslim managers.

Corporate social responsibility of Dutch companies: Benchmarking, transparency and robustness

This paper develops a method for benchmarking Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of Dutch companies. The benchmark includes economic, social and environmental aspects as well as national and international aspects of CSR. The overall benchmark is based on a weighted average of these aspects. The weights are based on the opinions of companies and NGO’s. Using different methods of weighting, we find that the ranking for 58 large Dutch companies is very robust.

Perceptions of Price Fairness : An Empirical Research

This article researches factors that influence price fairness judgments. The empirical literature suggests several factors: reference prices, the costs of the seller, a self-interest bias, and the perceived motive of sellers. Using a Dutch sample, we find empirical evidence that these factors significantly affect perceptions of fair prices. In addition, we find that the perceived fairness of prices is also influenced by other distributional concerns that are independent of the transaction. In particular, price increases are judged to be fairer if they benefit poor people or small organizations rather than rich people or big organizations.

Corporate social responsibility in China: implementation and challenges

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming increasingly important in China. This paper investigates the implementation of instruments for dimensions of CSR that are relevant for the Chinese context and the challenges that Chinese companies face. Based on a survey among 109 Chinese companies, we find that formal instruments to implement CSR are rather common. Companies spend most effort in improving the economic aspects of CSR, such as competitiveness, product innovation and process innovation. Only a small minority of the companies set concrete targets and report the realization of these targets for social and environmental goals. This indicates that the attention to social and environmental aspects of CSR is still rather loose. The most important challenges for improving CSR are strong competitive pressure, insufficient support from the government and/or nongovernmental organizations and high costs of CSR implementation. Multiple regression analysis shows that the use of instruments is positively related to company size and foreign ownership and negatively related to lack of resources and support for CSR by investors and consumers.

From Phillips curve to wage curve

SummaryIn most traditional macroeconomic models for The Netherlands the wage equation is specified by a Phillips curve, in which wage growth is negatively related to the unemployment rate. This paper shows, however, that wage formation can better be described by the so-called wage curve, in which the wage level, instead of wage growth, depends negatively on the unemployment rate.

Concepts of price fairness: empirical research into the Dutch coffee market

This paper researches perceptions of the concept of price fairness in the Dutch coffee market. We distinguish four alternative standards of fair prices based on egalitarian, basic rights, capitalistic and libertarian approaches. We investigate which standards are guiding the perceptions of price fairness of citizens and coffee trade organizations. We find there is a divergence in views between citizens and key players in the coffee market. Whereas citizens support the concept of fairness derived from the basic rights approach, holding that the price should provide coffee farmers with a minimum level of subsistence, representatives of Dutch coffee traders hold the capitalistic view that the free world market price is fair.

Transparency, market operation and trust in the Dutch construction industry: an exploratory study

After the discovery of illegal price agreements in the Dutch construction industry, the government and major players in the sector have initiated a transition process towards more professional commercial relations. In the transition process transparency plays an important part, as it is a precondition for better market operation in the construction sector. However, there are significant disadvantages to a pursuit of transparency, such as higher costs and the risk of information overload. It is therefore necessary to find a good balance between more transparency and other ways to restore trust between key players in the construction sector. Especially complex products with a high degree of risk can best be dealt with through implicit contracts, in which trust is based on a mixture of the reputation mechanism, contracts that create a congruity of interests and the integrity of the contract partners.

Decoupling among CSR policies, programs, and impacts : An empirical study

There are relatively few empirical studies on the impacts of corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies and programs. This article addresses the research gap by analyzing the incidence of, and the conditions that affect, decoupling (defined as divergence) among CSR policies, implementation of CSR programs, and CSR impacts for various environmental and social issues. Complete decoupling is a condition of full divergence among policies, programs, and impacts amounting to purely ceremonial CSR. Using ratings from a sustainability rating agency on a sample of about 1,000 large companies in 24 countries, the authors find empirical evidence not supporting a conclusion of complete decoupling. The empirical evidence suggests four levels of nondivergence in the sample. First, for most CSR issues examined, CSR policies of high quality (as measured by scope and level of detail) do have relatively strong effects on CSR implementation. Second, CSR programs of high quality (as measured by scope, the use of targets, and the use of strict deadlines) do have relatively strong effects on CSR impacts. Third, for most CSR issues, even low-quality CSR policies enforce the incidence and quality of programs in comparison with having no policy at all. Fourth, weak programs have more impact on the realization of CSR goals than having no program at all. The authors also find that the quality of CSR reporting (as measured by the implementation level of Global Reporting Initiative guidelines) and locating the responsibility for CSR at the board level reduce decoupling by strengthening the quality of CSR programs.

Motives of Socially Responsible Business Conduct

The social and ecological challenges that governments face have raised their interest in socially responsible business conduct (SRBC). In this article we analyze the motives of executives to perform SRBC. We distinguish three types of motives: financial, ethical and altruistic motives. We test the hypotheses on a sample of 473 executives. The estimation results show that SRBC is driven by a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motives, but that the intrinsic motives are stronger than the extrinsic motive.

PERCEIVED ORGANISATIONAL SUPPORT AND PROFITABILITY

This paper investigates the impact of perceived organizational support (POS) on performance.We predict that POS will be reciprocated by positive discretionary employee behavior, which in turn has a positive impact on performance.Empirical research on a sample of Dutch construction companies indeed corroborates a positive relationship between POS and performance. Moreover, the POS-performance link is found to be stronger for good performing firms than for bad performing firms, which supports that reciprocity drives the relationship between POS and performance.