Figure - available from: Journal of Business Ethics
This content is subject to copyright. Terms and conditions apply.
Source publication
This paper examines the question of how to determine the extent of a multinational corporation (MNC)’s corporate social responsibility for actions by its suppliers. Drawing on three theories of power and influence from the organization and management literature—resource-dependence theory, social exchange theory and social network theory, this paper...
Similar publications
This paper considers the question of whether attending a single-sex or co-educational secondary school made any difference to a range of social outcomes for girls and boys at school, and for men and women as they progressed through the life course. We examine these questions using data from a large and nationally representative sample of British re...
Several contributions from organizational, strategy and entrepreneurship research emphasize the cofounder relationship as a promising concept to explain the success of growing companies and acknowledge its peculiarities in contrast to conventional group or team behavior. Despite the recognized relevance of the cofounder relationship for organizatio...
The global higher secondary physics teaching has ultimate goal to inculcate & augment higher order thinking (HOT) ubiquitously. The present study concerns analysis of Indian state board higher secondary physics examination questions, for HOT skills. The researchers utilized content analysis followed by peer review methods to analyze & categorize 12...
In order to enhance the learning interest of deaf-mute children as beginners in sign language and promote the balance of educational reform, we have developed a new application which based on data gloves, to be the enlightenment for children learning sign language. The application mainly includes three parts: data acquisition and conversion, wirele...
In the paradigm of mirror visual feedback, it remains unclear how images of the mirrored hand directly affect the sense of motion of the hidden hand (kinesthetic illusion). To examine this question, we created an original mirror visual feedback setup using a horizontal mechanism of motion for the mirror and the hidden hand, each of which could inde...
Citations
... A notable power imbalance exists between corporations and their stakeholders, particularly between large corporations and small suppliers or consumers. This imbalance makes it difficult to achieve the equal negotiation and mutual consent presupposed in social contract theory [12]. ...
Amidst the accelerating pace of economic globalization, many corporations increasingly grapple with the challenge of effectively balancing economic gains against their broader social and ethical responsibilities. This research paper delves deep into the applicability of social contract theory within the corporate sphere, analyzing its foundational principles in conjunction with Plato's Theory of Ideal Forms. The comprehensive study posits that modern corporations can be integral and proactive actors within the broader social contract, bearing significant societal responsibilities and moral obligations. It thoroughly explores the theoretical grounding for corporate adherence to social ethics and proposes practical and actionable implementations of social contract theory in corporate management. Emphasis is strongly placed on the moral role and the weighty societal responsibilities of corporations in today's ever-changing world. The compelling findings indicate that social contract theory offers a robust theoretical basis for corporations to adhere to social ethics voluntarily. Additionally, it assists corporate managers in developing decision-making models that align closely with these ethics. This alignment helps harmonize the pursuit of economic objectives with broader societal responsibilities.
... 16 Whereas trade was historically conducted on the basis of a make-here, sell-there model, today a great deal of trade is organised within complex supply-chain networks that often span many countries before a finished good is ready to sell on the market. 17 As a result, the power of MNCs, who operate as the central nodes that coordinate activity within these complex supply-chain networks, has been greatly augmented (Chen, 2018). This doesn't just affect the myriad producers within MNCs' supply-chains; countries seeking to enhance their trade performance must be increasingly cognisant of the interests of MNCs when formulating their economic policies (see e.g. ...
When it comes to fulfilling our basic duties to distant others, we in the affluent world face a motivation gap; we consistently fall short of bearing even moderate costs for the sake of helping others secure basic minimums to which they are entitled. One response to the motivation gap is to cultivate in affluent populations a greater concern for distant others; cultivating such concern is the goal of ‘sentimental cosmopolitanism’. Two approaches to sentimental cosmopolitanism currently dominate the literature, a compassion-based and a complicity-based approach, respectively. In this paper, I argue for the promise of reciprocity as an alternative motivator of cosmopolitan concern. I further argue that a sense of obligation to distant others, grounded in our participation in an ongoing system of reciprocal exchange, can be cultivated within a thus-far overlooked sphere of cosmopolitan sensitization, namely the market. I make the case for the market as an appropriate site for cosmopolitan sensitization, and further argue that multinational corporations are, for several reasons, well-positioned to bear the political responsibility of sensitizing affluent populations to the significance of their participation in a cooperative economic scheme shared with distant others. This paper, then, makes a novel contribution to debates on cosmopolitan sentiment, as well as to the emerging literature on corporations’ political responsibilities. Keywords: multinational corporations; political responsibility; reciprocity; sentimental cosmopolitanism; trade
... 5 For instance, some authors show that the power of suppliers (Ş ener et al., 2016) remains limited. This is particularly evident in the case of multinational corporations (MNCs) with long supply chains, which have been perceived as more powerful than their suppliers and accused of exerting undue pressure on them (Chen, 2018). Similarly, a low level of salience was also revealed concerning employees, who often "find themselves disadvantaged in negotiating with a powerful and sometimes uncompromising employer" (Koku et al., 1997 p. 15, see also Pruitt et al., 1988). ...
... Organizations are increasingly positioning themselves, and are being seen as, mediating links between individuals and society (Hatch, 2018). This shift has occurred to such an extent that corporations (e.g., Facebook and Apple) are considered to be important components of the social structure of humanity (Chen, 2018). As a result, increasing demands are being placed on organizations regarding the possible roles and responsibilities they might reasonably assume. ...
A key feature of Iranian sporting clubs is the increased focus on the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). A large number of Iranian sporting clubs are employing CSR initiatives to support specific stakeholders and to leverage their societal positions. Nevertheless, there is limited research that has examined CSR in Iranian sports to guide policy and practice associated with CSR initiatives. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to examine CSR in the Iranian sports industry so as to support the advancement and evaluation of CSR initiatives in clubs. A developmental orientation was adopted in this qualitative research. Participants were selected using a combination of purposeful and snowball sampling methods. A total of 30 participants were involved including executive managers, university faculty members, and coaches of the Iranian Premier League clubs of Football, Volleyball, Basketball, Futsal, and Handball, as well as members of university sport management faculties. One-on-one, semi-structured interviews were used to generate data. Data analysis procedures were conducted in line with the principles of grounded theory and involved open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. In this study, 64 open source codes were identified. Further, the use of the grounded theoretical approach led to the creation of a theoretical model comprised of causal conditions (five categories), contextual conditions (two categories), intervening conditions (six categories), strategies (two categories), and consequences (four categories) that describe the phenomenon of CSR in Iranian sport. Particular attention is given to the five key causal categories that were cultural, social, economic, policy, and institutional in nature. CSR activities were found to have the capacity to impact the promotion of the club through a number of concepts and categories, including fostering trust amongst the public, promoting ethical dimensions through sport, discovering and creating new markets, and attracting supporters. This analysis situated in the Middle East provides a way of considering CSR that is an alternative to the dominant Western approaches.
... Organizations are increasingly positioning themselves, and are being seen as, mediating links between individuals and society (Hatch, 2018). This shift has occurred to such an extent that corporations (e.g., Facebook and Apple) are considered to be important components of the social structure of humanity (Chen, 2018). As a result, increasing demands are being placed on organizations regarding the possible roles and responsibilities they might reasonably assume. ...
... Business owners are important leaders for society mainly because they create employment, feed communities, and can be the driver of social priorities for the people (Dollinger 2008;Chen 2018). These are all significant elements, especially toward SDGs (Timms et al. 2019). ...
The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), Goal 16: Peace, justice, and strong institutions can drive positive environmental, social, and economic changes in sub-Saharan Africa while transforming informal sectors. Peer-reviewed English language publications on Google Scholar were explored based on a systematic literature review using loop analysis modelling, mapping out currently underdeveloped gaps such as the intersection of circular economy and the ASM sector in African countries. By identifying the significance of circular economy adoption within the realm of sub-Saharan Africa, which is rightly rich in quarried natural resources, this chapter laid the groundwork for the significance of strong institutions for the adoption of a circular approach and environmental management. Thereby, the problem of mining waste was highlighted, and the state of institutions was identified as the main facilitator of a circular economy for the ASM sector. Countries with institutional voids, weak policies, and marginal international collaboration are instructed by this chapter to carry out formalization that can enable stakeholder participation as well as institutional and policy changes, which support targets and indicators of SDG16. Given the blurred margins of functioning systems in emerging economies such as the case of developing sub-Saharan African countries, often the indicators for implementation, monitoring, and distribution data may be inadequate. Therefore, stronger regard for further research is encouraged to target more refined versions of clearer circular economy approaches, which would offer clearer and supportive adoption guidelines, i.e., easier to implement in poor or informal communities. The chapter is aligned with the need of formalizing the ASM sector toward efficiency and the decarbonization of the global economy at all levels of production, starting with the sourcing of raw materials – “mining.”KeywordsSDG16Strong institutionsCircular economyASM
... According to RDT, power is vital to foresee firms' strategic actions (Jin and Shao, 2022). RDT is, therefore, deemed appropriate to explore power differences between firms in supply chain management (Chen, 2018). ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to understand how supply chain actors in an Italian cashmere supply chain reacted to dependence and power use during the Covid-19 crisis and how this affected their perceptions of justice.
Design/methodology/approach
The research took a case study approach exploring issues of dependence, power and justice in a multi-tier luxury cashmere supply chain.
Findings
The authors found two types of dependence: Craftmanship-induced buyer dependence and Market-position-induced supplier dependence. The authors also identified four key archetypes emerging from the dynamics of dependence, power and justice during Covid-19. In the repressive archetype, buying firms perceive their suppliers as dependent and use mediated power through coercive tactics, leading the suppliers to perceive interactional, procedural and distributive injustice and use reciprocal coercive tactics against the buying firms in the form of coopetition. In the restrictive archetype, buying firms that are aware of their dependence on their suppliers use mediated power through contracts, with suppliers perceiving distributive injustice and developing ways to circumvent the brands. In the relational archetype, the awareness of craftmanship-induced buyer dependence leads buying firms to use non-mediated power through collaboration, but suppliers still do not perceive distributive justice, as there is no business security or future orders. In the resilient archetype, buying firms are aware of their own craftmanship-induced dependence and combine mediated and non-mediated power by giving the suppliers sustainable orders, which leads suppliers to perceive each justice type positively.
Originality/value
This paper shows how the actors in a specific supply chain react to and cope with one of the worst health crises in living memory, thereby providing advice for supply chain management in future crises.
... Whilst, however, there are intensive needs at stake, and we can argue that corporations are the agents best-placed to meet LDC inhabitants' trade-related needs in their role as coordinators of the supply chains linking rich consumers to poor workers (see e.g. Chen, 2018;Danielsen, 2019), 26 it remains the case that locating in an LDC will very often be far too risky, and insufficiently cost-competitive to generate any sort of duty on the part of companies to locate there. In part, this is simply because LDCs are so badly off; such countries will tend to have poor material, social, and legal infrastructure, each of which will make it difficult to keep costs low and operation smooth. ...
Many corporations are large, powerful, and wealthy. There are massive shortfalls of global justice, with hundreds of millions of people in the world living below the threshold of extreme poverty, and billions more living not far above that threshold. Where injustice and needs shortfalls must be remediated, we often look towards agents’ capabilities to determine who ought to bear the costs of rectifying the situation. The combination of these three claims grounds what I call a ‘linkage-based’ account of why corporations have demanding positive duties to the global poor. In this paper, I put forward a distinctive linkage-based account of corporations’ positive duties centred on the idea of dependence and the importance of meeting agents’ core needs. In addition to outlining and defending this account, I will show that we can utilise its basic conceptual components to make headway on questions that have received insufficient attention in the business ethics literature; specifically, we can say something substantive about the weighting of needy agents’ competing claims to assistance, and about the limits to the demands that can be lodged against corporations on the basis of others' unmet needs. Having integrated considerations of duties' grounding, their comparative weight, and the limits of their demandingness into a single account of corporate positive duty, I conclude by discussing a challenge to attributing to corporations duties owed to the worst-off amongst the global poor.
... Firms' dependence on resources is a key source of relationship power, since the unique resources that firms need are often held by other firms [69]. Therefore, resource dependence theory provides an overview of the formation of power in relationships, and assists in the development of ways to access and exploit unique resources [14,69]. ...
... Firms' dependence on resources is a key source of relationship power, since the unique resources that firms need are often held by other firms [69]. Therefore, resource dependence theory provides an overview of the formation of power in relationships, and assists in the development of ways to access and exploit unique resources [14,69]. According to Gelderman and Van Weele [10], three factors affect how dependence between firms increases: first, the dependence of one firm on another increases once the importance of a resource increases; second, the dependence of one firm on another firm increases once the discretion over resource acquisition increases; and third, when the concentration of resource control increases, the dependence of one firm upon another for that resource increases accordingly. ...
... The cooperation between buyers and suppliers increases the focal firm's ability to implement supply chain sustainability practices [43]. Firms are held responsible not only for their own actions, but also for the actions of those with whom they are connected in their buyer-supplier relationships [69]. Therefore, firms exercise power over the members in their buyer-supplier relationship to ensure that they behave ethically and adhere to sustainability standards [69]. ...
Buyers and suppliers of healthcare products and services are more dependent on each other than ever before for the provision of scarce and unique resources, which highlights the need to implement supply chain sustainability practices. Firms controlling these resources hold excessive power over others. This study adopted resource dependence theory as a theoretical lens to explore the role of relationship power in supply chain sustainability practices between a South African private healthcare provider and its suppliers. The study employed a generic qualitative single-case study design. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data from 12 participants at various levels of the case organisation's hierarchy. The main findings revealed several types of environmental and social practice used in the supply chain of the private healthcare provider. Some of the environmental practices were effective waste management and recycling, while the social practices included supplier selection and periodic reviews. The healthcare provider exercised extensive power over its suppliers to implement these practices. By exploring the advantages and disadvantages of sustainability practices, the findings showed that relationship power acted as a driver of supply chain sustainability. Mutual commitment, continuous communication, and training support these practices. Healthcare managers must be aware of the importance of relationship power for supply chain sustainability practices implementation, and are advised to invest time and effort in building buyer-supplier relationships to aid sustainability. This study expands the literature on relationship power in supply chain sustainability practices in an underexplored developing country healthcare context.
... Third, there are no effective governance institutions in place that can decide on what constitutes norm-deviant behavior, enforce sanctions on transgressors, or regulate the redressing of damages. Some consumer countries have started to experiment with domestic regulations that have extraterritorial effects, most notably France's due diligence law to sanction companies that have assets in French territory and cause human rights or environmental violations abroad, but the effectiveness of these efforts has not yet been sufficiently assessed (Chen, 2018). The EU has been preparing regulatory action to reduce imports of embodied deforestation, yet the most politically feasible options so far are of voluntary nature (e.g., certification or multistakeholder forums) and fall short of full accountability (Bager et al., 2020). ...
The destruction of the Amazon is a major global environmental issue, not only because of greenhouse gas emissions or direct impacts on biodiversity and livelihoods, but also due to the forest's role as a tipping element in the Earth System. With nearly a fifth of the Amazon already lost, there are already signs of an imminent forest dieback process that risks transforming much of the rainforest into a drier ecosystem, with climatic implications across the globe. There is a large body of literature on the underlying drivers of Amazon deforestation. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the behavioral and institutional microfoundations of change. Fundamental issues concerning cooperation, as well as the mechanisms facilitating or hampering such actions, can play a much more central role in attempts to unravel and address Amazon deforestation. We thus present the issue of preventing the Amazon biome from crossing a biophysical tipping point as a large-scale collective action problem. Drawing from collective action theory, we apply a novel analytical framework on Amazon conservation, identifying six variables that synthesize relevant collective action stressors and facilitators: information, accountability, harmony of interests, horizontal trust, knowledge about consequences, and sense of responsibility. Drawing upon literature and data, we assess Amazon deforestation and conservation through our heuristic lens, showing that while growing transparency has made information availability a collective action facilitator, lack of accountability, distrust among actors, and little sense of responsibility for halting deforestation remain key stressors. We finalize by discussing interventions that can help break the gridlock.
