Implementation, communication and benefits of corporate codes of ethics : an international and longitudinal approach for Australia, Canada and Sweden

This paper examines the implementation, communication and benefits of corporate codes of ethics by the top companies operating in Australia, Canada and Sweden. It provides an international comparison across three continents. It is also based on a longitudinal approach where three national surveys were performed in 2001–2002 and replications of the same surveys were performed in 2005–2006. The empirical findings of this research show in all three countries that large organisations indicate a substantial interest in corporate codes of ethics. There are, however, differences in the ways that the companies in each country implement and communicate their corporate codes of ethics and the benefits that they see being derived from them. The longitudinal comparison between 2001–2002 and 2005–2006 indicates changes in the implementation, communication and benefits of corporate codes of ethics in the three countries.

Structures, processes and performance of corporate and business ethics in supply chains

The objective of this paper is to introduce and describe a conceptual framework of firms' corporate and business ethics in supply chains in terms of ethical structures, ethical processes and ethical performance. A framework is outlined and positioned incorporating an ethical frame of reference in the field of Supply Chain Management (SCM). A number of areas and sub-areas of firms' corporate and business ethics are framed in the context of supply chains. The introduced framework should be seen as a seed for further development and refinement in the field of SCM. It provides opportunities for further research of ethical concerns in supply chains.

How do Australian small and medium enterprises communicate their corporate social responsibility activities online?

Much of the existing research on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) focuses on large firms, with comparatively little on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The SME research focuses on barriers and drivers to CSR and neglects how SMEs communicate their CSR activities. This paper addresses this gap by reporting on a content analysis of 443 Australian SME websites which identifies how they are using this channel to communicate their CSR activities.

Regulatory and enabling approaches to corporate law enforcement : patterns of litigation 1986-2002 and the effect of recent reforms in New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom

Enforcement of corporate rights and duties may follow either a ‘regulatory’ or ‘enabling’ model. If a regulatory approach is taken, enforcement action will generally be undertaken by regulatory agencies such as, in New Zealand, the Registrar of Companies and Securities Commission, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) or the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) in the United Kingdom. If an enabling approach is chosen, enforcement action will more often be by private parties such as company shareholders, directors or creditors. When New Zealand's company law was reformed in 1993, a primarily private enforcement regime was adopted, consisting of a list of statutory directors' duties and an enhanced collection of shareholder remedies, based in part upon North American models and including a statutory derivative action. Public enforcement was largely confined to administrative matters and the enforcement of the disclosure requirements of New Zealand's securities law. While the previous enforcement regime was similarly reliant on private action, the law on directors' duties was less accessible, and shareholder action was hindered by the majority rule principle and the rule in Foss v Harbottle. This approach is in contrast with that used in Australia and the United Kingdom, where public agencies have a much more prominent enforcement role despite recent and proposed reforms to directors' duties and shareholder remedies. These reforms are designed to improve the ability of private parties to enforce corporate rights and duties. A survey of enforcement litigation in New Zealand since 1986 indicates that the object of a primarily enabling enforcement regime seems to have been achieved, and may well have been achieved even without the 1993 reform package. Private enforcement has, in fact, been much more prevalent than public enforcement since well before the enactment of the new legislation. Most enforcement action both before and after the reform was commenced by shareholders and shareholder/directors, and most involved closely held companies. Public enforcement was largely undertaken in areas such as securities law, where the wider public interest was affected. Similar surveys of Australian and United Kingdom enforcement litigation reveal a proportionally much greater reliance on public bodies to enforce corporate rights and duties, indicating a more regulatory approach. The ASIC and DTI enforced a wider range of provisions, affecting both closely and widely held companies, than those subject to public enforcement in New Zealand. Publicly enforced provisions in Australia and the United Kingdom include directors' duties and provisions dealing with disqualification from managing companies, as well as securities law requirements.

Exchange as a determinant in corporate citizenship : exploratory action research into the social construction of corporate citizenship

This study attempts to achieve two things. Firstly it contextualizes corporate citizenship drawing on scholarly, government, media, legal and business discourses which when viewed as a whole, reveals the importance of exchange as a central determinant in how all the major themes or subfields of corporate citizenship function and subsequently become valued within public discourse. Secondly, it reports on exploratory action research where I as a researcher occupied a central role in understanding and contributing towards how organizational settings socially construct and evolve corporate citizenship in real time through various exchange behaviour, drawing from four years field research within BP and its interactions with the external world. This research contributes to new knowledge by building a rare contextual understanding into how cultural change evolves over time within an organization, from its public face, through policy, down into employee and stakeholder reactions, including identifying the crucial role played by Cultural bridges’ in shifting entrenched organizational culture towards embracing new, more sustainable ways of doing business, and additionally how practitioners can legitimately act as a researcher in facilitating this process by assisting an organization to move from simple, transactional relationships to more sustainable integrated social, financial and environmental exchange between business and its broader context. Importantly, this research develops entirely new theoretical models for understanding the social application and commercial value of corporate citizenship to both business and society.

Segment reporting and corporate takeovers : user needs

The nature of a corporate takeover often leads to the contraction in the number of companies operating in a given industry classification, along with the contraction in the amount of formal financial statements produced by the companies in that industry. Since 1985 Australian diversified companies are required to break their operations down into industry and geographical segments, so it would be expected that companies which diversify their operations through a corporate takeover would be forerunners in the adoption of this relatively new accounting standard on segment reporting. While previous studies have both declared the benefits of segment reporting to report users, and exposed some preconceived problems of its application in practice, there has not been any work on the 'usefulness1 of segment reporting as a form of reporting that will compensate shareholder users for the information loss suffered during a corporate takeover. This study endeavours to determine this, by questioning shareholders of companies that have been involved in takeovers in a period subsequent to the application date of the segment reporting standard, and obtaining their views on the usefulness of the post-takeover segment reports produced by their companies. A link is discovered to exist between shareholder dissatisfaction with segment reporting and the non-practice of creating a new segment in the post-takeover annual report for the target acquired. The underlying assumption that the practice of new segment creation after a takeover is influenced by the type of takeover undertaken is supported by the study. Regardless of whether or not a company is diversified before the takeover, the findings show that a corporate acquirer in a takeover is less likely to create a new industry or geographical segment for the target acquired if they are involved in horizontal or vertical takeovers than if they are involved in diversified takeovers. In these situations, segment reporting is found to not compensate shareholders for the loss of information incurred by them in these types of takeovers.

Corporate sustainability : greenwash or a path to sustainable capitalism?

The problems of unsustainable development and the increased-awareness of corporate power in the global era have contributed to an agenda of corporate citizenship. This thesis explores the meanings and practices that fall under the banner of the triple bottom line of corporate citizenship through forty-two in-depth interviews with representatives from the corporate sector and NGO sector (including trade unions) in Australia. This purposive sample includes a specific range of corporate industries and NGO types, all of which have involvement with various areas of sustainability. Interviewees described their feelings and experiences in relation to the concept of the triple bottom line, the potential and limitations of this type of sustainability and the purpose and impacts of partnerships between NGOs and the corporate sector. On the basis of this research, this thesis argues that corporate citizenship is at best, a set of initiatives for making minor adjustments to the way companies perform their day-to-day operations and at worst, a program for improving corporate image rather than performance and for shifting the agenda of sustainable development toward corporate interests. While radical steps are required to achieve a sustainable society and environment, the terms of corporate citizenship offer very limited opportunities for change. The self-regulatory and market based model of citizenship does not challenge the impact of consumerism or the legitimacy of particular industry types and their products, except where threats are perceived to the longevity of the companies involved. Furthermore, while the exploitation of the environment and society has occurred as a result of corporate self-interest, corporate citizenship is justified on the same basis. The self-interest rationale and the tyranny of the economic bottom line in particular, substantially limit the fields of responsibility that can be included in the citizenship paradigm. While there are undoubtedly some well-intentioned corporate representatives who are working toward attaining a more sustainable corporate culture, the discourse is primarily used to shift the sustainable development agenda toward corporate paradigms and interests.

The association between corporate governance attributes and audit fees in Malaysia : ethnicity implications

This study extends the literature on audit pricing by examining the relationship between audit fees and corporate governance factors, namely audit committee and CEO characteristics of 605 public-listed companies in Malaysia. The study specifically investigates the association between audit fees and the ethnicity attributes of the CEO (bumiputra or not) and audit committee members (i.e. proportion of bumiputra membership), as well as audit committee characteristics pertaining to the proportion of independent members, financial expertise and diligence. The findings indicate audit committee independence is significantly and positively associated with audit fees, while financial expertise has a negative association with audit fees. We however do not find any relationship between audit fees and audit committee diligence as measured by meeting frequency. In addition, the data also reveals that firms with bumiputra CEOs and bumiputra dominated audit committees hold significant and positive relationships with audit fees.

The impact of ownership structure on corporate debt policy : two stage least square simultaneous model approach for post crisis period : evidence from Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange

Ownership concentration as a governance mechanism has received considerable attention among academician, practitioners as well as policy makers because large-block shareholders are increasingly active in their demands that corporations adopt effective governance mechanisms to control managerial decisions, which include corporate debt policy. Earlier study on the agency model of the firm widely recognizes that the managerial ownership and external debt play an important role in mitigating agency conflicts and enhancing firm value. They also found that increase in the external monitors, for example the institutional investors, can actually play a useful role in limiting agency problems in the firm. This paper, using 100 Composite Index companies from Brusa Malaysia between 1998 to 2002 explores the impact of institutional holdings on managerial ownership and debt policy in an integrated framework by using a simultaneous equations estimation procedure (2SLS). The findings show that there is a significant impact of institutional ownership which serves effective control mechanism on managerial ownership and corporate debt policy as hypothesized. Findings of such evidence suggest that institutional holding thus have played an important role in managers' strategic management decision and reduce agency conflict. In addition, corporate debt policy too is governed by managerial ownership and exhibited a negative relation.

Communities of practice in Academe (CoP-iA) : understanding academic work practices to enable knowledge building capacities in corporate universities

A form of voluntary workplace engagement, communities of practice are characterised in literature as providing entities with the potential to harness the multiplier effects of collaborative processes by building on informal networks within entities. As knowledge building and sharing institutions it would be reasonable to presume that communities of practice activities have been embraced to facilitate a level of connectedness and engagement in a university context. However, evidence from the Australian higher education environment suggests that the enlistment of communities of practice processes by universities faces a number of challenges that are peculiar to academe. We suggest that academic knowledge work practices are significantly different from the business/industry related applications of communities of practice and that an understanding of the unique aspects of such practices, together with the impediments posed by a 'corporate university' model, require acknowledgment before the knowledge building and sharing aspects of communities of practice activities in academia can emerge.

The purchasing of naming rights for sports stadiums : a harbinger of bad corporate governance or just bad timing?

The literature on corporate governance and the market’s delayed reaction to news events proliferated over the last two decades. This paper examines return patterns surrounding the event date for firms purchasing naming rights for North American sports stadiums. One argument appearing in the financial press is that such acquisitions are a harbinger of widespread corporate mismanagement and hubris at the highest levels of corporate governance. Purchases of stadium naming rights provide sidebenefits to executives such as “being in the limelight” and the use of supplementary corporate boxes. Thus, management has a strong incentive to undertake such investments even if their decision is not value enhancing to shareholders. The extent to which these agreements are associated with negative risk-adjusted returns is an empirical question, which this study addresses. On average, negative riskadjusted returns are observed over the three years following the event date, and these results are significant at standard levels of significance. The efficient market hypothesis suggests that these results are not due to a cause and effect relationship but represent data snooping or just bad timing.

Corporate social responsibility : corporate reputation, business performance and public liability

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) may be viewed as a business strategy rather than a philanthropic concept. The increasing use of CSR as a corporate core strategy, in reaction to consumers‘ growing sentiments, can influence aggregate consumption and consumers‘ quality of life. As such, CSR would be of interest to the policy makers and may become subject to corporate governance and control mechanism. CSR is largely unregulated. Reliance on corporations‘ self-restraint and voluntary initiatives is inadequate to protect the society and avoid the disadvantages that may emerge from the potential deceptive practices in using a CSR strategy. This study investigates the evidence of economic benefits as incentives to corporations for using CSR. CSR is measured in terms of the firm‘s relationships with primary stakeholders. A model is constructed to identify the primary stakeholders and to estimate the association between CSR, corporate reputation and business performance. Policy implications of CSR are discussed.