The four pillars of corporate responsibility: ethics, leadership, personal responsibility and trust

Purpose – This paper aims to examine how to further embed CSR thinking and practice into corporations, particularly in emerging markets, by reviewing and drawing similarities between key issues faced by all senior managers, namely ethics, leadership, personal responsibility and trust. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a conceptual exploration of global CSR practices using social psychology and overlays this concept with strategic and institutional theory in order to encourage new ways of thinking about CSR adoption, especially in emerging markets. Findings – The paper reveals the importance of shareholder needs on global corporate decision making and applies alternative conceptual models to help businesses to devise better CSR practices and individuals to align their actions to their own values. Originality/value – This paper strongly argues for blending different theoretical foundations from the management and organization literature in order to draw comparisons between current global CSR practice and the potential for its further adoption in emerging markets.

Asymmetric information, credit market condition, and entrepreneurial finance

The issue of imperfect information plays a much more important role in financing “informationally opaque” small businesses than in financing large companies.1 This chapter examines the asymmetric information issue in entrepreneurial finance from two perspectives: the effects of relationship lending and the impacts of credit market concentration on entrepreneurial financial behavior. These two perspectives are strongly linked to each other via the asymmetric information issue in entrepreneurial finance. Existing literature has recognized the important role played by relationship lending in alleviating the problem of asymmetric information. However, mixed empirical results have been reported. For example, it has been found that the development of relationship lending can improve the availability of finance for small businesses borrowers (Petersen and Rajan, 1994) and reduce the costs of finance (Berger and Udell, 1995). Meanwhile, with monopoly power, banks may extract rents, in terms of charging higher-than-market interest rates, from small businesscustomers who have very concentrated banking relationships (Ongena and Smith, 2001). In addition, both favorable and unfavorable effects of credit market concentration on financing small businesses have been acknowledged. Small business borrowers may have to pay a higher-than-market price on loans (Degryse and Ongena, 2005) and are more likely to be financially constrained (Cetorelli, 2004) than in competitive markets. On the other hand, empirical studies have shown that market concentration create a strong motive for lenders to invest in private information from small business customers, and therefore a concentrated market is more efficient in terms of private information acquisition (Han et al., 2009b). The objective of this chapter is to investigate, by reviewing existing literature, the role played by relationship lending and the effects of market concentration on financing entrepreneurial businesses that are supposed to be informationally opaque. In the first section we review literature on the important role played by asymmetric information in entrepreneurial finance from two perspectives: asymmetric information and relationship lending, and the theoretical modeling of asymmetric information. Then we examine the relationship between capital market conditions and entrepreneurial finance and attempt to answer two questions: Why is the capital market condition important for entrepreneurial finance? and What are the effects of capital market conditions on entrepreneurial financial behavior in terms of discouraged borrowers, cash holding, and the availability and costs of finance?

'Publics' or 'stakeholders'? Performing social responsibility through stakeholder software

Government and corporate organizations increasingly seek the support of the communities where they operate and represent themselves as good corporate citizens with a sense of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). These organizations seek to create and sustain dialogue with their many and varied ‘stakeholders’ and reject traditional ‘PR’ approaches that regard communication as a way to manipulate ‘target publics’. Some of these organizations use a form of ‘stakeholder software’ to guide and support their efforts to embrace CSR in their operations and this article examines two such software packages. It sets their use and the broader drive for CSR in the context of a diminishing trust in traditional institutions and a rise in new, extra-parliamentary forms of activism (new activism); and it examines stakeholder software’s potential contribution to a values-based approach to PR training in universities and colleges.

Defining the domain of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in tourism organisations : a preliminary view from stakeholders in Thailand's accommodation sector

This paper aims to define the domain of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) for hotel and accommodation organizations in Thailand. It seeks to integrate the diverse components of CSR as defined within the general business/management, tourism and stakeholder literatures. A review of existing literature, codes of practice and standards, identify three broad CSR components – economic issues, social/ethical issues and environmental – although each of the standards varied in terms of the definition and emphasis applied. The components were ‘aggregated’ within each of the broad management and tourism literature, these two sets of groupings were then aggregated into one overarching set of CSR issues. Semi-structured interviews were then undertaken with 38 key informants from hotel and resort businesses in Thailand to identify their views toward the applicability of these over-arching components to hotel and accommodation organisations.

The results of the aggregation of standards suggest that CRS approaches within general business tend to be more socially/ethically orientated whereas within the tourism area approaches tend to be more environmentally orientated. Key respondents’ views were generally consistent with the three broad issues of the integrated CSR domain, although some issues were identified as more salient to hotel and accommodation organisations than others. The paper suggests that there is a need to develop CSR measures and indicators applicable and reflective of the different environmental, legal, cultural and local setting.

Implanting sustainability in business strategies : CSR, ethics or the law

This paper elucidates the conundrum faced by Australian businesses in developing ‘sustainable’ business strategies that are acceptable to a multiplicity of stakeholders. A content analysis of the web pages for leading Australian companies indicates that there is little tangible evidence that sustainable business practices are being implemented. The authors propose several directions for research into substantive issues between ethical behaviour, corporate social responsibility and environmentally sustainable behaviour for businesses. Each of these areas is developing research in relative isolation. However, we argue that this paradigmatic divide is limiting the opportunities for research to provide real insight into seemingly intractable problems.

Social responsibility and credit availability

There has been a widespread increase in the use of consumer credit and therefore consumer indebtedness. Some of this increase has been within that segment of the population least able to afford debt of any kind – welfare recipients. This qualitative study demonstrates some interesting attitudes to debt, as well as differences in peoples’ perceptions of acceptable debt and their debt-management strategies. This study suggests that action is required by those responsible for the marketing of credit to this vulnerable group and government policymakers to provide a socially responsible approach to manage this societal concern.

Has international borrowing or lending driven Australia's net capital inflow?

Over the recent decades the most significant global imbalances have been between Asia-Pacific economies, with most attention directed to the imbalances of the largest economies, China, Japan and the United States. In contrast, this paper examines how external account imbalances and real long term interest rates are determined in smaller open economies. It first derives the proposition that external imbalances and long term interest rates move together whenever saving-investment shocks are predominantly domestically sourced, but move oppositely when saving-investment shocks mainly emanate abroad. It then shows that in the case of Australia, an Asia-Pacific economy that has borrowed heavily from abroad since the mid 1980's, rising net capital inflow has had a statistically significant negative impact on domestic real interest rates. This suggests that over that time net international lending rather than net foreign borrowing was mainly responsible for the variation in its external imbalance and real interest rates.

A Q methodology study of stakeholders' views about accountability for promoting healthy food environments in England through the responsibility deal food network

In March 2011, the United Kingdom's (UK's) Government launched five Public Health Responsibility Deal Networks to address public health priorities. The Networks used voluntary partnerships to influence peoples' choice architecture to move them toward healthier behaviors. The purpose of this research was to conduct an exploratory study of diverse stakeholders' perspectives about perceived responsibility and accountability expectations to improve food environments in England through the Food Network partnerships. A purposive sample of policy elites (n=31) from government, academia, food industry and non-government organizations sorted 48 statements related to improving food environments in England. Statements were grounded in three theoretical perspectives (i.e., legitimacy, nudge and public health law). PQMethod 2.33 statistical software program used factor analysis to identify viewpoints based on intra-individual differences for how participants sorted statements. The results revealed three distinct viewpoints, which explained 64% of the variance for 31 participants, and emphasized different expectations about responsibility. The food environment protectors (n=17) underscored government responsibility to address unhealthy food environments if voluntary partnerships are ineffective; the partnership pioneers (n=12) recognized government-industry partnerships as legitimate and necessary to address unhealthy food environments; and the commercial market defenders (n=1) emphasized individual responsibility for food choices and rejected government intervention to improve food environments. Consensus issues included: protecting children's right to health; food industry practices that can and should be changed; government working with industry on product reformulation; and building consumer support for economically viable healthy products. Contentious issues were: inadequacy of accountability structures and government inaction to regulate food marketing practices targeting children. We conclude that understanding different viewpoints is a step toward building mutual trust to strengthen accountability structures that may help stakeholders navigate ideologically contentious issues to promote healthy food environments in England.