Shifts in modes of governance and sustainable development in the Brazilian oil sector

This article discusses shifts in modes of governance in the Brazilian oil sector over a 60-year period. On the basis of Driessen et al.'s (2012) framework, we discuss the impact of these shifts on sustainable development. Our results suggest that changes in modes of governance were driven by regulation and mostly associated with shifts in both actors and institutional features but that the underlying rationale of prioritising economic outcomes remained unaffected. The results also confirm that a central governance structure remained in place over time and co-existed in different modes of governance. Petrobras was the backbone of this structure and instrumental in empowering and disempowering non-state actors. This article stresses that a mode of governance furthering sustainable development should promote interactions of large numbers of actors and may require active participation of Petrobras to encourage rationales that support improvements in social and environmental domains.     

Why do users trust algorithms? A review and conceptualization of initial trust and trust over time

Algorithms are increasingly playing a pivotal role in organizations' day-to-day operations; however, a general distrust of artificial intelligence-based algorithms and automated processes persists. This aversion to algorithms raises questions about the drivers that lead managers to trust or reject their use. This conceptual paper aims to provide an integrated review of how users experience the encounter with AI-based algorithms over time. This is important for two reasons: first, their functional activities change over the course of time through machine learning; and second, users' trust develops with their level of knowledge of a particular algorithm. Based on our review, we propose an integrative framework to explain how users’ perceptions of trust change over time. This framework extends current understandings of trust in AI-based algorithms in two areas: First, it distinguishes between the formation of initial trust and trust over time in AI-based algorithms, and specifies the determinants of trust in each phase. Second, it links the transition between initial trust in AI-based algorithms and trust over time to representations of the technology as either human-like or system-like. Finally, it considers the additional determinants that intervene during this transition phase.     

Ethically adrift: How others pull our moral compass from true North,and how we can fix it

This chapter focuses on the social nature of morality. Using the metaphor of the moral compass to describe individuals’ inner sense of right and wrong, we offer a framework that identifies social reasons why our moral compasses can come under others’ control, leading even good people to cross ethical boundaries. Departing from prior work on how individuals’ cognitive limitations explain unethical behavior, we focus on socio-psychological processes that facilitate moral neglect, moral justification, and immoral action, all of which undermine moral behavior. In addition, we describe organizational factors that exacerbate the detrimental effects of each facilitator. We conclude by advising organizational scholars to take a more integrative approach to developing and evaluating theory about unethical behavior and by suggesting further study of interventions that might disempower these social triggers of unethical behavior, allowing us to regain control of our moral compasses.

A solitary organism has no need for moral rules, nor does a creature living among others without mutual dependency. (Høgh-Oleson, 2010, p. 3).

     

You Stab My Back,I'll Stab Yours: Management Experience and Perceptions of Organization Political Behaviour

This paper reports the findings of a survey of 250 British managers, exploring their experience and perceptions of organization politics. Political behaviour appeared to be common. Most managers viewed political behaviour as ethical and necessary, and aspects of organizational effectiveness, change, resourcing and reputation were attributed to political tactics, although 80% had no training in this area. Tactics experienced frequently included networking, using ‘key players’ to support initiatives, making friends with power brokers, bending the rules, and self‐promotion. Tactics experienced as rare, but not unknown, included misinformation, spreading rumours, and keeping ‘dirt files’ for blackmail. A consistent pattern of responses concerning willingness to engage in politics, the need to act ruthlessly and the appropriateness of reciprocity when faced with political behaviour implies an attitude of ‘you stab my back, I'll stab yours’. Findings are discussed using an ‘antecedents–behaviours–consequences’ framework of perceived organization politics to guide research.     

Ethical frameworks and ethical behavior: A survey of business students

This study investigated the efficacy of collegiate attempts to help students cope with ethical dilemmas. Data were collected from 674 business students on their ethical frameworks and ethical behaviors. Modest support was found for the relationship between the frameworks used for decision making and the choices made when confronted with an ethical dilemma. Furthermore, it was found that ethical frameworks were generally resistant to change over time while behavioral choices did change over time.     

Refining the Concept of Political Will: A Gender Perspective

While politics are known to be prevalent at managerial levels, there is currently little insight into what drives managers to engage in organizational politics and whether there are gender differences in this respect. In the current study we explore the concept of political will by using a qualitative approach based on 14 semi‐structured interviews with managers (five men and nine women) in a global semiconductor company. We identify key dimensions of managerial political will consisting of three attitudinal ambivalences: functional, ethical and emotional. We also examine gender differences along these dimensions and discuss managers' political will in the context of a masculine organizational setting. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of the findings and further research directions.     

Moral Utility Theory: Understanding the motivation to behave (un)ethically

Moral Utility Theory provides an integrative framework for understanding the motivational basis of ethical decision making by modeling it as a process of subjective expected utility (SEU) maximization. The SEUs of ethical and unethical behavioral options are proposed to be assessed intuitively during goal pursuit, with unethical conduct emerging when the expected benefits of moral transgressions outweigh the expected costs. A key insight of the model is that any factors that increase the value of a goal—including incentives, framings, and mindsets—can motivate misbehavior by increasing the SEU of unethical conduct. Although Moral Utility Theory emphasizes the automatic and habitual nature of most SEU appraisals, it also describes a mechanism for initiating the deliberative moral reasoning process: the experience of moral uncertainty. Moral uncertainty is proposed to occur when the SEUs of ethical and unethical behaviors are similar in magnitude, thereby activating the behavioral inhibition system and motivating the allocation of attentional resources toward the decision process. This framework bridges the gap between affective and cognitive perspectives on ethical decision making by identifying automatic evaluations as a central driver of moral decisions while also specifying when and how moral reasoning processes are initiated. By combining dual-process models of morality with well-validated principles from the science of motivation, Moral Utility Theory provides theoretical parsimony and formal modeling potential to the study of ethical decision making. The framework also suggests practical strategies—from employee selection and training to goal setting and compensation systems—for encouraging ethical behavior in organizations.     

On the Ethical Justification for the Use of Risk Acceptance Criteria

To protect people from hazards, the common safety regulation regime in many industries is based on the use of minimum standards formulated as risk acceptance or tolerability limits. The limits are seen as absolute, and in principle these should be met regardless of costs. The justification is ethical - people should not be exposed to a risk level exceeding certain limits. In this article, we discuss this approach to safety regulation and its justification. We argue that the use of such limits is based on some critical assumptions; that low accident risk has a value in itself, that risk can be accurately measured and the authorities specify the limits. However, these assumptions are not in general valid, and hence the justification of the approach can be questioned. In the article, we look closer into these issues, and we conclude that there is a need for rethinking this regulation approach - its ethical justification is not stronger than for alternative approaches. Essential for the analysis is the distinction between ethics of the mind and ethics of the consequences, which has several implications that are discussed.     

Corporate Political Activity: A Literature Review and Research Agenda

This paper reviews the diverse literature on corporate political activity (CPA) and develops a framework that details and integrates existing research in this field. A systematic analysis of extant CPA literatures is conducted to order them into domains that have implications for organizational performance. The paper is structured into three such domain emphases, which require further research investigation: resources and capabilities focus; institutional focus; and political environment focus. The contribution of each to an understanding of CPA in pursuit or defence of corporate competitive advantage is discussed. The authors also suggest that the internationalization of business, including the more recent emergence of developing country economies and companies, presents scholars with the challenge of understanding CPA in more varied institutional settings. CPA practices continue to expand as commerce goes increasingly global and, consequently, involves a wider array of political actors and institutions. The paper contributes by increasing the clarity of CPA classification, reflecting on the implications of a multi‐polar world for CPA research and advancing future agendas for scholars in this research community.     

Prophets vs. profits: How market competition influences leaders' disciplining behavior towards ethical transgressions

We investigate how market competition influences the way leaders discipline employees' ethical transgressions. A cross-sectional study among organizational leaders (Study 1) revealed that strong market competition is related to an instrumental decision frame (business practices are more focused on serving the organization's interest). This decision frame explains why strong market competition is related to leaders' perceptions of the evaluation of wrongdoing in terms of instrumental rather than moral concerns. Two experiments (Studies 2 and 3) show that increased market competition makes leaders' disciplining of ethical transgressions more contingent upon the transgression's instrumentality to the organization: the same ethical transgression is punished less when it resulted in profit than when it resulted in loss. This research is among the first to identify conditions that determine disciplinary responses of organization leaders to ethical transgressions, and it feeds the debate on whether market competition promotes the display of unethical behavior within organizations.     

From Rocking the Boat to Wagging the Dog: A Literature Review of Subsidiary Initiative Research and Integrative Framework

This literature review on the topic of subsidiary initiatives discloses a certain lack of conceptual clarity concerning the phenomenon. After providing an overview of the research field, the paper applies a conception of entrepreneurship inspired by Schumpeter (1912) as a basis for refining our understanding of just what a subsidiary initiative is and of the different kinds of subsidiary initiative. A framework is developed with a view to the current and anticipated growing importance of highly populated countries like China and India which are bound to raise the MNC-internal profile and weight of subsidiaries serving these national mega-markets. The framework distinguishes between organizational disequilibrium and market disequilibrium as a way to classify different types and different degrees of subsidiary initiative. It is argued that prior conceptions of subsidiary initiative in practice reveal a bias towards organizational disequilibrium and tend to overlook important MNC subsidiary initiatives involving market disequilibrium, generally neglecting the entrepreneurial dimension that Birkinshaw (1997) associated with the term when he initiated this research stream. Metaphorically speaking, although Birkinshaw was always clearly interested in MNC subsidiary initiatives that “wag the dog,” most follow-up research examines initiatives that merely “rock the boat.” Our framework helps capture the distinction and anticipates more dog-wagging by MNC subsidiaries in the future.     

Discerning Possibilities for Action: A Typology of Approaches to Moral Imagination

The existing literature on moral imagination proposes that actors can best respond to ethical dilemmas by tailoring their actions to the practical demands of the situation. It has done little to develop this insight, however. To address this gap, I used institutional theory to identify six ideal type approaches to moral imagination. I proposed that in addressing ethical dilemmas, the morally imaginative actor takes account of two situational factors: first, the social construction of the unmet ethical claim or obligation which constitutes the ethical dilemma, and in particular whether or not it is broadly perceived to be legitimate; and second, its own degree of power. The framework presented represents the first attempt to systematically enumerate approaches to moral imagination and identify their boundary conditions.     

A Framework to Guide Thinking and Analysis Regarding Climate Change Policies

The potential impacts from climate change, and climate change policies, are massive. Careful thinking about what we want climate change policies to achieve is a crucial first step for analysts to help governments make wise policy choices to address these concerns. This article presents an adaptive framework to help guide comparative analysis of climate change policies. The framework recognizes the inability to forecast long-term impacts (due in part to path dependance) as a constraint on the use of standard policy analysis, and stresses learning over time as a fundamental concern. The framework focuses on the objectives relevant for climate change policy in North America over the near term (e.g., the next 20 years). For planning and evaluating current climate policy alternatives, a combination of fundamental objectives for the near term and proxy objectives for characterizing the state of the climate problem and the ability to address it at the end of that term is suggested. Broad uses of the framework are discussed, along with some concrete examples. The framework is intended to provide a basis for policy analysis that explicitly considers the benefits of learning over time to improve climate change policies.     

Firm-level indicators of instrumental and political CSR processes – A multiple case study

Recent studies have been increasingly distinguishing between instrumental and political approaches to corporate social responsibility (CSR). However, few studies have explored the firm-level processes generating these types of CSR engagements. Using Basu and Palazzo’s (2008) proposition to model CSR as a process of sensemaking, we suggest that multinational enterprises use different processes in developing capabilities around instrumental and political CSR. Our qualitative multiple case–study analysis is based on data from 42 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 27 senior managers from British American Tobacco, Nestlé, and Hewlett Packard. Our findings from the three cases indicate that instrumental and political CSR are characterised by different sensemaking processes. We also find evidence for overlapping of processes between instrumental and political CSR.     

Putting emergence back in leadership emergence: A dynamic,multilevel, process-oriented framework

The study of leadership emergence has increased substantially over the past few decades. However, due to a lack of integrative theory, we believe limited advancement has been made regarding the full process of leadership emergence. To address this concern, first, we conceptualize the leadership emergence process from a complexity perspective and define emergence as a dynamic, interactive process grounded in three principles of emergent phenomena. Second, we review how previous research has modeled leadership emergence by focusing on the content areas of the lower-level elements, the mechanisms that facilitate their emergence, and the dynamism of the process once it has emerged. Third, based on the findings from the review, we introduce a process-oriented framework of leadership emergence. Fourth, we offer propositions to guide developing and testing emergent leadership processes, and we conclude with recommendations for future leadership process research. Our hope is that by realigning the study of leadership emergence with complexity and multilevel theory, we can reorient this area to focusing more on the process mechanisms within emergence, connecting back to research progress made over 60?years ago.     

Managing Change Across Boundaries: Boundary‐Shaking Practices1

To date, boundary spanning has primarily been conceived of as an activity relating an organization to its environment, including other organizations with which it cooperates and competes. In contrast, this study focuses on the boundary spanning practices of individuals acting as change agents to implement boundary‐shaking change initiatives across intra‐organizational boundaries. These boundary‐shaking individuals all work for blue‐chip organizations in sectors as diverse as pharmaceuticals, consultancy and automotive. The change initiatives are equally diverse, including post‐merger integration, exploitation of across‐business synergies and implementing more integrative structures. Through our examination of boundary‐shakers we are able to extend what we know about internal change agency and change agent skills and practices. Our starting point is that organizations are comprised of networks of people with a degree of common interest. Our research shows our research subjects to be active movers and shakers in these networks, using their knowledge of the organizational political context and the motivations of others to create new networks (or new meanings within old networks), which then enables them to pursue their change objectives.     

Strategic Appraisal of Environmental Risks: A Contrast Between the United Kingdom's Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change and its Committee on Radioactive Waste Management

In this article, we compare two high‐profile strategic policy reviews undertaken for the U.K. government on environmental risks: radioactive waste management and climate change. These reviews took very different forms, both in terms of analytic approach and deliberation strategy. The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change was largely an exercise in expert modeling, building, within a cost‐benefit framework, an argument for immediate reductions in carbon emissions. The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, on the other hand, followed a much more explicitly deliberative and participative process, using multicriteria decision analysis to bring together scientific evidence and stakeholder and public values. In this article, we ask why the two reviews were different, and whether the differences are justified. We conclude that the differences were mainly due to political context, rather than the underpinning science, and as a consequence that, while in our view “fit for purpose,” they would both have been stronger had they been less different. Stern's grappling with ethical issues could have been strengthened by a greater degree of public and stakeholder engagement, and the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management's handling of issues of uncertainty could have been strengthened by the explicitly probabilistic framework of Stern.     

The role of human and social board capital in driving CSR reporting

The objective of this paper is to analyze the effect of the professional, technical and relational background (human and social capital) of outside directors on promoting firm CSR disclosure. Following the Hillman et al. (2000) taxonomy of board members, we classify outside directors as business experts, support specialists and community influential, and examine whether business and technical expertise or political ties in the boardroom affect CSR disclosure.This study confirms that not all outside directors are equally effective in improving CSR disclosure and that only certain kinds of outside directors, those classified as support specialists, help promote it. On the other hand, our findings also show that directors with previous experience as politicians affect CSR disclosure negatively, probably due to their interests in safeguarding their reputation within the company, in avoiding public scrutiny and in protecting their political connections. In addition, our set of analysis with interaction effects reveals that powerful CEOs have the incentive to promote CSR-related strategies and to convince business experts and support specialist directors to enhance profitable sustainability strategies and transparency in CSR disclosure. Nevertheless, the powerful CEO effect is not enough to compensate the negative role of political directors on CSR reporting. Therefore, this paper supports the theories in favor of analyzing the multiple configurations of corporate governance mechanisms by adopting a holistic approach, and the need to combine these configurations in order to analyze their impact on CSR behavior.     

A Multi‐layered Exploration of the Diversity Management Field: Diversity Discourses,Practices and Practitioners in the UK

This paper presents a multi‐layered exploration of the diversity management field in the UK. In doing so, it aims to address two problematic tendencies in the current diversity research: the focus on single‐level explorations, and the polarization between critical and mainstream approaches. Using Bourdieu's concept of field, I develop a theoretical framework that conceptualizes the field of diversity management in three constituents: diversity discourse, diversity practice and diversity practitioners. The framework is used to analyse empirical evidence generated through semi‐structured interviews with 19 diversity managers of large private‐sector companies. This study reveals the presence of a gap between the diversity discourse and practice, and the absence of any standard set of qualifications and skills requirement for practitioners. The findings demonstrate the twofold role of discourse in drawing the boundaries of the diversity management field. First, it is instrumental in constructing diversity management as distinct from equal opportunities. Second, the use discourse functions as a mechanism to control the entry of practitioners into this field, which otherwise has low entry barriers. The paper offers a contribution to management research in general and equality and diversity research in particular through its original use of Bourdieuan sociology in an empirical study.     

The Impact of Capacity Costs on Product Differentiation in Delivery Time,Delivery Reliability,and Price

We develop an analytical framework for studying the role capacity costs play in shaping the optimal differentiation strategy in terms of prices, delivery times, and delivery reliabilities of a profit‐maximizing firm selling two variants (express and regular) of a product in a capacitated environment. We first investigate three special cases. The first is an existing model of price and delivery time differentiation with exogenous reliabilities, which we only review. The second focuses on time‐based (i.e., length and reliability) differentiation with exogenous prices. The third deals with deciding on all features for an express variant when a regular product already exists in the marketplace. We subsequently address the integrative framework of time‐and‐price‐based differentiation for both products in a numerical study. Our results shed light on the role that customer preferences towards delivery times, reliabilities and prices, and the capacity costs (absolute and relative) have on the firm's optimal product positioning policy.