In October 2020, the Government of Japan formulated a National Action Plan (NAP) on Business and Human Rights in response to the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and ensuing greater international awareness of violations of human rights by corporations.1 In the NAP, the government of Japan stated that on the basis of the UNGPs, it expects companies to (i) formulate human rights policies, (ii) conduct due diligence with respect to human rights, and (iii) establish grievance mechanisms.2 In order to achieve these goals, businesses need to understand whether and how they are violating human rights and prepare appropriate solutions. Whistleblowers play a crucial role in this process.

This paper examines the attitudes of multinational corporations (MNCs) toward the U.S.-China trade war through an original survey of China-based MNC subsidiaries in the manufacturing industry. Our argument is in two parts. First, firms that have relocated production outside of China or are considering such moves should be less likely to oppose the trade war as they possess outside options that reduce their vulnerability to trade restrictions. Second, firms’ tendency toward production relocation can in turn be explained by their local sourcing dependence, as measured by the level of such dependence and the degree to which their operations require supplier certification. This is because firms more heavily embedded in local supplier networks face stronger resource dependence that increases organizational inertia, reducing their ability to switch to alternative suppliers and therefore relocating production to other destinations. Our findings corroborate our hypotheses, highlighting how the heterogeneity in MNCs’ supply chain relationships may influence both their manufacturing relocation decisions and trade policy preferences.

Despite its importance to gender inequality, household incomes, and labor markets, the reasons behind Britain being one of the last major Western nations to introduce equal pay have been relatively neglected. This article first examines the campaign for equal pay from the late Victorian era to its eventual introduction in 1970. Economists predicted that equal pay would produce substantial female unemployment, but policy makers correctly doubted this—as data collected from early adopters in West Europe and North America showed no significant rise in female unemployment. Female employment rose substantially during Britain’s equal pay implementation—while, in contrast to broadly static earnings differentials from 1950 to 1970, there was a significant reduction in the gender pay gap, followed by a longer-term trend of narrowing differentials. This article explores why equal pay expanded female employment, given the absence of any sudden rise in women workers productivity or substantial acceleration of structural change in favor of female-employing sectors. The article finds that equal pay compelled employers to reevaluate the real worth of female workers based on their substantial relative human capital growth since 1945. This had not hitherto been reflected in relative earnings, owing to barriers such as segmented labor markets, monopsonistic employers, and collective bargaining procedures that fossilized traditional gender pay differentials.

Situated within the public will and political will framework, this paper explores frames to address the social issue of gender pay inequity. Specifically, the authors examine whether demographic characteristics affect perceived acceptability of different frames describing gender pay inequity and perceptions of this social issue. First, the authors identified 26 terms used to discuss gender pay inequity; this list was narrowed to 12, representing four categories. Next, the authors solicited sentiment reactions to those frames and perceptions of gender pay inequity. Taken together, the results indicated that although respondents had consistently positive reactions to the frames fair pay, equal pay, and pay fairness, perceptions varied across demographic groups. The biggest effects were consistently for political party-related variables. One frame, strategic compensation practices, emerged as a value-neutral frame that could potentially be used to reframe the issue and re-engage business and political stakeholders who do not perceive gender pay inequity as problematic.

Organized immaturity refers to the capacity of widely institutionalized sociotechnical systems to challenge qualities of human enlightenment, autonomy, and self-determination. In the context of surveillance capitalism, where these qualities are continuously put at risk, data transparency is increasingly proposed as a means of restoring human maturity by allowing individuals insight and choice vis-à-vis corporate data processing. In this article, however, I draw on research on General Data Protection Regulation–mandated data transparency practices to argue that transparency—while potentially fostering maturity—itself risks producing new forms of organized immaturity by facilitating user ignorance, manipulation, and loss of control of personal data. Considering data transparency’s relative “successes” and “failures” regarding the cultivation of maturity, I outline a set of possible remedies while arguing for a general need to develop more sophisticated ethical appreciations of transparency’s complex and potentially problematic implications for organized (im)maturity in the digital age.

Research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure recognizes the importance of the government and examines how firms respond to government CSR regulations. However, little attention is given to how government regulations affect firms’ disclosure strategy in multiple fields of CSR. Based on institutional theory, this study proposes that mandatory CSR disclosure increases the legitimacy management cost for firms, and thus firms disclose more CSR scope to gain legitimacy and less CSR emphasis to reduce costs. Using data from Chinese A-share listed firms in 2008–2018, this study finds that mandatory CSR disclosure is positively related to CSR scope but negatively related to CSR emphasis. In addition, firm visibility strengthens the aforementioned positive and negative relations, whereas market competition weakens the relation between mandatory CSR disclosure and CSR emphasis. This study contributes to the literature on CSR disclosure and studies on organizational responses to the government mandate.

Pricing is integral to insurance design, directly influencing firm behavior and moral hazard, though its effects are insufficiently understood. I study a quasi-experiment in which deposit insurance premiums were changed for U.S. banks with unequal timing, generating differentials between banks in both levels and risk-based “steepness” of premiums. I find evidence that differentials in premiums resulted in distortions, including regulatory arbitrage, but also provided strong incentives to curb moral hazard. I find that firms that faced stronger pricing incentives to become (or remain) safer were more likely to subsequently do so than similar firms that faced weaker pricing incentives.

To date, empirical research exploring the complex mechanisms of when and how information seeking from supervisor affects newcomers' task-related outcomes remains in its infancy. With a sample of 394 newcomers and their supervisors, drawing on the conservation of resources theory and professional image construction theory, we proposed and confirmed two paradoxical paths regarding perceptions of professional image construction – concern about impairing competence-image and confidence in improving commitment-image – that connect newcomers' information seeking from supervisor with their emotional exhaustion during socialization and ultimately can elevate and degrade their task-related outcomes, respectively. In addition, we found that supervisors' favorable feedback weakened the relationship between information seeking from supervisor and competence-image impairment concern, whereas it strengthened the linkage between information seeking and commitment-image improvement confidence. This study thus provides a more comprehensive picture for scholars and practitioners.

This article uses FAS 123R regulation to examine how reduction in CEO compensation incentives affects managerial “playing it safe” behavior. Using proxies reflecting deliberate managerial efforts to change firm risk, difference-in-difference tests show that affected firms drastically reduce both systematic and idiosyncratic risks, leading to an 8% decline in total firm risk. These reductions in risk are achieved by shifting to safer, but low-Q, segments while closing the riskier ones, without significant changes in investment levels. Our findings suggest that decrease in risk-taking incentives provided by option compensation, when not compensated for by alternative incentives or governance mechanisms, exacerbates risk-related agency problem.

The neglect of marginalized stakeholders is a colossal problem in both stakeholder and entrepreneurship streams of literature. To address this problem, we offer a theory of marginalized stakeholder-centric entrepreneurship. We conceptualize how firms can utilize marginalized stakeholder input actualization through which firms should process a variety of ideas, resources, and interactions with marginalized stakeholders and then filter, internalize, and, finally, realize important elements that improve a variety of related socioeconomic, ethical, racial, contextual, political, and identity issues. This input actualization process enables firms to innovate with marginalized stakeholders and develop marginalized stakeholder capabilities. To this end, firms fulfill both their moral and entrepreneurial claims to marginalized stakeholders.

The increasing focus on business and human rights (BHR) in civil society and policymaking has not been matched by research on corporate actions to respect and protect human rights. The lack of research on BHR is especially acute outside of Western Europe and Anglo-centric contexts. This paper seeks to investigate how the largest Russian firms conceptualize and fulfil their human rights obligations under the UN Guiding Principles and the extent to which internationalization of those firms may have impacted these behaviours. I use a unique dataset created from a sample made of the 100 largest firms listed on the Moscow Stock Exchange. Using the theoretical construct of institutional conflict, I find that cross-listing on other stock exchanges and the extent to which firms frame their broader social responsibility issues as ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustainable development’ rather than ‘corporate social responsibility’ has a substantial impact on firm attention to human rights. While this attention is encouraging, firm disclosure of actions taken to mitigate against violations and protect human rights is extremely limited and the strength of domestic institutional pressures has resulted in very little firm action in the face of the extreme and widespread human rights violations being committed in Ukraine by Russia.

Drawing from Michel Foucault’s reading of Immanuel Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?,” and specifically his definition of ascesis, we associate maturity with a capacity for, and interest in, forming the self. On the basis of an empirical study of making vinyl records following the successful commercialization of digital media, we identify micro-disciplinary techniques of self-forming that emerge as enthusiasts steadily learn the craft of vinyl record manufacturing. It is, we argue, through technology, rather than against it, that organizational immaturity can be resisted. Craftwork involves testing and transforming, rather than just acquiring, traditional skills. Maturity involves an ongoing struggle of selectively and reflectively engaging with technologies via attempts to be the subject of one’s own subjection. The former contributes to the latter.

On 24 June 2022, the Contracting Parties of the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) finalized discussions on the modernization of the treaty. After fifteen rounds of negotiations, an agreement in principle was reached to be adopted by the Energy Charter Conference on 22 November 2022 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.1 The ECT, adopted in 1994, establishes a legal framework that aims to promote international cooperation in the energy sector.2 It has a membership of 53 countries primarily from Europe and Central Asia, as well as the European Union (EU) and the European Atomic Energy Community. In recent years, the ECT attracted widespread public attention due to its impact on states’ environmental and climate policies. Particularly, the treaty’s provisions on investment protection, with investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS) at the centre, allow foreign investors in the energy sector to challenge adverse state action before international arbitration and claim compensation for measures affecting their business activities. Fossil fuel investors have increasingly used the ECT to challenge environmental and climate measures, such as phasing out coal-fired power generation, banning offshore oil drilling in coastal areas, and prohibiting gas fracking projects. Such cases have fuelled concerns regarding the abilities of governments to roll-out large-scale climate action. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that international investment agreements (IIAs) like the ECT could ‘be used by fossil-fuel companies to block national legislation aimed at phasing out the use of their assets’.3 With some of these damage claims running into billions of euros, the ECT enables fossil fuel investors to offload the costs and risks associated with their affected assets onto society at large in the face of necessary climate action. This would go, in the words of the editorial board of the Financial Times, against the ‘heart of the capitalist social contract’ and the ‘ability of markets to deal adequately with the challenge of climate change’.4

Regulatory impact analyses of proposed environmental, occupational, and consumer product safety regulations often rely on a metric known as the Value per Statistical Case of Cancer (VSCC), that is, the public’s willingness to pay (WTP) for reductions in the risk of developing cancer. In this paper, we ask whether the VSCC depends on cancer survival prospects. We develop a simple theoretical model that shows that under standard assumptions the VSCC is decreasing in the chance of surviving cancer. We empirically test this prediction by means of a stated preference survey, where we ask subjects aged 45–60 from the general population in the Czech Republic to report information about their WTP for reductions in the risk of getting cancer. One half of the sample was told that, if they got cancer, the 5-year survival rate was 60 % (corresponding to the average survival chances across all types of cancer), while the other half was told that it was 75 %. Consistent with the theoretical model, we find that the VSCC is larger in the former group. The ratio between the VSCC of the two groups is approximately equal to the ratio between the conditional cancer mortality risks implied by the survey’s survival rates, suggesting that the VSCC is proportional to conditional cancer mortality. Our findings have important policy implications in the context of regulations that focus on pollutants linked to cancers with different chances of survival.

As the climate and biodiversity crises gain unprecedented attention, many governments across the global north are taking legislative steps to address deforestation in supply chains linked to their domestic consumption or commercial activities, among them, the United Kingdom (UK) and the European Union (EU).1

Applying conservation of resources theory, we propose a theoretical model that explains how and when supervisor knowledge sharing affects creative behavior. Specifically, this study examines employee self-efficacy as the core intermediary mechanism and work–family conflict as the boundary condition of the indirect effect of supervisor knowledge sharing on creative behavior via self-efficacy. Drawn from a sample of 147 dyads comprising full-time employees and their immediate supervisors, the results of this study showed support for our moderated mediation model. The findings indicated that supervisor knowledge sharing had a significant effect on creative behavior and this influence is mediated by self-efficacy. Furthermore, our study revealed that work–family conflict attenuated the positive supervisor knowledge sharing's effect on creative behavior via self-efficacy. Implications of our findings for theory and practice are discussed.

In this article, we show that firms can become conservative in innovation when their directors face job insecurity. We find that after the staggered enactment of majority voting legislation that strengthens shareholders’ power in director elections, firms produce fewer patents, particularly exploratory patents, and fewer forward citations. This effect is stronger for directors facing higher dismissal costs or threats and for firms with greater needs for board expertise and is mitigated by institutional investors’ expertise in innovation. Overall, our results suggest that heightened job insecurity induces director myopia, which leads to a reduction in investment in risky, long-term innovation projects.