This study utilizes self-consistency motivational theory to investigate the association between employees' experience of co-worker ostracism and their promotive voice, while also examining the mediating role of organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) and the moderating effect of emotional stability. We collected three-wave data from personnel in North American organizations and found that social exclusion by co-workers hinders employees' expression of constructive views about work-related matters as it dampens their OBSE. We observed that this mediating role of OBSE is mitigated to the extent to which employees have emotional stability, a dispositional feature that helps them control emotions, discipline impulses, and handle challenges. Overall, our study identifies a key mechanism, employees' belief about their self-esteem and proficiency as an organizational member, through which co-worker exclusion hampers promotive voice, and it reveals how their emotional stability might contain this process.

This article examines the history of mining in British Southeast Asia during the early twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the histories of the Burma Corporation and the Duff Development Company, which were located in British-occupied Burma and Malaya, respectively. It argues that despite being represented as “rogue” corporate ventures in areas under “indirect” colonial rule, the contrasting fates of each company—one successful, one not—reveal how foreign-owned businesses operating in the empire became increasingly beholden to British colonial state regulations during this period, marking a shift in policy from the “company-state” model that operated in prior centuries. The histories of these two firms ultimately demonstrate the continued significance of business in the making of empire during the late colonial period, bridging the divide between the age of company rule and the turn toward state-sponsored “development” that would occur in the mid-twentieth century.

We exploit exogenous legislative changes that alter the priority structure of different classes of debt to study how debtholder monitoring incentives affect bank earnings opacity. We present novel evidence that exposing nondepositors to greater losses in bankruptcy reduces earnings opacity, especially for banks with larger shares of nondeposit funding, listed banks, and independent banks. The reduction in earnings opacity is driven by a lower propensity to overstate earnings and is more pronounced among larger banks and in banks with more real estate loan exposure. Our findings highlight the importance of creditors’ monitoring incentives in improving the quality of information disclosure.

The article aims to bridge divides between political theory and management and organization studies in theorizing workplace democracy. To achieve this aim, the article begins by introducing a new definition of democracy which, it is contended, is better suited than mainstream accounts to highlight the democratizing potential of employee involvement. It then defines employee involvement as an offshoot of early twentieth-century humanistic psychologies, from which it inherits an emancipatory ambition. In a third step, the article presents employee involvement as a set of organizational practices liable to transform dominant patterns of authority and social interaction in the workplace. The article concludes by contending that, apart from representation/participation and the employee’s voice, employee involvement must be considered the third necessary pillar of workplace democracy, endowed with distinctive normative features that neither representation/participation nor voices can aptly capture.

This article addresses a dilemma about autonomous vehicles: how to respond to trade-off scenarios in which all possible responses involve the loss of life but there is a choice about whose life or lives are lost. I consider four options: kill fewer people, protect passengers, equal concern for survival, and recognize everyone’s interests. I solve this dilemma via what I call the new trolley problem, which seeks a rationale for the intuition that it is unethical to kill a smaller number of people to avoid killing a greater number of people based on numbers alone. I argue that killing a smaller number of people to avoid killing a greater number of people based on numbers alone is unethical because it disrespects the humanity of the individuals in the smaller-numbered group. I defend the recognize-everyone’s-interests algorithm, which will probably kill fewer people but will not do so based on numbers alone.

Scholars who favor shareholder primacy usually claim either that managers should not fulfill corporate duties of beneficence or that, if they are required to fulfill them, they do so by going against their obligations to shareholders. Distinguishing between structurally different types of duties of beneficence and recognizing the full force of the normative demands imposed on managers reveal that this view needs to be qualified. Although it is correct to think that managers, when acting on behalf of shareholders, are not required to fulfill wide duties of charity, they are nevertheless required to fulfill a variety of narrow duties of beneficence. What is more, the obligation to fulfill these duties arises precisely because they are acting on behalf of shareholders. As such, this article 1) refines our understanding of the duties of corporate beneficence and 2) helps to identify which duties of beneficence are imposed on managers when they are acting on behalf of shareholders.

The professional institutions of loss adjusting in Australasia were shaped by a range of postcolonial developments, including adhesion to the British badge of organizational prestige, the Royal Charter. The aim of this paper is to explore how a single exogenous shock to the institution of loss adjusting in Australia enhanced a sense of national identity, altering the future of those institutions. Our conclusions are based on over sixty interviews with loss adjusters in three countries and the archives of several Australasian loss adjusting institutions dating back to the late 1800s. Archival material included correspondence, meeting minutes, various memorandum, newspaper clippings, membership lists, criteria for barriers to entry, records of lobbying efforts, disciplinary actions, and educational material. Reus-Smit (2002, 2017), Bell (2009), and Rae (2017) have developed the understanding of the role collective cultural and national identities play in institutionalism, whereas Suddaby et al. (2007, 2011) have contributed to the theory of field-level institutional change. Building on the literature of Suddaby et al., this paper appraises how a single historic natural event triggered normative changes impacting the institution of loss adjusting in the region.

This article challenges the unidimensional view of abusive supervisors and examines how employees respond to abuse when the transgressing boss also has a positive impact on others. Drawing on deonance and fairness theory, we propose competing hypotheses about the influence of prosocial impact. Specifically, we use deonance theory to suggest that prosocial impact might buffer the effects of abusive supervision. Alternatively, we incorporate fairness theory to predict that prosocial impact strengthens injustice perceptions and thereby worsens consequences of abuse. Two field studies show support for fairness theory, demonstrating that employees perceive greater injustice, and show stronger retaliatory behaviors, when the abusive supervisor makes a positive difference in the workplace. A final field study replicates these results, while also testing the underlying cognitive process employees use to assess the interplay between “good” and “bad” supervisory characteristics. This article contributes insights to abusive supervision, prosocial impact, organizational justice, and behavioral ethics literatures.

Social media companies commonly design their platforms in a way that renders them addictive. Some governments have declared internet addiction a major public health concern, and the World Health Organization has characterized excessive internet use as a growing problem. Our article shows why scholars, policy makers, and the managers of social media companies should treat social media addiction as a serious moral problem. While the benefits of social media are not negligible, we argue that social media addiction raises unique ethical concerns not raised by other, more familiar addictive products, such as alcohol and cigarettes. In particular, we argue that addicting users to social media is impermissible because it unjustifiably harms users in a way that is both demeaning and objectionably exploitative. Importantly, the attention-economy business model of social media companies strongly incentivizes them to perpetrate this wrongdoing.

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, scepticism on the merits of trade and globalization has increased across several key developed countries. This poses major challenges for multinational enterprises (MNEs) and other trade dependent firms (TDFs). This paper develops a framework to explore corporate nonmarket strategies (NMS) to address this backlash, covering both corporate political activity (CPA) and corporate social responsibility (CSR). We firstly provide an overview of the existing research within international economics, business strategy, and international political economy on the antiglobalization backlash and MNEs/TDFs strategy in the face of protectionism. Building on this scholarship, we formulate propositions for CPA and CSR actions, which are likely to be deployed by TDFs in developed economies to counter protectionism and address the criticisms of the antiglobalization movement. On this basis we propose an interdisciplinary analytical framework that can be used to study corporate strategy in times of growing antitrade sentiments. Finally, we provide initial proposals for testing these propositions and highlight the challenges researchers may face when carrying out such research.