Business ethics research has long been interested in understanding the conditions under which ethical consumption is consistent versus context-dependent. Extant research suggests that many consumers fail to make consistent ethical consumption decisions and tend to engage in ethical decisions associated with ingroup (vs. outgroup) identity cues. To fill this gap, four experiments examine how construal levels moderate the influence of ingroup versus outgroup identity cues in ethical consumption. The studies support the contention that when consumers use concrete construal to process information, they will focus on ingroup cues and make ethical consumption decisions that are aligned with ingroup biases. However, when consumers use abstract construal, they will act more consistently with their inner goals rather than focusing on ingroup and outgroup cues. Social goodwill, which indicates desires to give back to society, is identified as mediating the effects. The findings have important implications for ethical consumption and social influence literature.

Although individuals have different kinds of defensive strategies towards identity threat, the relationship between identity threat and unethical behavior is still unclear. In the current study, according to identity threat and self-affirmation theory, we propose and test the role of publicness of identity threat in determining whether identity threat will lead to unethical behavior. One online experiment with 197 participants (mixed design) and one laboratory experiment with 86 participants (between-subject design) are used to test our hypotheses. Our findings reveal that when individuals' identity threat is from the public sphere, it will increase their unethical behavior, but when such a threat is from the private sphere, it will reduce their unethical behavior. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Drawing on the new institutional theory and the resources based view of the firm (RBV), this study tries to shed light upon the idea that isomorphic organizational changes seek legitimacy over efficiency. Using data from 102 Spanish companies and employing partial least squares, a variance-based structural equation modeling technique, this study concludes that both objectives are achievable simultaneously when firms implement total quality management (TQM) as an integrative stream of both theories. Furthermore, empirical results reveal that: (i) institutional pressures (IP) condition significantly the implementation of TQM, (ii) TQM exerts a double mediating role in the IP-legitimacy and IP-efficiency relationships, and (iii) both efficiency and legitimacy objectives are achieved by means of TQM. However, we observe a dual phenomenon: (i) while we find a significant positive effect of TQM on overall performance (OP) via efficiency and (ii) we failed to find support for the TQM-OP link via legitimacy.

This article investigates the role external advice plays in the board’s determination of chief executive officer (CEO) compensation. We show that CEO incentive pay increases with the degree of compensation consultant independence using a quasi-natural experiment provided by the creation of an independent consultant after separation from an affiliated consultant. Specifically, switching to an independent consultant significantly increases the pay–performance sensitivity and relative performance evaluation of CEO contracts. Despite the benefits of independent advice, independent consultants may not be hired due to the influence of powerful CEOs or because boards already possess adequate expertise.

Looking across the long twentieth century, this article tracks the rise and fall of one form of anti-competition regulation: the certificate of public convenience. Designed to curb “destructive competition” in certain industries, such as transportation and banking, certificate laws prevented firms from entering those industries unless they could convince regulators that they would satisfy an unmet public demand for goods or services. This history highlights how lawmakers used similar techniques in governing infrastructure and finance—two fields that are not often studied together. It also shows that state regulation both prefigured legal change at the federal level and then lagged behind it, suggesting that different dynamics have been in play at each level of governance in devising competition policy over the last century.

The Chicago School of antitrust is often thought to have killed off antitrust enforcement beginning in the late 1970s. In fact, although Chicago school prescriptions were significantly more laissez-faire than the structuralist school Chicago replaced, antitrust enforcement did not die under Chicago's influence. Rather, by directing antitrust to focus on technical economic analysis, Chicago contributed to the creation of a large and entrenched class of antitrust professionals—economists and lawyers—with a vested interest in preserving antitrust as a legal and regulatory enterprise. Today, Chicago School's consumer welfare standard and specific enforcement prescriptions are coming increasingly under political pressure and may be replaced or supplemented in the near term. But Chicago's redirection of antitrust toward technical economic analysis and technocratic reasoning seems likely to remain a durable legacy.

Distorted images of American regulatory ideas and practices frame foreign responses to these practices as well as foreign views of the economic policies of the United States. U.S. power both embeds and contributes to these distorted images. This article highlights the evolution of these distortions and the ways in which business history has intertwined with legal and political history throughout the evolution. It focuses on a specific area of regulation—antitrust or competition law—in order to ground the more general discussion. The article provides insights into the relationship between cognitive distance and power and into its pernicious effects on transnational discussions and decisions involving competition law.

This article investigates the history of the Progressive Era effort to develop new techniques and technologies of control over American business and corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A revolution in Progressive economic regulation was rooted in the intellectual work of the so-called institutional economists—particularly in the context of what economists and lawyers like Richard Ely, John Commons, and Walton Hamilton ultimately talked about as the movement for the “social control” of business, with distinct emphasis on the legal and regulatory “foundations” of modern capitalism. With increased attention to dynamics rather than statics, the real social economy rather than ideal rational actors, and historical and institutional rather than theoretical and abstract renderings of business, industry, and the market, the institutionalists were directly concerned with problems of control, particularly those mechanisms of control available through law, politics, the state, and new technologies of legislative and administrative regulation.