By Sarah Stephen

The readers of Business & Society doubtless know about the mission of the journal: communicating research “which enhances our understanding of important societal issues and their relation to business.” In 2020, this mission was accomplished via publishing 8 issues, each packed with insightful research papers. Of these, 5 were nominated for the journal’s Best Paper Award, with the paper by Halme and co-authors receiving the well-deserved award in August 2021.

Should you be curious to know more about the finalist papers, the list below will lead you to both the research papers (open-access until end March 2022!) and the authors’ contributions via the BAS blog. Happy reading!

• Bret Crane: Revisiting Who, When, and Why Stakeholders Matter: Trust and Stakeholder Connectedness.

With limited resources and attention, managers have sought ways to categorize and prioritize stakeholders. The underlying assumption is that some stakeholders matter more than others. However, in the information age, stakeholders are increasingly interconnected, where a firm’s actions toward one stakeholder are visible to others and can affect members of the stakeholder ecosystem. Actions by a firm toward any of its stakeholders can signal its trustworthiness and determine to what degree other stakeholders will assume vulnerability and engage in future exchange relationships. In this conceptual article, I present a model of stakeholder connectedness and describe the conditions in which a firm’s actions toward one stakeholder can build or erode trust across stakeholders. This work contributes to current tensions in stakeholder theory by elucidating how the treatment of a single stakeholder, or a narrow group of stakeholders, can have cascading effects on a broader group of stakeholders.

• Ahmed Elamer, Collins Ntim, & Hussein Abdou: Islamic Governance, National Governance, and Bank Risk Management and Disclosure in MENA Countries.

We examine the relationships among religious governance, especially Islamic governance quality (IGQ), national governance quality (NGQ), and risk management and disclosure practices (RDPs), and consequently ascertain whether NGQ has a moderating influence on the IGQ–RDPs nexus. Using one of the largest data sets relating to Islamic banks from 10 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries from 2006 to 2013, our findings are threefold. First, we find that RDPs are higher in banks with higher IGQ. Second, we find that RDPs are higher in banks from countries with higher NGQ. Finally, we find that NGQ has a moderating effect on the IGQ–RDPs nexus. Our findings are robust to alternative RDP measures and estimation techniques. These results imply that the quality of disclosure depends on the nature of the macro-social-level factors, such as religion that have remained largely unexplored in business and society research, and, therefore, have important implications for policy makers.

• Ali Aslan Gümüsay: The Potential for Plurality and Prevalence of the Religious Institutional Logic (& his article for the blog: Religions have a central yet underexplored impact on business & society).

Religion is a significant social force on organizational practice yet has been relatively underexamined in organization theory. In this article, I assert that the institutional logics perspective is especially conducive to examine the macrolevel role of religion for organizations. The notion of the religious logic offers conceptual means to explain the significance of religion, its interrelationship with other institutional orders, and embeddedness into and impact across interinstitutional systems. I argue for intrainstitutional logic plurality and show that specifically the intrareligious logic plurality has been rather disregarded with a relative focus on Christianity and a geographical focus on “the West.” Next, I propose the concept of interinstitutional logic prevalence and show that the religious logic in particular may act as a metalogic due to its potential for uniqueness, ultimacy, and ubiquity. Through illustrations from Islamic Finance and Entrepreneurship, I exemplify implications of logic plurality and prevalence for organizations and societies.

• Minna Halme, Jukka Rintamäki, Jette Steen Knudsen, Leena Lankoski, & Mika Kuisma: When Is There a Sustainability Case for CSR? Pathways to Environmental and Social Performance Improvements (And Leena’s & Minna’s article for the blog: Does Corporate Responsibility Deliver? Broken Pathways to Business Sustainability).

Little is known about when corporate social responsibility (CSR) leads to a sustainability case (i.e., to improvements in environmental and social performance). Building on various forms of decoupling, we develop a theoretical framework for examining pathways from institutional pressures through CSR management to sustainability performance. To empirically identify such pathways, we apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to an extensive dataset from 19 large companies. We discover that different pathways are associated with environmental and social performance (non)improvements, and that pathways to success and failure are for the most part not symmetrical. We identify two pathways to improved environmental performance: an exogenous and an endogenous one. We find two pathways to improved social performance that both involve integrating social responsibility into the core business. Pathways to nonimprovements are multiple, suggesting that failure can occur in a number of ways, while there are only a few pathways to sustainability performance improvements.

• Peter Winkler, Michael Etter, & Itziar Castelló: Vicious and Virtuous Circles of Aspirational Talk: From Self-Persuasive to Agonistic CSR Rhetoric (and the authors’ article for the blog: Making managerial CSR visions matter – From aspirations to agonism).

Scholars are divided over the question of whether managerial aspirational talk that contradicts current business practices can contribute to corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this conceptual article, we explore the rhetorical dynamics of aspirational talk that either impede or foster CSR. We argue that self-persuasive CSR rhetoric, as one enactment of aspirational talk, can attract attention and scrutiny from organizational members. Continued adherence to this rhetoric, however, creates and perpetuates tensions that lead to a vicious circle of disengagement. A virtuous circle, by contrast, requires a shift toward an agonistic rhetoric that transcends tensions by rearticulating aspirations in concurrence with situated understandings of responsible corporate practice. Our arguments contribute to a better understanding of how communication becomes constitutive of CSR and address the debate on decoupling between talk and action.