Journal Articles

We sought to understand how income inequality could impact one of the most important decisions that a multinational business could make: where to locate their production operations. If different levels of inequality are conducive to different business activities, then reducing inequality would require a fundamental shift among policy makers on how such a socio-economic goal attracts foreign investment.
The Chinese government’s recent emphasis on environmental issues has encouraged firms to pay more attention to their environmental activities and reporting; however, the comprehensiveness and transparency of their reporting appear to have reached a plateau. But there are opportunities to revive this process by expanding the diversity and power of local stakeholders to act as watchdogs and as Chinese firms become more exposed to global influences through the process of internationalisation.
Transparency is often understood as a simple matter of handing out more information - this narrow focus overlooks complex communication processes that also create new realities.
In order to explore whether CSR is indeed bound to fail, I explore the most common criticisms of CSR: that CSR works as an expansion of corporate power, propagates a “business ontology” according to which market mechanisms are strictly preferably over alternative modes of societal coordination, and is most often used as a means to veil essentially problematic business activities.
Does inequality pose special challenges for organisations? Drawing on Aristotle’s ethical thought, as well as more recent work on a particular cognitive bias known as the ‘Just World Fallacy’, I argue that it does.