Search

This panel symposium aims to deepen an understanding of the role of public governance in ethically related or informed decision-making. Public governance refers to public involvement and engagement in governance of organizations to ensure administrative accountability, and to realize a more effective variety of corporate social responsibility. In so far as this is constructively conceived, the intention is to enhance the actual integration of ethical norms and principles within practice, and so raise ethical performance. This applies to both the public and private sectors. This may extend to the legal empowerment of public engagement (specific institution building for monitoring and control). The symposium intends to take forward a range of arising issues that can provide a platform for lively debate: (1) The significance of public governance for ethically informed decision-making in both the public and private sectors; (2) Discussion of the forms of public governance, which may be effective in addressing systemic governance failures; (3) Discussion of the balance between regulation and self-regulation and institution building as an approach to public deliberative democracy: issues of formal structures for deliberation (feasibility, implementation, range, etc). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the panel symposium is to engage a group of panelists in a formal, moderated and interactive discussion of how ethical governance can be properly built or rebuilt into private business and public service in capitalism in order to tackle governance failures and prevent further financial, economic, social and environmental crises. Major objectives of the symposium are: (1) To address the governance failure issues in private and public sectors and understand how the lack of true or genuine ethical governance has contributed to the failures. (2) To define more clearly the concept of ethical governance, based on the discussion of whether ethical governance can be inherently built into business and public service. (3) To apply the concept of ethical governance to different sectors and areas, addressing more concrete practical issues. (4) To consider how ethical governance can be built into capitalism in different contexts, including a discussion of different modes of thinking and alternative perspectives, appropriate approaches and operational mechanisms. (5) To set up a dialog between the different sectors, seeing what they can learn from each other, in relation to theory, value and practice, and noting how governance in the different areas interconnects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many consumer-focused corporate social responsibility (CSR) studies suggest a positive link between the responsibility demonstrated by a company and consumers' intention to favor the company in their purchases. Yet an analogous causal effect between corporate social and financial performances is not evident. This paper conceptualizes how social desirability bias and cynicism contribute to the discrepancy between customers' statements and their actual purchase behavior, and analyzes why intentions stated in surveys do not consistently convert into actions. We propose two variables, Corporate Social Desirability and Corporate Social Cynicism, as mediators between CSR and consumers' stated and actual choices. We further develop a framework based on hybrid choice modelling to estimate the impact of these two variables on responsibility research. The goal is to improve the usability of customer CSR survey results by quantifying and extracting the effects of behavioral patterns that otherwise threaten the validity of such findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]