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There is an ongoing debate about whether digital media undermines or enhances the ability of stakeholders—in particular, secondary stakeholders—to influence a firm’s policies and practices. One prevailing perspective (Barnett, Henriques & Husted, 2020; Barnett, Henriques & Husted, 2024) is that digital media leads to slacktivism, a token display of support, which impedes the ability of stakeholders to act collectively and makes it easier for firms to dismiss stakeholder claims. Another perspective (Colleoni, Zyglidopoulos & Illia, 2024) argues that even though synchronicity may be difficult to achieve, digital media in the form of hashtags makes it easier for heterogeneous stakeholders to converge around a broader demand for societal change and indirectly pressure firms to change their policies and practices. In this exchange, we expand on Colleoni, Zyglidopoulos, and Illia’s (2024) arguments by encompassing other forms of digital activism beyond generic hashtags. Drawing from the logic of connective action, we argue that two universal pathways—connectivity and velocity—applicable across a wide range of digital activism, are reshaping and enhancing stakeholders’ ability to influence a firm’s social policies and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multinational enterprises are aware of their responsibility to protect human rights now more than ever, but severe human rights violations, including physical integrity abuses (e.g., death, torture, disappearances), continue unabated. To explore this puzzle, we engage theoretically with the means-ends decoupling literature to examine if and when oil and gas firms' policies and practices prevent severe human rights abuse. Using an original dataset, we identify two pathways to mitigate means-ends decoupling: (a) while human rights policies alone do not reduce human rights abuses, firms with a high-quality human rights policy over the long-term reduce severe human rights abuses; (b) firms that combine preparedness—which we define as a firm's capabilities, practices, and engagement—with a long-term human rights policy also reduce the likelihood of human rights abuses. Preparedness, we argue, can lead to reinforcement dynamics between long-term policy efforts and additional capabilities that provide a more holistic understanding of firm behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors examine the number of stockholder resolutions relating to corporate governance and human rights issues over a period of eleven years. Cycles of shareholder interest are discerned.

This study extends previous empirical work on corporate political activity by examining which foreign-owned firms provide campaign contributions to United States legislators. While numerous studies have examined which domestic firms [...]

CEO's in the manufacturing industry was asked about their perception of the questionable intelligence gathering techniques employed by various business firms. Findings reveal that majority of the manufacturing companies resort to unethical tactics in obtaining information, although the incidence of the practice is less frequent than what press reports suggest. In general, CEOs believe that such practice is the norm rather than the deviant behavior in the industry. Evidently, there is a pressing need for private enterprises to promote higher ethical standards.

This study contributes simultaneously to research on women board members and competitive dynamics by investigating two unresolved research questions: What is the effect of female directors on the firm's competitive repertoire? Under what conditions is this effect more pronounced? Leveraging the "Awareness-Motivation-Capability" (AMC) framework, we predict that having women on the board of directors should impact the complexity, heterogeneity, and volume of the firm's competitive moves. Relying upon a sample of U.S. pharmaceutical firms for the years 2000 to 2017, we find that adding female directors on the board positively affects the complexity and volume of a firm's competitive moves, but negatively impacts the heterogeneity of competitive actions. In addition, the presence of a female CEO moderates these effects, leading to more complex competitive actions and increased volume. Thus, our study lends a greater understanding of how female board members influence competitive dynamics and shape the strategic direction of the firm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, we are privileged to work with a similarly dedicated, but expanded community of editors, associate editors, editorial board members, social media editors, production editor, authors, and reviewers who have made I Business & Society i one of the leading outlets for scholarly work in the broad domain of business and society. Finally, we are also planning to continue regular paper development workshops; the pandemic has boosted the use of online conferencing tools, so we hope to deploy these tools in several workshops in different corners of the world. As we noted, making a journal is a collaborative effort: We thank our authors and reviewers for their dedication in continuing to push forward the field of business and society. [Extracted from the article]

Shareholder activists increasingly pressure corporations on social policy issues; yet, extant research provides little understanding of who these activists are and how they choose their corporate targets. In this article, we adopt an activist-centered approach and rely on hybrid organizational identity theory to determine, in a two-phase analysis, how shareholder activists define their economic and social identities and whether these identities are associated with specific target characteristics and tactical strategies. Our findings form the premise of a typology of institutional shareholder activists that is empirically derived and takes into account the wide range of hybrid organizational identities that shareholders exhibit. With a sample of 735 social policy shareholder proposals filed by 104 institutional shareholders in the 2009-2010 period, our study presents one of the first empirical tests examining the heterogeneity of identities within the broad stakeholder category of "social shareholder activists." Our empirical evidence demonstrates that these shareholders' mix of economic and social identities is systematically related to their targets' characteristics and tactical strategies. The implications of our new typology for research on shareholder activism and the value of our findings for managers conclude this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As new co-editors, we want to take this moment provided by the transition in journal editorship to reflect upon the historical tenets of the journal and to outline where we would like to take the journal into the future. Also, we find ourselves in a fortunate position that the 60th volume of the journal will start later this year; we will devote a special issue of the journal to reflect on and celebrate the growth of the journal and the business and society field. While the mission of the journal has remained constant over the last 60 years, the initial founders of I Business & Society i needed to expend considerable effort in differentiating the journal from a broader academic landscape that at times seemed indifferent to societal concerns. Today, particularly as the journal's impact factor increases and the range of interested parties expands, we find that a growing number of authors who have traditionally worked outside these communities are increasingly choosing to submit to I Business & Society i . [Extracted from the article]