Contributions published at Foundations of Business Administration and Theories of the Firm (Andreas Scherer)

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The present thesis empirically analyses how a firm’s institutional environment and the organizational characteristics influence its global anti-corruption CSR engagement over time. A firm’s CSR performance is measured using the implementation-levels of the UNGC’s anti-corruption principle. Institutional influences include the levels of democratization, press freedom and economic freedom in the firm’s home country. Organizational characteristics in lude the firm’s size, its visibility and the participation duration to the CSR initiative. I conduct a panel-data analysis using data for 441 companies from 54 countries for the time frame of 2011 to 2016. The results suggest, firstly, that the institutional variables do significantly influence the implementation of anti-corruption in the short to medium term, particularly at a more advanced stage of CSR commitment. Secondly, it is found that the firm’s size has a significant impact on its anti-corruption performance in the short to medium term, even at a more advanced stage of CSR commitment. Thirdly, comparing the relative importance of the institutional and organizational factors, it is suggested that the included variables solely explain a small scale of the variations in a firm’s ant -corruption engagement over time. Consequentially to these findings it is suggested that large corporations are important drivers for the institutionalization of anti-corruption. This is suggested to be particularly important in region where economic regulation is weak.

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Corruption is a big issue of the current world economy, especially in those countries defined as emerging markets. Since globalization enables also small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to develop new potentials by doing business abroad, they get confronted with the issue corruption, too. Due to the continuous increase in transparency and the more stringent enforcement of laws and regulations, also across state borders, both, large as well as small firms are forced to actively deal with the topic of corruption in order to prevent the company from enormous costs. This thesis provides first insights about anti-corruption strategies of SMEs, from the perspective of the owner-manager. On the basis of initial research findings indicating that a proactive anti-corruption approach can contribute to reduce business corruption, the thesis examines wheter and why SMEs follow a proactive or reactive approach. A qualitative analysis was conducted in order to elaborate on the factors influencing the owner-manager’s decision wheter to engage in a proactive or reactive anti-corruption strategy. Furthermore, it proposes an SME-tailored three-point plan in order to facilitate the initiation and implementation of a proactive anti-corruption approach within SMEs.

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Organizations have to cope with the complexity of their environment in order to survive. A considerable body of research has shown that organizations may respond to environmental complexity by creating internal complexity – for example, by expanding internal structures and processes. However, researchers know less about how organizations create collaborative complexity collectively – for example, by establishing alliances or developing common standards. This paper uses social systems theory to explore how organizations collaborate in response to complexity and to analyse the conditions under which they create either internal or collaborative complexity (or both) to address environmental complexity. It also examines how these types of complexity feed back into environmental complexity. To illustrate our conceptual model, we use corporate social responsibility (CSR).

About six months after German Federal Minister for Economic Development and Cooperation Gerd Muller launched a multistakeholder initiative, comprising fashion companies, retailers, trade unions, and the civil society, to improve working conditions and labor rights in the textile industry, the industry suddenly walked out on him. After months of discussions, negotiations, and expert meetings, the majority of industry representatives refused to become members of the Partnership for Sustainable Textiles (hereafter Textiles Partnership for short). The initial idea behind this partnership was to tackle the poor working conditions in the ready-made garment (RMG) industry in developing countries such as Bangladesh. But after many controversies over the partnership’s goals and the processes it involved, just one day before the inaugural act various trade and commerce associations, as well as many retailers, announced that they would not sign the agreement. The case of the Textiles Partnership illustrates how initiatives of collective action may be suited to tackle ethical problems in business practice. It sheds light on the problems that hamper the emergence and effectiveness of such initiatives and contributes to a debate on their feasibility. The report on this case has been based on material drawn from public sources and from interviews with people who were involved in the formation of the Textiles Partnership

How do organizations respond to the loss of legitimacy in the context of disclosed corruption, and what drives the particular responses adopted? In this article, we study the organizational strategies of three multinational companies before, during, and after legitimacy loss due to disclosed organizational corruption. We explore why some multinational companies exceed regulatory expectations and choose radical strategies that substantially influence their environment by defining a new benchmark of anti-corruption practices, while others follow a more gradual approach. We build on the concept of legitimacy in institutional theory and focus on three strategies that organizations tend to adopt to regain legitimacy: isomorphic adaptation, moral reasoning, and strategic manipulation. Based on our empirical study, we suggest that when a transgression is accompanied by a strong legitimacy shock, transgressors are likely to see no alternative but to react both radically and instantly. We identify two distinct extremes of strategic manipulation: decoupling and substantial influence.

In this paper, we propose reconceptualizing diversity management from a communication-centered perspective. We base our proposal on the observation that the literature on diversity management, both in the instrumental and critical traditions, is primarily concerned with fostering the diversity of organizational members in terms of individual-bound criteria (e.g., gender, age, or ethnicity). By drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony as well as the ‘communicative constitution of organizations’ (CCO) perspective, we suggest reconsidering diversity as the plurality of ‘voices’ which can be understood as the range of individual opinions and societal discourses that get expressed and can find resonance in organizational settings.We contribute to the literature on diversity management by moving away from a focus on individual-bound and inalterable criteria of diversity and toward a reconceptualization of diversity management as dynamic processes of voice articulation and mediation.

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