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

We analyse the increasing engagement of business in the creation and application of self-regulatory standards in the area of human rights in the light of an emerging framework of transnational human rights initiatives. The voluntariness of most of these approaches leads to problems that are characteristic of organizational self-regulation initiatives. Our analysis will show that these issues cannot be resolved simply by designing organizational structures. Rather, we argue that organizations need to acquire additional moral, communicative and collaborative capabilities to successfully contribute to the protection of human rights.

The implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is crucial for organizational legitimacy in today’s globalized world. In the absence of a global governance system, several initiatives have emerged to support companies in designing, implementing and communicating CSR. However, research has so far mainly neglected to empirically evaluate the impact of such initiatives on organizational practices. This study aims to close this gap by analyzing on a large quantitative basis how business participants in the largest voluntary CSR initiative - the UN Global Compact (UNGC) - embed CSR into their organizations. Drawing on insights from institutional and stakeholder theory, I derive determinants of UNGC implementation and analyze the accountability of the initiative. My study contributes to the literature in several ways: I develop a theoretical model to describe and explain variation in UNGC implementation, and scrutinize the new measure for UNGC implementation. My results show that the initiative affects organizational practices: Contrary to the bluewashing arguments of UNGC critics, the level of CSR implementation increases with the time of membership in the UNGC. However, my findings also suggest that the declared participant information still lacks credibility - higher UNGC implementation levels are not associated with significantly less UNGC scandals. Implications for CSR research, the Global Compact and its participants are discussed.

The article links leadership and legitimacy in globalizing business. It forwards a framework for analyzing how actors in organizations may build and maintain organizational legitimacy through different strategies. The discussion connects strategies for legitimizing organizational conduct across levels of analysis, highlighting the role of leadership in this process. The article builds on organizational discourse analysis to explain how individual actors may shape societal perceptions around organizational legitimacy. The presented framework highlights three generic strategies and the corresponding processes associated with leading toward legitimacy. In this way, it emphasizes mechanisms for gaining and maintaining legitimacy for each strategic response of the organization in relation to rhetorical tactics used to influence discourses and the resulting necessary leadership resources. The framework offers future theoretical and empirical research directions for the analysis of legitimacy discourses.

This paper proposes to study the constitution of organization at the interstice of order and disorder. By putting forward the processual, heterogeneous, and fragmented nature of organization, it explores the mediating role of communication in organizational becoming (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). More specifically, the paper focuses on how organizations overcome the inherently precarious, contingent, and disorderly character of their existence in and through language use. Taking a communicative centered approach, the paper argues for considering language-in-use as intrinsically embedding both order and disorder. To do so it relies on the empirical material of three extensive qualitative case studies in three distinct project-based organizations: a science and technology diffusion program, a software development company, and a management consulting firm. The transversal analysis of these studies shows that efforts of ordering are continuously haunted by disordering, that is, the plurality of many potential orders, which are at work in communication. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the key and yet paradoxical role of ordering devices (in the three cases studied inscribed in texts), which are designed to create and maintain order, and because of their language-based nature, generate contingency and undecidability. Language is indeed a source of ambivalence (Weick, 1990). As such, the call for order can (usually does) trigger disorder and the other way around.

The financial crisis has fueled a heated debate about the responsibility of financialeconomists. Critics such as Paul Krugman, Robert Shiller, and David Colander arguethat financial economists have developed useless or even harmful theories. This isan important debate, but it suffers from the fact that the role of financial theoriesremains unclear. In this chapter we enter the field of philosophy of science to clarifythis issue. In particular, we emphasize the research interests and the various philosophicalassumptions of three alternative views on financial theories. We analyzethe widespread positivistic conception of financial theories and contrast it with apostmodern perspective. We conclude that both positions have limitations. As analternative, we outline a constructivist conception of financial theories. In the finalsection, we use these insights from philosophy of science to clarify the responsibilityof financial economists. Financial economists have to critically reflect the problemsin practice that need to be addressed and to keep their theories closely tied to theseoriginal problems. We show how, in the case of the efficient market hypothesis, themisunderstanding of the role of financial theories led financial economists to neglectthis responsibility.

This paper examines the type and temporal development of language in the process of corporate responsibility (CR) standardization. Previous research on CR standardization has addressed the proliferation and organizational embedding of material practices but neglected the analysis of underlying ideational dynamics. Departing from this practice, we introduce a narrative perspective that illuminates the trajectory a CR standard follows, from being formally adopted to becoming collectively accepted as a valid solution to a problem of societal concern. We argue that this perspective helps scholars explore the dynamic interplay between symbolic and material aspects of standardization and understand better the discursive antecedents of coupling processes in organizations. Drawing on the case of the Equator Principles standard in international project finance, we empirically study how narratives create meaning shared by both business firms and their societal observers, thereby exemplifying the analytical merit of a narrative approach to CR standardization.

This article offers reflections and insights on Management Communication Quarterly from a younger scholar in the field of organizational communication. After providing a brief history of the journal, topics of internationality, interdisciplinarity, and identity are explored. This is followed by a discussion among other “emerging scholars” in the field of organizational communication about these topics. The article concludes with a discussion about the role and format of Management Communication Quarterly in the digital age.

In a recent article published in this journal, Stohl and Stohl (2011) examine the phenomenon of clandestine organizations from a communication-centered perspective. The authors draw primarily on the work of the ‘Montreal School’ of organizational communication, which stresses the constitutive role of communication for organizations. In this response, we argue that the Stohls’ paper does not make full use of the paradigmatic turn that the Montreal School offers to organization studies. In our view, the authors overemphasize the role of communication among organizational members in the constitution of organizations. In contrast, we argue that organizations can also be ‘talked into existence’ by the communicative acts of third parties (e.g., the media), a view that is consistent with the Montreal School’s work. Moreover, drawing on the Stohls’ central example of the terrorist organization al Qaeda, we suggest that the attribute ‘clandestine’ does not capture the essence of that organization because it is characterized by extreme invisibility of its governance structures and by extreme visibility of its terrorist activities. We believe it is the reversion of the relation between invisibility and visibility that differentiates al Qaeda from legitimate organizations such as private businesses and ensures its perpetuation against all odds.

Over the last decades, the idea that communication constitutes organizations (CCO) has been gaining considerable momentum in organization studies. The CCO perspective provides new insights into key organizational issues, such as the relation between stability and change, between micro-level and macro-level phenomena, or between emergence and control. However, despite various theoretical advancements, the CCO perspective’s range of methodologies is still limited to analyzing local communication episodes, rather than studying organizations as broader networks of communication episodes. In this paper, we present a new methodological approach to the study of the relation between organization and communication, based on network analysis. Following a discussion of existing network approaches, we incorporate the fundamental assumptions of the CCO perspective into a methodology that places communication at the center of network analysis by turning the prevalent network perspective inside out, so that the vertices of the network represent communication episodes and the edges represent individuals. We illustrate our methodology with an empirical case study, in which we examine the structures and dynamics of an actual organization as a network of communication episodes.

Over the last years, many approaches have emerged that attempt to measure the contribution of firms to sustainable development, i.e. corporate sustainability. Our review of existing methodologies for the assessment of corporate sustainability reveals two major shortcomings. First, value creation as a core condition for sustainability as well as for further contributions to economic sustainability is often ignored in these assessments, suggesting that financial and non-financial organizational processes are separable. Second, existing approaches fail to differentiate between the actual contribution of a firm to sustainability on the one hand, and governance-related features aimed at attaining this contribution on the other. We argue that the implementation of sustainability-oriented organizational structures and managerial instruments alone does not necessarily quarantee sustainability performance. Therefore, besides the dimension of current sustainability performance, we introduce the notion of sustainability governance as a second distinct dimension of corporate sustainability assessment.

The article advances an understanding of responsible leadership in global business and offers an agenda for future research in this field. Our conceptualization of responsible leadership draws on deliberative practices and discursive conflict resolution, combining the macro-view of the business firm as a political actor with the micro-view of leadership. We discuss the concept in relation to existing research in leadership. Further, we propose a new model of responsible leadership that shows how such an understanding of leadership can address the challenges of globalization. We thereby propose positive outcomes of responsible leadership across levels of analysis. The model offers research opportunities for responsible leadership in global business.

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