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

Management literature has developed several theories that focus on the activities of business firms in foreign markets. The International School is an important part of this literature. This school of thought tries to explain the phenomenon of internationalization of production and trade (e.g., Hennart, 2001). The most important questions this school asks are: Why are firms leaving their home countries and going into foreign markets? What are the different strategies that firms use to enter a new foreign market? What factors influence the decision of when and where to enter? What parts of the corporate value chain will be outsourced across firm or national boundaries? At this point there is no encompassing theory that integrates all these questions. As a result there are different ways to explain economic activities in foreign markets. The historical point of origin for such explanations is the theory of external trade. This theory enumerates the advantages stemming from exchange of goods across national boundaries under conditions of imperfect mobility of factors of production. By contrast, theories of international production analyze the conditions that encourage the transfer of capital and factors of production into foreign countries. The article presents in the following an overview of this school of thought.

The Handbook of Research on Global Corporate Citizenship identifies and fosters key interdisciplinary research on corporate citizenship and provides a framework for further academic debate on corporate responsibility in a global society. This exciting and important Handbook provides a unique forum to discuss the consequences of the social and political mandate of business firms and examines the implications of these consequences for the theory of the firm. Leading academics have been invited from various disciplines such as management studies, economics, sociology, legal studies and political science to evaluate the concept of corporate citizenship and to analyze the role of private business in global governance and the production of global public goods. The Handbook is structured in seven sections: • theoretical perspectives on corporate citizenship • contemporary issues and challenges of global business regulation • actors and institutions of global business regulation • disciplinary perspectives on corporate citizenship • implications for management theory building • critical perspectives on corporate citizenship • conclusions. This Handbook will be a significant read for academics, postgraduate students and managers interested in the field of corporate citizenship, regulation and corporate responsibility across the social sciences.

First, we will explain the concept of globalization. We will describe its conceptual variants and point to some of the phenomena that are associated with this process. Next we will describe the traditional paradigm of CSR where the responsibilities of businesses are discussed vis-a-vis a more or less properly working nation state system and a homogenous moral (cultural) community. We will argue that both these assumptions become problematic in the current 'post-national constellation' (Habermas 2001). We describe the new situation with regulatory gaps in global regulation, an erosion of national governance (loss of national sovereignty and the exterritorial application of national law), and a loss in moral and cultural homogeneity in the corporate environment. We discuss the consequences of the post-national constellation with the help of two recent observations of business firms' behavior which call for a fresh view on the concept of CSR. We describe the necessary paradigm shifts toward a new politically enlarged concept of CSR in a globalized world.

Vorstellung des Dissertationsprojekts "Führung und Verantwortung"

Die Rolle der Unternehmung in der Gesellschaft ist seit vielen Dekaden ein umstrittenes Thema. Dies lange bevor das Wort „Globalisierung“ seine Bekanntheit erfahren hat. Die Kontroverse wird zum einen vor dem Hintergrund konkurrierender Theorien der Unternehmung ausgetragen, zum anderen ist sie aber auch als Folge der Kritik am Verhalten einzelner Unternehmen zu verstehen, mit der die praktische Dimension dieser Rollenbestimmung immer wieder vor Augen geführt wird. Die Tagespresse ist voll mit derartigen Berichten: Korruption, Kinderarbeit, Umweltverschmutzung, gesundheitsschädigende Arbeitsbedingungen, Unterdrückung gewerkschaftlicher Betätigung und andere Vorwürfe, mit denen Multinationale Unternehmen immer wieder konfrontiert werden. Dies betrifft etwa die Spielwaren-, die Textil- und Sportartikelindustrie. Hier lassen viele westliche Handels- und Markenartikelunternehmen ihre Produkte zu günstigen Arbeitskosten in Drittweltstaaten fertigen. Dies oftmals unter Nichtbeachtung der elementarsten Menschenrechte, die in vielen Entwicklungsländern vom Gesetz nicht geschützt sind oder von den Behörden nicht durchgesetzt werden. Aus diesem Grunde fordern Menschenrechtsgruppen die Multinationalen Unternehmen dazu auf, in den betreffenden Ländern freiwillig die Menschenrechte der UNO sowie die Arbeitnehmerrechte der Internationalen Arbeitsorganisation (ILO) einzuhalten und auch die Zulieferer darauf zu verpflichten. In eine ähnliche Richtung zielt der Global Compact der Vereinten Nationen, mit dem der Einfluss der Multinationalen Unternehmen zur weltweiten Durchsetzung der Menschenrechte sowie Arbeits- und Umweltstandards genutzt werden soll. Die Unternehmen sollen damit ganz klar öffentliche Aufgaben übernehmen, weil in vielen Entwicklungsländern die Regierungen diese Aufgabe nicht wahrnehmen können oder wollen und Supranationale Organisationen, wie etwa die UNO oder die ILO, keine Interventionsmöglichkeit zum Schutz dieser Rechte haben. Diese Forderungen sind freilich umstritten. Manche Autoren und Politiker befürchten, dass die Forderung nach einer Harmonisierung von Arbeits- oder Umweltstandards nur allzu leicht als protektionistische Maßnahme missbraucht werden könnte. Im Übrigen sei es die Pflicht der Unternehmen, die weltweit kostengünstigsten Produktionsmöglichkeiten zu nutzen, weil nur so das vorhandene Kapital optimal eingesetzt werden kann. Zugleich können auf diese Weise die Entwicklungsländer ihre Kostenvorteile zur Geltung bringen und sich in die weltweiten Produktions- und Handelsprozesse einklinken. Die Unternehmen sollten daher grundsätzlich nicht auf solche Forderungen der UNO und der Menschenrechtsgruppen eingehen. Was ist von solchen Forderungen zu halten? Welche Verantwortung sollen Unternehmen übernehmen? - Dies ist Gegenstand der Erörterung im vorliegenden Beitrag.

The article refers to research by Stephen Barley (2007) and replies to criticism by Peter Edward and Hugh Willmott concerning the authors' own research on the political aspects of corporate social responsibility. The Barley study suggests that business's influence on politics can negatively impact representative democracy. The reply comments on private- and public-sector cooperation, economic theory that separates the sectors' respective activities, conditions that maintain legitimacy for the social institutions of business and government, and voluntary philanthropy.

The Handbook of Research on Global Corporate Citizenship identifies and fosters key interdisciplinary research on corporate citizenship and provides a framework for academic debate on corporate responsibility in a global society. Leading academics have been invited from various disciplines such as management studies, economics, sociology, legal studies and political science to evaluate the concept of corporate citizenship and to analyze the role of private business in global governance and the production of global public goods. In this chapter, Andreas Georg Scherer and Guido Palazzo briefly discuss the role of the business firm in a globalized world and point to corporate citizenship as a global challenge. Additionally, the chapter provides an overview of the content of the Handbook of Research on Global Corporate Citizenship and offers a short summary of each chapter.

A rarely studied trend in corporate governance is the increasing tendency to fill CEO openings through external hires rather than through internal promotions: Kevin J. Murphy and Jan Zabojnik (2004) show that the proportion of outside hires has doubled and their pay premium almost quadrupled over the last thirty years. Assuming that general managerial skills are becoming more important relative to firm-specific skills, the authors conclude that competition in the managerial labor market establishes optimal contracts. In our model and our empirical analysis we question this explanation by assuming that over the past decades the dishonesty of the predecessor has become relatively more important for the appointment decisions of firms. We conclude that outside hires are a suboptimal trend because external candidates even step up the regression of integrity in firms: As nobody has an incentive to invest in firm-specific knowledge, not only the performance of firms drops, but also the remaining integrity.

Unternehmen sehen sich im Rahmen ihrer wirtschaftlichen Betätigung immer wieder mit ethischen Herausforderungen konfrontiert, die nicht ohne weiteres durch den Verweis auf die geltenden Gesetze oder anerkannte moralische Standards zu lösen sind. Dies gilt insbesondere für Aktivitäten im internationalen Kontext. Folgerichtig sucht die Unternehmenspraxis zunehmend nach Möglichkeiten, ihrer ethischen Verantwortung gerecht zu werden. Der vorliegende Tagungsband vereinigt unter dem Titel "Betriebswirtschaftslehre und Unternehmensethik" Reflexionsbemühungen und Orientierungsperspektiven für die Entwicklung betriebswirtschaftlicher Theorienbildung, Lehre und Praxis. Der Band trägt die vielfältigen Positionen zum Verhältnis der Betriebswirtschaftslehre und Unternehmensethik zusammen und bietet damit sowohl dem Theoretiker als auch dem Praktiker einen Überblick über den aktuellen Stand der Diskussion.

Powerfully driven by the work practices of consulting firms, the presentation software Microsoft PowerPoint is increasingly used on all levels of business and educational communication. Nevertheless, slideware ranks among the least explored media in communication studies. This study investigates the role of PowerPoint in organizational communication, particularly in terms of a functional dilemma between its application for documentation as opposed to presentation purposes. The theoretical part of the analysis combines insights from both organizational communication studies (J. R. Taylor et al.) and social systems theory (N. Luhmann et al.). The empirical analysis shows that PowerPoint documents created for cross-project learning purposes contribute to an invisibilization rather than a visibilization of decision processes and their contingency. In the light of these results, existing efforts to promote knowledge management based on the learning-from-mistakes principle need to be reconsidered with respect to their realization in communicative practice.

We review two important schools within business and society research, which we label positivist and postpositivist corporate social responsibility (CSR). The former is criticized because of its instrumentalism and normative vacuity and the latter because of its relativism, foundationalism, and utopianism. We propose a new approach, based on Jürgen Habermas's theory of democracy, and we define the new role of the business firm as a political actor in a globalizing society.

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This article advocates a program of standard instrumentation in organization studies to improve the way knowledge is managed in the discipline. The construct ‘knowledge management’ is discussed, and the role of this construct in the theory of the firm is briefly reviewed. Then two problems of knowledge management in organization studies are identified—construct de-objectification and the difficulty of cumulating knowledge across empirical studies. The role of instrumentation in natural science is described, and it is argued that standard instrumentation in natural science helps moderate the problems of construct de-objectification and barriers to cross-study accumulation of knowledge. The possibility of implementing a program of standard instrumentation in organization studies is then discussed. It is maintained that standardized instrumentation for measuring organization studies constructs would help alleviate the knowledge management problems just mentioned. Advantages and disadvantages of the standard instrumentation program are reviewed, and the conclusion emphasizes the potential contribution of the program.