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The Engagement of Firms in Environmental Collaborations: Existing Contributions and Future Directions

Ulrich Wassmer, Raymond Paquin, and Sanjay Sharma

The engagement of firms in environmental collaborations has become a ubiquitous phenomenon in today's business landscape. Yet much of the research to date is fragmented across multiple disciplines and lacks a clear framework to support future study. The authors consolidate and synthesize existing contributions into a conceptual map comprised of antecedents, consequences, and contingencies to better understand environmental collaborations. This map offers a perspective on how firms develop strategies, structures, and capabilities to manage and balance environmental and economic performance and increasing demands for environmental sustainability from multiple stakeholders and society. The authors then highlight existing gaps in the extant literature and outline a future research agenda, including key questions and issues needing additional study.

Promoting Corporate Responsibility in Private Banking: Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Joining the Wolfsberg Initiative Against Money Laundering

Martino Maggetti

In recent years, the fight against money laundering has emerged as a key issue of financial regulation. The Wolfsberg Group is an important multistakeholder agreement establishing corporate responsibility (CR) principles against money laundering in a domain where international coordination remains otherwise difficult. The fact that 10 out of the 25 top private banking institutions joined this initiative opens up an interesting puzzle concerning the conditions for the participation of key industry players in the Wolfsberg Group. The article presents a fuzzy-set analysis of seven hypotheses based on firm-level organizational factors, the macro-institutional context, and the regulatory framework. Results from the analysis of these 25 financial institutions show that public ownership of the bank and the existence of a code of conduct are necessary conditions for participation in the Wolfsberg Group, whereas factors related to the type of financial institution, combined with the existence of a black list, are sufficient for explaining participation.

The Connection Between Stakeholder Theory and Stakeholder Democracy: An Excavation and Defense

Jeffrey Moriarty

In early writings, stakeholder theorists supported giving all stakeholders formal, binding control over the corporation, in particular, over its board of directors. In recent writings, however, they claim that stakeholder theory does not require changing the current structure of corporate governance and further claim to be "agnostic" about the value of doing so. This article's purpose is to highlight this shift and to argue that it is a mistake. It argues that, for instrumental reasons, stakeholder theorists should support giving all stakeholders control over the corporation, in the form of control over its board. That is, stakeholder theorists should support stakeholder democracy over the status quo. A larger goal of this article is to steer the conversation about stakeholder theory toward questions of governance and control. Stakeholder theorists tend to sidestep these questions, but it is vital that they be addressed.

Evaluating Social and Environmental Issues by Integrating the Legitimacy Gap With Expectational Gaps: An Empirical Assessment of the Forest Industry

Rajat Panwar, Eric Hansen, and Robert Kozak

This article adopts an issues management approach to corporate social responsibility (CSR) implementation. Issues evaluation, which is an integral component of issues management, can be conducted by using the concept of three expectational gaps (factual, conformance, and ideal gaps). However, the concept of expectational gaps suffers from an ambiguity that limits its application to issues evaluation. The legitimacy gap concept is used in this article to clarify the ambiguity surrounding expectational gaps. The study thus develops a four-gap framework for conducting a quantitative issues evaluation. This framework is applied to six social and six environmental issues in the context of the forest products industry in the <st1:place w:st="on">Northwest United States</st1:place> by means of a survey of 278 society and 94 industry respondents. Results empirically demonstrate the existence of expectational gaps and also provide insights into the nature of misalignment between societal and business perceptions along these social and environmental issues. Appropriate managerial responses are suggested to narrow or bridge different types of gaps.