Business Ethics the Environment & Responsibility最新文献

This study explores how individual judgments of organizational legitimacy form. While prior research links moral evaluations to intent, the role of motives in legitimacy judgments remains underexplored. Using an experimental vignette study, we test whether identical positive organizational outcomes have a weaker effect on legitimacy when driven by self-interest rather than prosocial motives. Our findings confirm that while evaluators consider outcomes, motives often play a greater role—prosocial motives enhance legitimacy benefits, while self-interested motives diminish them. Further analysis suggests this effect stems from inferred intentionality: Organizations gain legitimacy when positive outcomes appear intentional rather than incidental. These insights help managers strengthen legitimacy and underscore the importance of considering both outcomes and motives in public policy discussions, especially amid concerns that profit-driven actions harm public welfare.

We study the coverage of European funds by the mass media and the relationship between media sentiment and public sentiment. We analyze 31,570 media articles published across all European Union (EU) countries between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2023 — a period significantly shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic and major EU funding initiatives —using the BERTopic modeling technique. We find that public discussions related to European funds can be categorized into 11 distinct topics, ranging from project developments in Central and Eastern Europe to employment and economic measures. Our results show that during the period studied, public sentiment towards European funds is generally stable yet negative, with notable fluctuations corresponding to specific events. Significant positive and negative peaks in sentiment are observed during periods associated with successful project implementations or corruption scandals. We also find significant geographical variation in media coverage and sentiment across EU member states. While Greece, Croatia, and Bulgaria exhibit high media coverage and more negative sentiment, Denmark, Ireland, and Portugal display more positive media sentiments. Our results suggest a negative relationship between media sentiment scores and the proportion of negative responses concerning the EU and the European Parliament (i.e., a proxy for Euroscepticism).

This study contributes to the literature on corporate environmental responsibility by investigating the impact of female board directorship on the environmental performance of listed financial and non-financial firms in Europe from 2013 to 2022. We propose a novel proxy for greenwashing that has not yet been implemented at the firm level in financial studies. We applied panel regression estimation with fixed effects to 1300 firm-year observations. The misleading baseline results show a negative relationship between female board directorship and environmental performance. Conversely, the second layer of analysis indicates a negative relationship between our greenwashing measure and female board directorship, supporting the positive role of women on boards of directors; spurious environmental performance measures obscure this significant association. A set of robustness checks and alternative specifications (generalized least squares and two-stage least squares) confirmed the consistency of our empirical results. This study has theoretical and managerial implications by reinforcing the crucial role of women in top management positions as supporters of environmental initiatives.

This theoretical paper explores the role of an ethics of embodiment perspective in promoting meaningful work for people with disabilities in Alternative Forms of Work Organization (AFWO). Starting with a consideration of the importance of meaningful work within a broader project of disability inclusion, the paper addresses four main challenges that AFWO faces, as expressions of a neo-normative paradigm, in producing meaningful work for people with disabilities while considering issues of embodiment: (1) self-identity; (2) autonomy/flexibility; (3) abstract embodiment; (4) Intermediate space/time. Referring to crip theory, a radical and provocative approach in disability studies that challenges normalization and compulsory able-bodiedness, the paper then proposes four illustrative cases that offer a critical and innovative view on embodiment. From the analysis of these cases, we identify four categories for a crip ethics of embodiment: (1) crip self-identity; (2) mixed ability organizing; (3) meaningful embodiment; and (4) non-normative space/time. We argue that these four categories provide new pathways for AFWO to promote meaningful work for people with disabilities and represent a potential turning point in reflecting on the neo-normative approach in organizations.

Previous research shows that family businesses are ideal candidates for contributing to the sustainable development of society due to characteristic features such as their transgenerational aspirations. Additionally, many studies suggest that new technologies may be an antecedent to the improvement of companies' sustainability performance. The aim of this paper is to understand how the digitalization of business strategy contributes to improving the sustainability performance of family businesses. Also, recognizing the wide heterogeneity among family businesses, we assess how the ownership and corporate governance structures of the family business condition the relationship between strategy digitalization and family business sustainability performance. We test our hypotheses using the STEP Project Global Consortium database of family businesses from multiple economic sectors around the world. The results obtained confirm that the digitalization of strategy has a direct positive effect on family business sustainability performance, while the moderating effects of ownership and corporate governance structures act in opposite directions: family ownership negatively influences the impact of the digitalization of strategy on family business sustainability performance, but corporate governance structures positively moderate its effect. Our findings suggest that family businesses need to carefully balance ownership dynamics and corporate governance structures to maximize the sustainability benefits of business strategy digitalization. These insights can guide family business members, advisors, and policymakers in creating more effective strategies to enhance sustainability performance.