June 2017 – BOS

In Tribute: Malcolm McIntosh

‘Have fun and laugh. I had a ball. Sorry to go early. Laugh a lot, it oxygenizes the brain just as well as yoga. Malcolm McIntosh

Malcolm McIntosh’s words, quoted in an announcement of his passing on June 7, 2017, sent out by his family, epitomize how he lived his life. I first met Malcolm in the late 1990s when he was forwarding the then-new conversation about corporate citizenship through conferences and a center at the University of Warwick and later at Coventry. He came to academia non-traditionally, through careers in TV production and journalism with the BBC, with a PhD and lifelong interest in peace research that spread out to understanding corporate responsibility and citizenship and, more recently, political economy. In the early 2000s, he founded the Journal of Corporate Citizenship and served as its editor multiple times over the years, including several stints as part of team of guest editors, guiding it to be an outlet for big ideas that bridge from theory to practice, from empiricism to thought leadership. He was the founding director and Professor at Griffith University’s Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise in, Brisbane, Australia, where he served for five years.

Malcolm was a wonderful thinker, a polymath who followed his own path towards making the world a better place. A global citizen of the first order, there was little that he didn’t know about—from music to philosophy to sustainability to how the world actually works. He was a true intellectual shaman, and a serial social entrepreneur, who was always thinking forward to the next big thing that could serve—or perhaps save—the world. He was a pioneer in the conversation about corporate citizenship, political economy, sustainability, and human rights, who pulled few punches in telling it like he saw it, yet always did so with the most amazing sense of human and personal insight.

Malcolm fully embodied the three tasks of the intellectual shaman: healing, connecting, and sensemaking the service of a better world. As a healer, he was profoundly concerned about the state of the world, ecological, politically, and socially, and worked tirelessly to make a difference through his teaching, writing, and consulting. As a connector and global citizen, he bridged across boundaries of all sort, bringing people together in conversations and convenings that informed and enlightened. As a sensemaker and prolific author of more than 25 books and numerous articles, he engaged ideas and shared his insights as a public intellectual. And all of this work aimed at making the world a better place for all.

Malcolm recognized early on the potential of the UN’s Global Compact and, later, the Principles for Responsible Management Education, as levers for positive change in the world, engaging with those initiatives in a variety of ways. He always ‘thought forward,’ systemically, and with a keen sense of the need to bring about change in the world for the better. He brought many of his ideas to fruition in two of his last books Thinking the Twenty-First Century, and The Good Society, which will be published posthumously by Greenleaf.

What I will most remember about him, I suspect, is his spirit, his sense of life, his philosophy that we should, as his website says, ‘Love life, love the plant.’ Most of all I will remember his sense of humor, his prototypical intelligent British wit, his ability to laugh at his own situation, including facing his illness over the last years of his life. He was not afraid to die and he approached that possibility with the same wit he approached everything else. He was not afraid to die because he lived fully and enjoyed every minute of it, including his long marriage to Lou and his wonderful daughters Cleo and Sophie, the work that he did, and his many, many friends around the world. I will miss his spirit, his energy, and his healing presence in our world and also know that the good work that he did will live on.

Words by Sandra Waddock, Boston College, June 2017

Gender Matters: ‘There’s nothing so practical as a good theory’

By Kate Grosser.

The centrality of gender issues to the global challenges of poverty, development and environmental sustainability, among others on the CSR agenda, and the normalisation of gender inequality, including sexual harassment (Trump election campaign) and violence against women, requires that we strengthen and extend feminist scholarship in our field. This is part of a wider agenda to enrich our work with reference to perspectives from the margins so as to inform increasingly inclusive, pluralistic research and practice. There is much evidence that such approaches can enhance legitimacy and effectiveness in constructive business-society relations. So how do we address this in our scholarship?

Is it just a matter of more research?
Well yes … and no.

Gender and CSR research has grown exponentially over the last decade and a half. Research focuses on corporate boards, workplace practice, supply chains, entrepreneurship programs, and community impacts, for example. Yet we still find few references to gender perspectives in mainstream CSR research. This situation is seen to result from the institutionalization of gender inequality within organizations, academia and society more broadly, including the marginalization of women’s voices and perspectives.

Gender research needs feminist theory
Important though these explanations are, in a recently published paper in Journal of Business Ethics with Jeremy Moon we explain limitations in gender and CSR research as deriving from a lack of systematic and explicit utilization of feminist theory. With reference to Feminist Organization Studies (FOS), we demonstrate the validity of Lewin’s (1951) claim that “There is nothing so practical as a good theory” by showing how use of feminist theory can progress our field, to the benefit of CSR research broadly.

Feminist organization theory underpins our work
With reference to a quarter of a century of scholarship on gender in organization studies, we show how both ‘women-centred’ and ‘gendering’ theories are implicit in CSR scholarship, informing very different sets of approaches. Theories centred on ‘women’ consist of liberal, radical and psychoanalytical feminist theories, which share the assumption that ‘women’s oppression is located in the condition of women’. Commonly found implicitly in CSR scholarship these perspectives tend not to differentiate between women but rather imply an essentialist and universal ‘woman’ and attempt to understand her subordination to ‘man’.

In contrast approaches that centre on ‘gendering’ include socialist feminism, poststructuralist/postmodern feminism, and transnational/(post)colonial feminism, which denaturalize assumptions within women-centred theory through engagement with relations of power. They show how ‘attempts to understand, and theorize about, gender and organizations’ have been ‘trapped by the assumption that organizational structures are gender neutral, when in fact they are highly gendered’:

Advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine’, such that gender is an integral part of all organizational processes (Acker 1990, p. 146).

Thus, ‘gender relations, and its intersections with other systems of social inequality and difference, such as race, class and sexuality, are regarded as fundamental to contemporary organizations, to capitalism’ and to scholarship in our field.

Articulating these different perspectives enables us to ‘identify significantly different: accounts of gender issues; framing of the ‘problem’ with respect to gender and organizations’; methodologies; ‘and suggested solutions to these problems’. The different approaches lead to ‘agendas that range from fixing individuals and ‘‘reforming organizations; to transforming organizations and society; to transforming our prior understanding of what constitutes knowledge’’ in our field (Calas and Smircich 2006, p. 286)’.

An Integrated Theoretical Framework for the Analysis of Gender Issues in CSR
We highlight a variety of CSR theoretical approaches (ethical, instrumental, stakeholder, political, institutional and critical) and uncover feminist engagement with each. Then, drawing upon both FOS and CSR theory we develop an integrated theoretical framework for the analysis of gender issues in CSR. This ‘enables us to systematically map progress in CSR research on gender, to open space for new conversations, and to identify a number of novel directions for future research’.

For example, with respect to women-centred approaches, our framework enables us to identify an absence of liberal feminist perspectives, which focus on equal opportunities and non-discrimination, in ethical, political and critical CSR scholarship. ‘Research in such areas could shed light on what are currently rather marginal sets of questions about who leads CSR, for example’. We find a dearth of radical feminist perspectives guiding CSR research of any kind. Also, while the focus on ‘the value of ‘women’s difference’ (from men) adopted in much psychoanalytic feminist theory has been influential in ethical and instrumental CSR research’, it has an unexplored potential for other approaches, such as ‘political CSR’.

‘‘Gendering’ theoretical perspectives can facilitate a more detailed, nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the gender impacts of CSR practice at a societal level, rather than simply an individual level, across the CSR research domain’. ‘Further utilization of socialist feminist organization analysis can help us question and evaluate the influence of CSR on gender relations and gender equality regarding, for example, power relations, unequal pay, the gendered provision of unpaid care work and the normalization of particular kinds of masculinity’. ‘Significant research gaps and opportunities relating to the application of poststructuralist feminist organization theory to CSR are identified across the board. This approach facilitates exploration of whose voices are missing’, as authors and subjects of knowledge, offering potential to inform the development of more inclusive and pluralist research. To this end, further reference to feminist transnational/(post)colonial theory can ‘bring the varied perspectives of Third World women to CSR research’. Finally, ‘one of the most significant findings from our analysis is the lack of feminist theory/perspectives in critical CSR research. This gap offers important research potential that could make a significant impact upon the relevance, and application of critical CSR scholarship in terms of its ability to address inequality and poverty issues globally’. All three of the ‘gendering’ theoretical lenses can elucidate how CSR research reproduces or changes gender and other power relations.

Potential to transform our field
We conclude that explicit reference to feminist theory has the potential to open up a number of new research agendas that can help ‘counteract discrimination, gender inequality and the marginalization of perspectives that are in fact central to addressing the really big contemporary challenges in the CSR field, and for society’.

Kate Grosser is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Management at RMIT University in Melbourne, and a Visiting Fellow (2016) with the VELUX Chair in Corporate Sustainability, Copenhagen Business School. She researches gender and CSR, feminist organization theory, political CSR, feminist movements and CSR, culture and sustainability. She is on Twitter @KateGrosser.

Pic by Christopher Dombres

When diversity is everyone’s business

By Jannick Friis Christensen.

In April, CBS celebrated not only its centenary but also how diverse the business school has become over the years on Diversity Day 2017. If unconscious bias—along with stereotypes and prejudice—is what undermines diversity efforts in organisations, then, what difference can such a (diversity) day make? We took an experimental research approach to organising CBS Diversity Day to find out.

The purpose of CBS Diversity Day is to put a strong focus on diversity and inclusion both internally in our own organisation and in educating future business leaders. One way of supporting this double purpose is to organise events that introduce the concepts of diversity and inclusion to the 22,000 students at CBS as well as to our researchers and administrative staff. In particular, we do this on Diversity Day.

How to approach organisational diversity?

In previous years, focus has been on putting to the forefront best practices in companies that manage to use their core competencies in creating an organisation, which is sustainable both financially and socially – in other words the good business case. We believe that CBS should be perceived as an organisation committed to promoting diversity and inclusion.

We would like to acquaint the CBS community with the diversity represented by the people—for example ability/disability, sexual orientation, gender, ethnicity, religion, and nationality—who study and work at CBS and how their experiences may differ as a result of those differences. In doing so, emphasis this year was on the practical implications of how to approach organisational diversity in a way meaningful to all parties involved, including those aforementioned groups typically casted as being diverse. It was therefore not a question of defining what diversity is or if it ‘pays off’ but rather to explore how diversity issues may inspire different practices for alternative and more inclusive organising.

Researching diversity requires diverse approaches

The idea was to challenge any ‘conventional’ knowledge diversity and inclusion and we were interested in measuring the overall potential effect(s) of Diversity Day, that is, the combination of events that included logical-rational as well as emotional and action- and solution-oriented presentations. All presentations were live-streamed and recorded and can be watched via this link.

A citizen science approach was adopted prior to Diversity Day to allow the student population at Copenhagen Business School to identity the problem that will be turned into our research issue. This was done by having a random sample of students fill in a questionnaire about the diversity issues of ethnicity and religion in Denmark. This part of the study is expected to show to what degree students hold explicit bias towards ethnic and religious minorities.

To measure implicit bias and the potential impact of Diversity Day we designed clicker tests that were conducted before and after each scheduled event. We expect the results from these tests to show a reduction in latency as the day progressed, since the respondents ought to spend less time becoming consciously aware of own unconscious biases due to a heightened awareness level prompted by the critically reflexive focus on various diversity issues. The results will, however, not be able to say anything about whether this change (if any) will last or whether it I will lead to changes in behaviour – only that a momentary bias reduction can be achieved.

The final part of the project consists of focus group interviews to get an in-depth understanding of participants’ own perceptions of and experiences with Diversity Day as well as to follow up on the questionnaires and clicker tests. Due to the experimental research design we need elaborations on the various aspects from the participants’ perspectives. The interviews take place in weeks 25 and 26 so if you attended CBS Diversity Day 2017 on 27 April we would like to hear from you. Sign up via this link by adding your name + email and select the dates/timeslots that fit your calendar. The interviews will take approximately 1-1½ hours and the questions will be open-ended for you to reflect on what you got out of Diversity Day. We aim for including five to seven people in each focus group and the interviews will be anonymized.

The next big diversity event is on 19 August 2017 where CBS for the first time joins the Copenhagen Pride Parade from Frederiksberg Town Hall at 13:00. Check cbs.dk for updates.

About Diversity Day

CBS Diversity Day 2017 was co-organised by Jannick Friis Christensen and Associate Professor Sara Louise Muhr (Dept. of Organization). The specific research project discussed in this blog post is conducted in collaboration with Associate Professor Ana Maria Munar (Dept. of International Economics and Management) and Postdoc Kristian Møller Moltke Martiny (University of Copenhagen).

Jannick Friis Christensen is PhD Fellow at the Department of Organization. His research project seeks to develop new methods for intervening diversity by bridging critical performativity theory with organisational practice and managerial discourse. It explores—ethnographically—the norms of diversity practices in contemporary organisations, granting insights into how perceptions of diversity are constructed discursively, and how they govern people’s conduct. And it challenges existing practices and render them productive through continuous critical reflection on the underlying norms. You can find Jannick on LinkedIn, Instragram, Twitter and Facebook.

Pic by Lise Søstrøm (MSC)

CSR and the role of business in Areas of Limited Statehood

By Sameer Azizi.

The global search for new markets has pushed corporations to operate in national settings in the Global South that differ tremendously from Western understanding of business-society relations and CSR. The question is whether the mainstream understanding of CSR is adequate to cover the complexities of business-society issues that companies face in the diverse settings of Global South?

The point of departure in CSR debates is that local and global stakeholders use various means to push large companies to engage in CSR. The companies respond by engaging CSR practices – sometimes in collaboration and partnership with civil society actors and transnational organisations – to both deflect criticism and to set the CSR agenda for the future. Such CSR engagements enable the largest corporations to play a pivotal role in global governance. It is even claimed that they can complement or substitute the provision of a rights and basic level of public goods (e.g. education, health, infrastructure) that would otherwise be expected by the governments.

Such assumptions about stakeholder relations and claims about the role of large corporations in society are not reflecting the realities of many countries in the Global South. In my doctoral research I studied the Afghan mobile telecommunications industry as a particular case of CSR by large global firms operating in least developed setting with fragile state institutions and a massive need for social development. I underline that the Afghan state is limited and unable to provide security or basic public goods (e.g. basic education and health services) in certain geographic areas. These areas are in other words ‘Areas of Limited Statehood’. Studying CSR and the role of business in such settings lead to two points of criticism about the mainstream CSR assumptions and claims.

The role of conventional and unconventional stakeholders

First, in specific geographic areas (e.g. South-eastern parts of Afghanistan), the Afghan state and the Western coalition forces are in a continuous violent conflict with opposing groups over authority to rule. In such extreme cases of areas of limited statehood, there is a need to distinguish between the ‘conventional’ stakeholders (e.g. state actors, civil society organisations and UN agencies) as identified in CSR debates, and the less known and ‘unconventional’ stakeholders consisting of informal actors. Though typically not mentioned in the CSR literature, the latter is important to include as they influence business-society relations in such areas. The unconventional non-state actors are important governance actors in areas of limited statehood and can influence the business-society relations by operating as a de-facto state.

The study shows that the large corporations in Afghan mobile telecommunications industry operate in both state-controlled urban areas and in the rural parts of Afghanistan, where the non-conventional actors also operate. On the one hand, the corporations address CSR explicitly with/without conventional actors (e.g. UN offices, donor agencies, NGOs and state institutions) by drawing from CSR best practices and award-winning solutions on various community development projects and innovative solutions based on mobile technology. On the other hand, the corporations face unconventional actors in rural areas that use unorthodox methods to seek economic and political gains. As an example, various criminal groups utilise the ‘anarchical’ situation to seek ransom money by abducting corporate personnel working in these remote areas. Other more politically motivated groups threaten to vandalise corporate assets (e.g. tele-towers or corporate buildings) unless the mobile network is shut down in specific locations. Such lack of mobile network service would enable the insurgency groups to carry out activities against the central state without getting reported by the local populations and/or tracked through mobile phone technologies. The affected corporations either engage indirectly with the non-conventional actors by providing alternative community development projects or more directly by sporadic ransom and/or systematic informal tax in order to reduce threats and avoid the violent sanctions. These examples provide a more nuanced picture of stakeholders and pressures than yet covered in the mainstream debates on CSR.

The political role of business in Areas of Limited Statehood

The second point of critique of the CSR debates concerns the claims that corporations gain a political role in Global South as public good providers and enablers for democratic governance. In contrast, my findings suggest that the corporations do support – perhaps unwillingly – both the conventional actors that ideally strive for a democratic society and the unconventional actors that are opposing such ideals in Afghanistan. In other words, it is obvious that corporations have a political role in society, but the drivers and implications of this political role is somewhat different from the debates on political CSR.

The examples indicate that access to the rural market motivates the corporations to operate in the midst of a violent and ideological conflict. Hence, instrumental motivations are not contradicting or hampering for-profit corporations to engage in a political role as assumed in recent CSR debates. On the contrary, the for-profit logic serves as a driver for such role in society. In other words, CSR in such settings revitalises Friedman’s famous statement: “…there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud” (Friedman 1970). Therefore, there is an urgent need to revise Western-biased assumptions about stakeholders and claims about the role of business in Global South when debating CSR in relation to Areas of Limited Statehood.

Sameer, PhD, is an External Lecturer at the CBS Department of Management, Society and Communication. His main research interests are in the fields of CSR and business-society relations in Areas of Limited Statehood, ICT4Development and critical management studies.

Pic by Todd Huffman

The “sandwich trick”: How ethically questionable practices get normalized

By Dennis Schoeneborn & Fabian Homberg.

At some resort hotels in Las Vegas, it is an established practice that guests at check-in hand-over to the receptionist a ‘$20 sandwich” (i.e. a banknote slipped between credit card and ID) in order to attain a room upgrade. Such benefits can include luxurious suites, top floor rooms with views, etc. In a recent study, Dennis Schoeneborn (Copenhagen Business School) and Fabian Homberg (Southampton Business School) have examined this ethically questionable practice that can be seen either as a “tip” or rather as a “bribe”, since it is paid before any services are received and with a clear expectation of reciprocity. Their study has been accepted for publication and is forthcoming at the Journal of Business Ethics.

In their article, the two researchers present findings from analyzing users self-reports on the website Frontdesktip.com that includes numerous stories of “succeeding” or “failing” when “playing the sandwich trick”. To give one example – one guest named “J.”, staying at the Bally’s Hotel, reports: The receptionist “asked for my driver’s license and credit card. I slid the $20 sandwich over, and before releasing the sandwich I asked ‘Are there any complimentary upgrades available?’ He immediately knew what I was talking about. He nodded his head, placed my sandwich under the counter on the keyboard and began typing away. Within a few moments, […] [w]e were upgraded to a King JR Suite in the North Tower. Well worth the $20.”

By studying self-reports of playing the “$20 sandwich trick”, the researchers found that this ethically questionable practice “worked” especially when hotel guests engaged in informal interactions that allowed to avoid the social stigma of bribery, for instance, by making small talk with the receptionist or claiming to be celebrating a “special occasion” (e.g., a birthday or anniversary). Based on these findings, the study makes an important contribution to existing understandings of how typified social interactions can stabilize and “normalize” petty forms of corruption or other ethically questionable practices.

You can find the full article here: Schoeneborn, D., & Homberg, F. (forthcoming). Goffman’s Return to Las Vegas: Studying Corruption as Social Interaction. Journal of Business Ethics.

Dennis Schoeneborn is a Professor (MSO) of Organization, Communication, and CSR at Copenhagen Business School (Denmark). Fabian Homberg is an Associate Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior at Southampton Business School (UK).

Pic by Max Pixel