Harry J. Van Buren

University of New Mexico | UNM · Department of Organizational Studies (DOS)

The COVID‐19 pandemic has exacerbated underlying and pre‐existing social, political, and economic conditions that make their negative effects both more likely and more negative, particularly for workers in global value chains (GVCs). In our conceptual and normative paper, we encourage a rethinking of GVCs and associated strategies of lead firms by...

Entrepreneurship is the dominant form of enterprise in conflict-affected settings, yet little is known about the role of entrepreneurship in peacebuilding. In response, the article undertakes a review of entrepreneurship in conflict-affected regions to integrate research from business and management with research from political science, internation...

In his invited essay for Business & Society’s 60th anniversary, Archie B. Carroll (2021, p. 16) refers to human rights as “a topic that holds considerable promise for CSR [corporate social responsibility] researchers in the future.” The objective of this article is to unpack this promise. We (a) discuss the momentum of business and human rights (BH...

The construct of pluralism has allowed us to see a world where parties could pursue divergent interests, sometimes to the point of conflict, and still work together to realise goals. In response to changing models of employment that are threatening many of the values and interests core to workers and society, new readings of pluralism have emerged...

Business and human rights (BHR) scholarship addresses whether corporations have human rights responsibilities and if so, what such responsibilities mean for corporate behaviour. BHR scholarship is cross-disciplinary and scattered across numerous academic disciplines such as law, philosophy, management, political science and accounting. While BHR sc...

Human trafficking is one of the most lucrative international criminal activities and is widespread across a variety of industries. The response to human trafficking in corporate supply chains has been dominated by analyses of due diligence obligations. Existing scholarship, however, has cast doubt on the effectiveness of corporate due diligence in...

Religion has been in general neglected or even seen as a taboo subject in organizational research and management practice. This is a glaring omission in the business and society and business ethics literatures. As a source of moral norms and beliefs, religion has historically played a significant role in the vast majority of societies and continues...

In this paper we seek to uncover and analyse unitarist ideology within the field of HRM, with particular emphasis on the manner in which what we call ‘new unitarism’ is ideologically performative in HRM scholarship. Originally conceived of as a way of understanding employer ideology with regard to the employment relationship, unitarist frames of re...

Stakeholder inclusion in organizational decision‐making, and the resulting issue of value creation, is one of the thorny problems that stakeholder theory has sought to address. Yet progress has been slow, we suggest, because present accounting theory and practice does not address the decision‐making needs of all stakeholders who are at risk due to...

This article examines the issue of gender equality within Islam in order to develop an ethical framework for businesses operating in Muslim majority countries. We pay attention to the role of women and seemingly inconsistent expectations of Islamic and Western societies with regard to appropriate gender roles. In particular, we contrast a mainstrea...

Given the historical and ongoing influence of religion, religious faith traditions might provide a compelling and coherent normative core for stakeholder theory. This paper explores the three Abrahamic faith traditions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – and applies principles derived from these traditions to stakeholder theory. Our analysis of th...

Chief Executive Officers and other organizational leaders can affect how corporate social responsibility initiatives are perceived in their organizations. However, in order to be successful with regard to promoting CSR, leaders need to have strong network competencies and to move beyond charismatic leadership. In this paper we offer a critique of c...

In this paper we examine the work of Mary Parker Follett as it relates to current management practice. Specifically, we focus on her development of the concepts of integration and participation with respect to the employer-employee relationship in the context of the low-skill workforce. At their core, both of these concepts relate to the idea that...

Scholars have studied the various pressures that companies face related to socially responsible behavior when stakeholders know the particular social issues under consideration. Many have examined social responsibility in the context of environmental responsibility and the general approaches companies take regarding environmental management. The is...

Workplace bullying has increasingly become of interest to scholars and practicing managers due to its creation of dysfunctional intraorganizational conflict and its negative effects on employees and the workplace. Although studies have explored bullying in different cultural contexts, little research exists that provides a comparison of bullying be...

The aims of the research are to explore evidence of professional human resource management (HRM) role tensions, the factors that affect HRM role tension, and to consider the impact on management perceptions when role tensions exist. Using a qualitative approach, 25 interviews were conducted in Australia with senior HRM personnel, top management tea...

This paper seeks to uncover and to analyze unitarist ideology within the field of HRM. The development of unitarism as a broad idea within HRM scholarship will be traced, with an emphasis on how and why “new unitarism” developed as a more palatable alternative to old unitarism. In so doing, we seek to make explicit the implicit assumptions of unita...

Given the growing interest in religion and spirituality in the community and workplace, we consider what light one of the oldest sources of human ethics, the Torah, can throw on the vexing issues of contemporary employment ethics and social sustainability. We specifically consider the Torah because it is the primary document of Judaism, the source...

Focusing on corporate responsibility (CR) toward employees, this article discusses how multilayered institutional logics affect the relationship between the firm and its employee stakeholders. It considers what constitutes CR toward employees and explores the institutional logics that can shape whether employers treat their employees as merely mean...

The current proxy voting system in the United States has become the subject of considerable controversy. Because institutional investment managers have the authority to vote their clients’ proxies, they have a fiduciary obligation to those clients. Frequently, in an attempt to fulfill that obligation, these institutional investors employ proxy advi...

Purpose – This chapter presents a preliminary conceptualisation of the effects that unequal power relationships have on the integrity and the safety of researchers. Methodology/approach – We begin by presenting a review of the current literature on risk to research outputs and researcher safety. In this review, we offer a conceptual framework of th...

In recent years, there has been increasing managerial and academic attention given to a variety of mechanisms for companies to respond to stakeholder concerns about global business ethics. One area that merits further analysis is the role of industry‐level cooperation regarding issues in global business ethics such as labor practices. There are two...

Human resource management (HRM) education has tended to focus on specific functions and tasks within organizations, such as compensation, staffing, and evaluation. This task orientation within HRM education fails to account for the bigger questions facing human resource management and employment relationships, questions which address the roles and...

This empirical study examines corporate responses to activist shareholder groups filing social-policy shareholder resolutions. Using resource dependency theory as our conceptual framing, we identify some of the drivers of corporate responses to shareholder activists. This study departs from previous studies by including a fourth possible corporate...

The course discussed in this article uses an integrative approach in presenting the concept of social capital and power to Executive MBA students at a large public university in the southwestern United States, where a majority of the students are members of non-dominant racial, gender and ethnicity groups. The article describes the theoretical cons...

The purpose of this paper is to critique the shift from employee focus to strategy focus in the role of HRM. It is our contention that, contrary to assumptions of unitarism, organizational goals and employee goals remain largely in conflict. We conceptualize unitarism at three levels – normative, conceptual, and empirical – in order to explain the...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report the results of a study comparing perceptions of discrimination for immigrant and US‐born Hispanics, focusing on Hispanic business professionals. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected via nationwide survey of over 1,500 Hispanic business professionals and analyzed via analysis of variance. F...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider whether golf functions as a networking barrier for women in professions that require networking for career success. Design/methodology/approach Data from 496 golf courses, in addition to demographic data and data about salaries in sales, managerial, and marketing and sales professions in the USA, we...

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to propose that stakeholder scholarship should take its rightful role in the acknowledgement of stakeholder value production, the enhancement of stakeholder voice and public stakeholder advocacy. Its focus is on low‐wage workers particularly, although the analysis holds for dependent stakeholders generally. De...

Organisations in the current economic climate might conclude incorrectly that being hard and even abusive to employees will serve a useful purpose. However, we will argue that organisations that will survive the current economic turbulence are those that follow ethical principles by managing damaging bullying behaviour. Workplace bullying is the re...

Trust is a fundamental aspect of the moral treatment of stakeholders within the organization–stakeholder relationship. Stakeholders trust the organization to return benefit or protections from harm commensurate with their contributions or stakes. However, in many situations, the firm holds greater power than the stakeholder and therefore cannot nec...

One of the ways in which scholars have sought to broaden the discussion of the social responsibilities of corporations and their managers is through the development of the stakeholder concept. The primacy of shareholder interests in corporate-governance processes and managerial action is, however, a myth that justifies all sorts of managerial self-...

The article presents management science research on stockholder activism, examining the response of corporations to stockholder resolutions seeking company policies aimed at contributing to social change. It is hypothesized that corporate reaction to such resolutions is largely determined by institutional influences with a business enterprise's par...

We examine the relationship between political environments and perceptions of women's physical abilities. Using a sample of 496 golf courses located in the United States, we find a significant relationship between state political affiliations, ratings of senators and congressional representatives on a liberal to conservative continuum, and percepti...

The popular view of shareholder activism focuses on shareholder resolutions and the shareholder vote via proxy statements at the annual meeting, which is treated as a “David vs. Goliath” showdown between the small group of socially responsible investors and the powerful corporation. This article goes beyond the popular view to examine where the rea...

Although not always termed “organizational justice,” the fairness of organizations has been a consistent concern of management thinkers. A review of the 1900–1965 time period indicates that management theorists primarily conceptualized organizational justice in utilitarian terms, although each theory emphasized distributive and procedural justice t...

Shareholder resolutions filed by socially concerned investors are a rich and underused source of data for research in social issues in the business and society field. This article examines how shareholder activists use the resolution process to advocate for issues related to social justice and corporate activities. After briefly reviewing the justi...

One of the essential ethical issues in the employment relationship is the loss of employee voice. Many of the ways employees have previously exercised voice in the employment relationship have been rendered less effective by (1) the changing nature of work, (2) employer preferences for flexibility that often work to the disadvantage of employees, a...

This paper examines corporate responses to activist shareholder resolutions, focusing on when firms choose to engage in dialogue with stakeholder groups. We find that managers are more likely to engage in dialogue when the issue involves social justice, firm size is smaller, more outside directors serve on the board, and corporate visibility is hig...

There are few resources available for business ethics education from a religious perspective. This is due to the specialization of careers, the mobility of workers, and clergy discomfort with the topic—all of which have led to a decline of ecclesiastical influence in this area. The author discusses why business ethics education is important in the...

Corporate citizenship is rapidly becoming a popular expectation around the globe. This paper explores the approaches to corporate citizenship and corporate social responsibility (CSR) of large firms headquartered in Mexico. We contend that three myths about Mexican CSR influence the perceptions of outsiders to Mexico's economy and society. One myth...

Recently, there has been considerable academic attention given to the role that reli- gious institutions play in pressuring companies and industries toward greater cor- porate social responsibility (CSR). One area of concern for religious institutions is the behaviour of extractive-industry companies. In this paper, I discuss how religious institut...

Recently, there has been considerable academic attention given to the role that religious institutions play in pressuring companies and industries toward greater corporate social responsibility (CSR). One area of concern for religious institutions is the behaviour of extractive-industry companies. In this paper, I discuss how religious institutions...

Although the concept of corporate social performance (CSP) has become more clearly specified in recent years, an analysis of CSP from the perspective of one particular stakeholder group has been largely ignored in this research: employees. It is proposed that employees merit specific attention with regard to assessments of corporate social performa...

This article analyzes the issue of merit as a means of allocating scarce positions in society while attempting to answer the question about whether merit is an operative social contract in U.S. society. Like traditional social contract theory, integrated social contract theory starts with the idea of consent to a hypothetical social contract that g...

Boundaryless careers may be beneficial to people with rare and valuable skills, but might prove harmful to many others. The idea of employability as an ethical responsibility of employers to employees is introduced; it is argued that attention to employability in private practice and public policy partially resolves the ethical problems inherent to...

This article reports a study of how leading U.S. business schools incorporate one important dimension of corporate citizenship—corporate involvement in community economic development (CI/CED)—in their curricula and programs. Corporate citizenship, or social responsibility, is shown to have several important and unexpected locations in business educ...

For the concept of corporate citizenship to be an effective guide for managerial practice, there is a need for one or more decision rulesgrounded in ethical theoryto provide useful guides for analysis and action. In this paper, I propose that fairnessgrounded in express consentis an appropriate decision rule for undertaking analyses of corporate ci...

Work on stakeholder theory has proceeded on a variety of fronts; as Donaldson and Preston (1995) have noted, such work can be parsed into descriptive, instrumental, and normative research streams. In a normative vein, Phillips (1997) has made an argument for a principle of fairness as a means of identifying and adjudicating among stakeholders. In t...

Downsizing has become a significant public issue that has not yet been significantly studied by business ethicists. It is proposed that reasonable social and psychological contracts bound the moral free space of managers contemplating downsizing; the degree of constraint is also dependent on the organization's resource munificence. A framework for...

Lately, the field of business ethics has begun to take an intense interest in the relationship between religion and business ethics. Various books and articles are being produced at an increasing rate using theoretical and qualitative research methods. However, to date, almost no data exist quantifying relationships between religion and business et...

We introduce the construct of organizational social capital and develop a model of its components and consequences. Organizational social capital is defined as a resource reflecting the character of social relations within the organization. It is realized through members' levels of collective goal orientation and shared trust, which create value by...

In this paper, the issue of plant closings is analyzed from the perspective of halakhah (the Written Law of Judaism). Two levels of analysis in halakhah must be differentiated: the legal (enforced by courts) and the moral (not enforced by law, but rather framed in terms of duty to God). There is no legal mandate to keep an unprofitable plant open,...

Although considerable work has been done on the measurement of religious values and beliefs, little is understood about their effect on managerial values and decision making. This paper reports on theoretical work by the authors identifying Christian religious beliefs that might affect managerial decision making; it also reports the results of empi...

Feelings of stress are common to almost all ministers. Ministers can do three things to reduce their stress levels: determine their core competencies and delegate those tasks that they do not enjoy or do well, establish clear expectations for their ministerial roles, and avoid overwork. The author also focuses on ambition as a source of clergy stre...

This article focuses on the connection between the religious faith of employees and their relationships with employers. There are two models for how religionists understand their role in the world: they can either try to model behavior not common in a secular world or infiltrate the structures of society in the hope of bringing about social change....