Michael Barnett

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Full) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

We overview the role of business in climate change and apply this to Oregon as part of Oregon's seventh climate assessment.

Currently more than half of the world’s population lives in cities. This is expected to rise to more than two-thirds by mid-century. Thus, our economic, social, and environmental challenges mostly and increasingly play out in urban settings. How can cities be strengthened to address the growing challenges they face? This special issue addresses the...

One of the most investigated research topics in the corporate sustainability literature is "the" business case. Long lionized for linking the profit motive to corporate environmental initiatives, the business case for sustainability is now vehemently criticized. These critics generally argue for a return to the state and stronger regulatory framewo...

We investigate whether shareholders consider firms’ performance in corporate social responsibility (CSR) when submitting proxy proposals. We find that shareholders are more likely to propose governance changes when a firm has more CSR strengths and more CSR concerns. The results hold across popular proposal types, different sponsors, and different...

The forces that threaten to break apart private regulatory institutions are well known, but the forces that sustain them are not. Through a longitudinal inductive study of the Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) program in the Canadian mining industry, we demonstrate how private regulatory institutions are sustained by strategically manipulating diffe...

The planet and our society are on unsustainable footing. Many firms do more harm than good in helping to bring about environmental, social, and economic sustainability. This chapter offers guidance on how firms can make the urgently needed strategic shift to sustainability. The chapter begins by defining sustainability strategy and reviewing the li...

Are corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives providing the societal good that they promise? After decades of CSR studies, we do not have an answer. In this review, we analyze progression of the CSR literature toward assessing the performance of CSR initiatives, identify factors that have limited the literature’s progress, and suggest a new...

Are CSR initiatives providing the societal good that they promise? After decades of CSR studies, we do not have an answer. In this review, we analyze progression of the CSR literature toward assessing the performance of CSR initiatives, identify factors that have limited the literature’s progress, and suggest a new approach to the study of CSR that...

Do firms benefit from their voluntary efforts to alleviate the many problems confronting society? A vast literature establishing a “business case” for corporate social responsibility (CSR) appears to find that usually they do. However, as argued herein, the business case literature has established only that firms usually benefit from responding to...

In this chapter, we explain why firms selectively responding to the most powerful, legitimate, and urgent demands of their stakeholders will not bring about sustainability and offer suggestions on what we should do in light of this shortcoming. Sustainability issues tend to be wicked problems that require cooperation across parties and over time to...

Stakeholders hold power because they hold resources essential to firm survival. Through their exercise of this power, they produce, or not, change in business practices. The social movements of united individuals, as well as the non-market strategies of firms and industries designed to forestall or counter these movements, succeed or fail based on...

Governing the void between stakeholder management and sustainability ABSTRACT In this paper, we explain why firms selectively responding to the most powerful, legitimate, and urgent demands of their stakeholders will not bring about sustainability and offer suggestions on what we should do in light of this shortcoming. Sustainability issues tend t...

Have stakeholders increased their influence over firm behavior in the digital age? We draw from cognitive theory to argue that although social media have made it easier for stakeholders to broadcast their demands, the methods used to cope with the drastic change in quantities and qualities of information in the digital age have limited stakeholder...

We measure the influence of reputation rankings on individuals’ perceptions of firms. Through experimental design, we vary whether and how participants are exposed to a reputation ranking alongside other information about a firm. We find that rankings influence perceptions when they are negative and congruent with other information about the firm....

To survive, firms must adapt to their changing environments. Strategic learning is a process by which firms notice environmental change and develop the capacity to alter their strategies in order to prosper under new environmental conditions. Firms often prove inept at strategic learning. They have significant difficulty noticing environmental chan...

One of the greatest challenges for sustainable business models is achieving a scale of operations that is adequate to meet the quantity and depth of needs in their markets. In this paper, we examine scaling of sustainable business models at the base of the pyramid (BOP). Using within- and cross-case analyses, we study the sustainable business model...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been shown to provide insurance-like protection that buffers firms from losses when they are sued. But does CSR also buffer firms from being sued? We conduct a study of 408 U.S. firms over the period 2002 to 2011 and find that, indeed, firms with greater CSR were less likely to be sued. Yet despite sufferin...

A trade assocation’s effectiveness is more than a matter of attracting and retaining member firms. It must also manage member firm involvement in its activities. Herein, I outline three drivers of firm participation in TA activity – economic self-interest, sociological identity, and meta-organizational management – and call for further research on...

To survive, firms must adapt to their changing environments. Strategic learning is a process by which firms notice environmental change and develop the capacity to alter their strategies in order to prosper under new environmental conditions. Firms often prove inept at strategic learning. They have significant difficulty noticing environmental chan...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a better understanding of how, and how well, stakeholders make decisions about rewarding firms for acts of social responsibility and punish firms for their lack thereof. Design/methodology/approach The author integrates factors at the individual, firm, and industry levels that cause variation in how...

Thousands of scholars and hundreds of millions of dollars are devoted to the study of management. What has society gained from this significant and ongoing allocation of scarce talent and money? As many of our most senior scholars have noted, less than we would like. We can do better. Through an organized process, we can develop more managerial kno...

Business collective action (BCA)—the collaboration of private sector organizations and/or industries to achieve common market or non-market objectives—is a prevalent aspect of business activity (Barley, 2010; Mizruchi 2013; Walker & Rea, 2014). BCA involves a wide range of activities and occurs through a large number of unique organizational forms...

Extant literature suggests that corporate social responsibility (CSR) can help firms avoid the unpleasantness of being involved in lawsuits. However, prior work has focused on how CSR affects the outcomes of lawsuits. The literature has not yet measured the relationship between CSR and involvement in litigation. In this study, we assess whether CSR...

We develop and test predictions regarding how migrants living abroad change corporate governance norms in their home countries through a combination of financial and social remittances. We evaluate these alternatives by analyzing the impact of migrant remittances, migrant location, and migrant skill on an index of corporate governance quality in 46...

Building on and extending previous work in the fields of reputation and corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability, this symposium will explore the nature of reputations for corporate social and environmental responsibility (CSER), focusing in particular on the signals that build CSER reputations and the consequences of having...

Trade associations operate under the premise of advancing the shared interests of their member firms. How well do they fulfill this role? This article measures the activity of 148 major industry trade associations over time and relates this activity to the performance of the relevant industries and dominant firms within them. Findings suggest that...

We conduct an exploratory study of the determinants of success in the multinational transfer of social practices. We find that though extant literature on business practice transfer provides some relevant insight, social practice transfer differs in significant ways from "business as usual." In particular, successful social practice transfer is ass...

What does it mean to have a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ reputation? How does it create or destroy value, or shape chances to pursue particular opportunities? Where do reputations come from? How do we measure them? How do we build and manage them? Over the last twenty years the answers to these questions have become increasingly important – and increasingly pro...

Do firms collude to improve their reputations? We examine Fortune’s well-established America’s Most Admired Companies (AMAC) reputation scores from 1985 to 2010. Controlling for a variety of other influences on reputation, we find that those firms deemed to have greater concern for reputation and opportunity to interact also had significantly highe...

Building on the theoretical argument that a firm's ability to profit from social responsibility depends upon its stakeholder influence capacity (SIC), we bring together contrasting literatures on the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) to hypothesize that the CSP‐CFP relationship is U‐sh...

This paper explains inconsistency in stakeholder punishment for firm misconduct. It does so by developing a cognitive view of the process by which stakeholders allocate their limited attention. This cognitive view outlines individual and situational factors that produce variation in a stakeholder’s likelihood of noticing that an act of misconduct h...

Building on Barnett’s (2007) theoretical argument that a firm’s ability to profit from social responsibility depends upon its stakeholder influence capacity (SIC), we bring together contrasting literatures on the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) to hypothesize that the CSP-CFP relatio...

Thousands of scholars and millions of dollars are devoted to the study of management. In the last decade, the number of active members of the Academy of Management has increased by more than 50 percent, to 17,607 members. The number of management journals continues to grow as well. These rates of growth suggest that many academics are seeing benefi...

Managers and management researchers tend to assume that learning from strategic events yields benefits. Although some firms have gained competitive advantages from learning, instances are infrequent, and firms that have gained persistent advantages through learning are probably quite unusual. Learning from successes has short-run benefits but event...

This chapter traces the development of real options reasoning (ROR) and details how problems in assessing the value of real options have made ROR as initially proposed difficult to implement. The paper then describes how in practice, instead of focusing on explicit valuation, organizations usually use analogous reasoning to develop, select and impl...

Real options reasoning assumes timely and effective managerial decision-making yet does not address managers' ability to provide it. An attention-based view describes managerial behavior under varying structural conditions. I examine real options reasoning from an attention-based view. I develop several testable propositions regarding the effects o...

It is argued that no simple correlation can be established between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance. The activities that generate CSP do not directly impact the company's financial performance, but instead affect the bottom line via its stock of reputational capital - the financial value of its intangible assets. It...

We extend theories of self-regulation of physical commons to analyze self-regulation of intangible commons in modern industry. We posit that when the action of one firm can cause spillover harm to others, firms share a type of commons. We theorize that the need to protect this commons can motivate the formation of a self-regulatory institution. Usi...

Guest editors' introduction of a special issue dedicated to advancing understanding of how a firm's reputation is influenced by the actions of other firms and advancing methods of managing this interdependence. It introduces the topic of reputational interdependence, summarizes the five articles and two book reviews that compose the special issue,...

When a firm suffers a major accident, its stock price is likely to become more volatile, but does this accident also increase the volatility of the stocks of rivals? Following a major accident, rivals sometimes unite through their trade association to implement an industry self-regulatory program. Do such collective efforts help to stabilize the st...

Over the last decade, managers have increasingly emphasised the creation of tangible measures of intangible organisational properties. Many major corporations now include measures for intellectual capital, knowledge capital, reputational capital, and other such intangible assets on their financial ledgers. Counter to the rubric that ‘If it doesn’t...

This paper presents a dynamic framework that describes how firms allocate limited resources between improving their competitive position relative to rivals and their communal position shared with rivals. This dynamic framework outlines how organizational field-level dynamics influence industry attractiveness and thereby alter a firm's incentive to...

We study conditions surrounding the emergence of a private decentralized institution. We find that a critical event created an industry commons, and a self-regulatory institution reduced the risks associated with this commons. Surprisingly, the institution did so by protecting the entire industry from the errors of member firms.

A review of the documentary, The Corporation.

William H. Starbuck is one of the most creative, productive, and wide-ranging writers in management and organization studies. His work spans three decades and encompasses a whole variety of issues, yet it has never been collected together in one place. This book does just that - bringing together his most seminal writings, prefaced by a personal re...

Firms pursue competitive advantage through both individual and collective strategic actions. Because of the difficulties of coordinating collective action, industries are characterized by extended periods of individual activity, punctuated by waves of collective activity. Rational and self-interested firms engage in individual activities unless dis...

While interest in the concept of corporate reputation has gained momentum in the last few years, a precise and commonly agreed upon definition is still lacking. This paper reviews the many definitions of corporate reputation present in the recent literature and categorizes these definitions based on their similarities and differences. The purpose o...

William H. Starbuck began his academic career in the late 1950s as a doctoral student at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, working alongside Herb Simon, Jim March, and Dick Cyert. Bill ends his academic career this year as the ITT Professor of Creative Management at the Stern School of Business at New York University. In the intervening decades...

Over the last decade, managers have placed increasing emphasis on the creation of tangible measures of intangible organizational properties. Many major corporations now include measures for intellectual capital, knowledge capital, reputational capital, and other such intangible assets on their financial ledgers. Counter to the rubric that "If it do...

Should corporations serve as agents of social change? For more than 30 years, scholars have attempted to make a "business case" that demonstrates that corporations should because they can earn positive financial returns from social responsibility. However, the business case remains unproven. This paper argues that research on the business case must...

For those who are overly enamored of the MBA credential, this book is an overly lengthy but important wakeup call. Mintzberg is right that it is wrong to put a newly minted MBA, without prior management experience, directly into a significant management position. But this is not nearly as common a happenstance nor as large a threat to humanity as M...

The strategy literature is increasingly focused on the need to create dynamic capabilities to respond with innovative product offerings in 'hypercompetitive' environments. The real options approach offers hope for managers facing such threatening environments by highlighting methods to hold options on a variety of possible future states, thereby re...

In March of 2003, the publishers of two books with contrasting perspectives sponsored a public debate about the contents of these books, and the larger issues involved. The lead authors of each of the books participated in the debate: Chad Holliday, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of DuPont, for Walking the Talk: The Business Case for Su...

This paper combines economic, political, and sociological perspectives to present a dynamic framework for understanding how a firm strategically allocates its limited resources between competitive pursuits and industry-wide cooperation. Organizational field dynamics alter a firm's incentive to engage in industry-wide cooperation relative to competi...

The events of September 11, 2001, unified our nation. But how long can this unity last? I examine the dynamics of the national shift between individualism (me) and communalism (we) on the heels of September 11 through comparison with analogous patterns in interorganizational behavior. Based on these patterns, I conclude that, despite the severity o...

I present a study of the US chemical industry's unified efforts to reverse an unfavorable institutional shift triggered by the transgressions of one of its members. I measure changes in the industry's institutional environment from 1980 to 2000. I find that the industry's collective efforts did not directly improve institutional conditions confront...

This paper primarily focuses on Entine's assertion that SRI research is hopelessly flawed. Although SRI researchers have primarily chosen to pluck the low-hanging fruit in this line of inquiry, it is possible to obtain unbiased higher level insight. SRI research best functions as a means of helping firms and investors identify what the market wants...

Are financial and social performance negatively associated, positively associated, or are they simply unrelated? Common sense, theory, and a growing body of empirics have supported all of the above contradictory positions. Despite the importance of this body of research and the intensity of study directed at it, in the end, the relationship between...

Forecasts are plentiful. Accurate long-range forecasts are rare. But some forecasts are more accurate than others are and a few are very accurate. In this paper, we first explore the case of Moore's Law, a forecast that has proven quite accurate for almost 40 years. We illustrate how expectations that Moore's Law will continue to be accurate actual...

Finance's option theoretic framework has recently been extended into a prescriptive approach to corporate strategy. This “real options” approach has refocused managerial attention on the strategic value of holding flexible positions in increasingly turbulent environments. However, emerging descriptive research on real options has begun to reveal is...

A central and contentious debate in many literatures concerns the relationship between financial and social performance. We advance this debate by measuring the financial–social performance link mutual funds that practice socially responsible investing (SRI). SRI fund managers have an array of social screening strategies from which to choose. Prior...

A central debate in many literatures concerns the relationship between financial and social performance. Studies have shown a negative association, a positive association, as well as no relationship at all. We bridge this long-standing divide by measuring the financial-social performance link within mutual funds that practice socially responsible i...

The 3rd International Conference on Corporate Reputation, Image and Competitiveness brought together academics and practitioners from a variety of fields to discuss many critical issues on the topic of how corporate reputation can contribute to corporate performance. In this paper, several of the presentations are overviewed to draw out common them...

Firms within an industry often find themselves tarred by the same brush. When accidents occur, stakeholders often punish both the offending firm and the entire industry. In this way, a firm's reputation may be tied to other firms, and so reputation may be a common resource shared by all members of an industry - what we term a reputation commons. As...