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This study aims to revisits the meaning of corporate identity (CI) in practice to identify its key dimensions and the interrelationships between them and to provide insights on how to operationalize the construct.

This study is based on a comprehensive literature review and qualitative research consisting of 22 semi-structured interviews with senior managers from 11 UK-leading companies, and three in-depth interviews with corporate brand consultants who worked closely with these firms in cognate areas.

The study identifies the following six key dimensions of CI in the UK industry: communication, visual identity, behavior, organizational culture, stakeholder management and founder value-based leadership.

The focus on UK leading companies limits the generalizability of the results. Further studies should be conducted in other sectors and country settings to examine the relationships identified in the current study.

This study identifies the salient dimensions of CI and, for the first time, the role of founder transformational leadership, employee identification and top management behavioral leadership as key dimensions and sub-dimensions of CI. The study also provides novel insights about the measurements for these dimensions. Additionally, this study introduces a model for the interrelationships between CI dimensions and their influence on corporate image, based on rigorous theoretical underpinnings, which lays the foundation for future empirical testing.

This paper aims to piece together chronologically the events and revolutionary acts that have been taken by groups of individuals, entrepreneurs/industrialists and corporate entities in the UK which fall under the ambit of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in order to derive the history of CSR in the country.

Data from literature and prior studies were used to gather the required information in order to contribute to knowledge about the history of CSR, at least from the perspective of the UK.

The results suggest that individuals in groups, industrialists/entrepreneurs acting individually, and even corporate entities have been indirectly engaged in CSR activities in the UK for well over 200 years. Altruistic CSR in the UK has a long history.

Information on how CSR evolved in the UK and elsewhere is considered to be valuable by both academic researchers and business managers, as it provides a framework on which future studies can be based. In addition, it improves the understanding of how the field originally started before it reached its current state.

The author focusses on corporate history from a media aesthetic perspective using the case of the Danish brewer Carlsberg. Through a careful examination of the company’s website that draws on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s work on modality, the author examines how images and symbols of the past and present are intertwined so as to ‘curate’ history and present the brand as both deeply rooted and authentic.

This chapter squarely attributes DEI responsibility to powerful corporations that have historically benefitted from a history of discrimination against people of color and recommends a path forward that embraces DEI-PR-CSR intersections by placing DEI within a CSR office rather than in HR.

Business corporations (and unincorporated joint-stock companies) formed in Britain and the United States in the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century were lightly regulated by today’s standards and, as startups, sold equity directly to investors without the aid of intermediaries, yet they suffered relatively few governance breakdowns. That is because republican government-style checks against the arbitrary power of any group of stakeholders (managers, blockholders, directors) suffused their founding documents (charters/constitutions, articles of agreement, bylaws), raising the expected costs of defalcation above the expected benefits. Over the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, the original checks disintegrated. They were functionally replaced twice, first by financial capitalism a la J. P. Morgan, then by corporate raiders and takeover specialists like KKR, but politicians neutralized the first and managers (and judges) the second, leaving many widely held corporations today under the control of CEOs/Board Chairmen who can self-deal with near impunity and have apparent incentives to do so. A return to the precepts of the republican model could help to improve governance outcomes in the future.

The aim of this study is to discuss what implications referencing to the past can have on how firms manage their supply chains and communicate about them, drawing on the social memory literature.

In a conceptual manner, the authors connect the field of responsible supply chain management to the growing literature on corporate heritage and social memory in organizations.

The authors develop seven propositions related to the communication of the past and its connection to responsible supply chain management.

A social memory perspective can inform supply chain management research, by helping to better understand how and with what consequences the past can be used in communication about supply chains. This paper is conceptual in nature and empirical investigations would be needed to support and/or modify the literature-based findings.

Managers should be aware that both opportunities and risks are associated with communicating the past in connection to responsible supply chain management. Deployed in the right way, such communication can be valuable both in marketing and in internal management processes.

This article introduces the social memory perspective to the supply chain management field and shows what implications it can have for research on responsibility in supply chains.

This study aims to explore the evolutionary trajectory of American corporations and their governance over the past few centuries, using a multidisciplinary investigative approach. The research focuses on the American business landscape because it has played a pivotal role in shaping the field of corporate governance theory and practice.

The author thoroughly investigates archival records, legal documents, academic publications, reputable databases and pertinent literature to unearth valuable insights into the key events that have influenced the evolutionary path of American corporations and their governance throughout history.

Delving into the evolutionary journey of American corporations and their governance reveals a multifaceted narrative, enhancing our comprehension of the impact of the external socio-economic environment, and the effectiveness and limitations of established corporate governance paradigms in addressing such transformations. This introspection establishes the groundwork for ongoing discussions concerning how corporate governance should adapt to meet the evolving needs and expectations of stakeholders and society as a whole, with a specific focus on the pivotal role that boardrooms could play in this regard.

The insights gained from this analysis offer practitioners a foundational resource to understand corporate governance in a complex business landscape. Armed with this understanding, practitioners can better align governance strategies with both historical context and contemporary requirements.

The research has significant social implications in the sense that history highlights the importance of the society in influencing corporate governance practices. It specifically emphasizes the need for the board of directors to consider both shareholder value and social responsibility, while also fostering public trust and confidence.

Many corporate governance concepts are often used with limited understanding of their initial intent, resulting in their unquestioned adoption. In this paper, the author offers a contextual exploration of historical events that have contributed to the development of these diverse corporate perspectives. To the best of the author’s knowledge, there are exceedingly few, if any, papers that present comparably insightful and multidisciplinary insights into the evolutionary path of corporations and their governance, especially within a dynamic and influential market like that of the USA.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the way in which agency theory has crowded out other approaches to understanding the governance of modern businesses. The paper rescues the meaning and context which informed the American corporate governance reform movement originally and demonstrates how the economically predicated agency approach became dominant in academic considerations of corporate governance.

Both primary and secondary sources were considered in a Foucauldian history of ideas approach.

Other approaches to corporate governance have been pushed out of the mainstream of corporate governance discourse by an economic model which excludes many of the key issues which informed the notion originally.

Dominant academic attitudes to corporate governance have occluded other ways in which the governance of corporations can be understood.

Previous accounts of corporate governance have ignored the alternative approaches represented before agency theory became dominant.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the utility of corpus linguistics and digitised newspaper archives in management and organisational history.

The paper draws its inferences from Google NGram Viewer and five digitised historical newspaper databases – The Times of India, The Financial Times, The Economist, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal – that contain prints from the nineteenth century.

The paper argues that corpus linguistics or the quantitative and qualitative analysis of large-scale real-world machine-readable text can be an important method of historical research in management studies, especially for discourse analysis. It shows how this method can be fruitfully used for research in management and organisational history, using term count and cluster analysis. In particular, historical databases of digitised newspapers serve as important corpora to understand the evolution of specific words and concepts. Corpus linguistics using newspaper archives can potentially serve as a method for periodisation and triangulation in corporate, analytically structured and serial histories and also foster cross-country comparisons in the evolution of management concepts.

The paper also shows the limitation of the research method and potential robustness checks while using the method.

Findings of this paper can stimulate new ways of conducting research in management history.

The paper for the first time introduces corpus linguistics as a research method in management history.

This article scrutinises the nature and salience of corporate heritage identities via the lens of the British Monarchy. A corporate heritage identity framework is introduced. The heritage identity construct is positioned vis‐à‐vis other related constructs such as nostalgia, tradition, and custom.

An embedded case study informed by desktop research and a literature review of the British Monarchy and by an empirical‐collaborative study on the Swedish Monarchy. The paper is also informed by the literature on heritage and other historically‐related constructs.

The notion of relative invariance is introduced. The latter is important since it explains why heritage identities can remain the same and yet have changed, namely: The Relative Invariance Notion. Corporate heritage identities and brands are invested with special qualities in that they are a melding of identity continuity, identity change and are also invested with the identities of time (times past, present and future). Heritage identities are an accretion of various identities, which are variously linked to institutions, places, cultures, and to time frames. The notion of Institutional Role Identities is introduced. The study suggested that heritage identities have multiple institutional role identities. These identities can be utilised in various contexts and for a variety of purposes: this might account for their strength. One explanation of why heritage identities are powerful is because they meet customer and stakeholder needs by encapsulating and, importantly, by giving identity. Heritage identities, potentially, are an important dimension of a group's collective memory.

A revised corporate heritage identity framework relating to the British Monarchy is introduced. The model can be adapted so as to appraise our comprehension of corporate heritage identities in more general institutional contexts. The importance of bi‐lateral institutional and stakeholder trust to the framework and the need for (institution) heritage authenticity – or perceived authenticity – and stakeholder affinity are noted.

The paper focuses on heritage identities in institutional contexts and a distinction is made between corporate heritage identities and corporate heritage brands identities.