Search results

Does the rise of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Central and Eastern Europe lead to supraterritoriality? The analysis of FDI flows between world investor countries and Central and East European (CEE) hosts between 1989 and 2000 shows that the majority of FDI flows into CEE in this period do not exemplify a trend of undifferentiated transcendence of post-communist borders. Rather, FDI flows continue to be based in territoriality and embedded in existing social relations between investor and host countries: migration and trade flows, historical ties, political alliances, and cultural affinities. Nevertheless, the rhetoric supporting the opening of post-communist countries to FDI is widespread and consistent with the neoliberal credo, which has acquired a supraterritorial character. Ultimately, we see that embeddedness and supraterritoriality co-exist but they manifest themselves for distinct FDI phenomena: the concrete economic practice and the economic rhetoric, respectively.

I use a controlled experiment to examine, in the context of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) crises, whether investors' investment judgments are influenced by a firm's CSR reputation and CSR crisis response strategy. I find that for good CSR reputation firms, the use of a rebuild or deny crisis response strategy does not lead to improvements in investment judgments. However, for bad CSR reputation firms, the use of a deny response strategy leads to improvements in investment judgments while the use of a rebuild strategy does not.

Purpose – This chapter reviews the influence that institutional investors have on corporate climate change disclosures and related reporting regimes.

Approach – We overview recent research undertaken by the authors that provides evidence of the influence of institutional investors on voluntary reporting of climate change information in annual and sustainability reports. In addition, this chapter considers the influence of institutional investors on climate change disclosure regulation and the use of climate change information by investors.

Findings – The material presented in this chapter indicates that institutional investor coalitions have been internationally influential in determining the extent and content of climate change disclosures of large corporations. The CDP annual questionnaire has been particularly influential. The influence of other initiatives such as development of the CDSB reporting framework is not yet clear. Further, the ability of institutional investor coalitions to influence the regulation of climate change disclosure is uncertain, since most national governments have not yet headed requests for greater regulation.

Research implications – Several avenues for future research are identified including a consideration of the trade-offs between investor information demands, costs of compliance and a desire for concise reporting; investor decision making processes as well as the impediments to use of the information currently available; and the validity of the perception that increased disclosure requirements assists with driving emissions reductions and ensuring adequate consideration of climate change risks.

Value – The material presented in this chapter is expected to be useful for informing the continuing debate around the regulation of and/or provision of guidance to companies about the disclosure of climate change related information to investors and other stakeholders.

This paper is an exploration of the potential place, if any, for ethics in corporate governance. It begins with the influential role that agency theory has played both in the conception and reform of corporate governance. Its grounding assumption of self-interested opportunism leaves little or no room for ethics beyond what pays. This conception is then contrasted with a Foucauldian view of governance in which ethics is explored in terms of how an ‘ethic’ of shareholder value has been promulgated in the last decade. The third section of the paper explores the contemporaneous explosion of interest in corporate ethics and social responsibility and suggests that there is a nascent disciplinary regime being assembled which may redefine the terms of shareholder value to include environmental and social performance. What is paradoxical about both an ethics of shareholder value and corporate responsibility is that they are effective only through creating a preoccupation with the self and how the self is seen, rather than the other. The final concluding part of the paper suggests that ethics, following Levinas, should be understood in terms of sentience and the ‘responsibility for my neighbour’ that this assigns. Such a view of ethics refutes the individualism that agency theory takes as the essence of human nature, and Foucauldian analysis suggests is the product of disciplinary processes. Its grounding in sentience and proximity however offer it only a local role in corporate governance.