Search results

This case study seeks to present the CSR activity of a mining company in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the conflict between the company and its local stakeholders. The company promotes an enlightened CSR, focused on the promotion of individuals' rights; but the local population has inherited a paternalistic mindset, which clashes with this enlightened approach.

The conflict is presented and analyzed at three levels: company‐government, company‐local communities, and company‐local employees. The cultural change necessary to address the conflict involves fundamental questions in SGM's business model: strategy, structure and mainly purpose, processes and culture.

The company needs to design individual and industry‐wide strategies to tackle the problems with the Central Government; develop dialogues with key leaders of local communities in order to promote with them an enlightened culture of CSR and of development; and change the processes to diffuse and eventually modify the company values affecting local employees.

Research on CSR in the Democratic Republic of Congo, specifically in the Katanga province, is very scarce, even if mining companies are starting to operate in that Province, raising important problems in terms of development and cultural change. In spite of several problems, SGM is a case of good practice that can inspire other mining companies or extractive industries in developing countries.

This paper aims to provide an insight around operationalising CSR and sustainability activities within an Asian‐Pacific subsidiary of a leading CSR global third‐party logistics company; Deutsche Post DHL.

An in‐depth single case‐study approach was adopted for this study. Using semi‐structured interviews with managers, the research maps various strategic CSR activities from the European corporate centre across to activities within this Asian subsidiary's different business units.

The research provides evidence of activities and issues around this subsidiary's internalisation of CSR by selectively highlighting local initiatives and solutions that help address and contribute towards the global CSR strategic objectives. It describes some issues and opportunities around global policies and local activities that affect the subsidiary's present scope for decision making and management accountability. Along with the issues and challenges from this loose fit tactic of bottom‐up with top‐down engagement, it highlights influential aspects of social, cultural and business management models and the interpretations, context and limitations of the subsidiary's CSR contributions to date.

Little has been written around the empirical operationalisation of CSR and sustainability from third‐party logistic companies; even less so from the Asia Pacific region. The activities, themes and challenges serve as useful references for practitioners. With new, original data sets, for academic scholars, the findings also serve to provide deeper and more explanatory contributions as complementary theory development resources.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the motives of Indian firms for engaging with corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and their interplay by using interpretive structural modelling methodology (ISM) and Matrice d’impacts croisés multiplication appliquée á un classment (MICMAC) analysis.

The research uses ISM and Matrice d’impacts croisés multiplication appliquée á un classment (MICMAC) analysis to find the structural relationship among the CSR motives of the Indian firms identified from the past literature and agreed upon by the experts.

The ISM model indicates that firms primarily engage in CSR either because of top management commitment to certain values, to meet the legal mandate or of the pressure from the NGOs. The top management commitment gives a strategic orientation to CSR, which results in community engagement by the firm as one of the important components of the strategy. The community engagement helps in engaging with its employees and investors along with finding sources of innovations, which, in turn, help the firm in engaging its customers, managing corporate reputation and getting a cost advantage. Collectively, these help them in improving their financial performance. However, the model highlights two autonomous sources, meeting legal mandate and pressure from NGOs also motivate firms to engage in CSR without having any strategic thought or engagement with its strategic system.

The study provides a comprehensive listing of CSR motives of Indian firms along with the structural relationships among the identified CSR motives. The model developed provides CSR professionals and policymakers an understanding of the primary CSR motives along with their driving power and dependence. This insight will help them in manipulating these motives for better CSR engagement by the Indian firms.

This paper aims to examine the current state of education for sustainable development (ESD) at Chemnitz University of Technology (CUT) and to propose a guide for analysing sustainability at higher education institutions (HEI) in terms of implementation of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and sustainability dimensions in the cognitive domain of education.

This paper uses a new combination of two frameworks, the “Phase Model of Sustainability in MBA (Master of Business Administration) Education”, developed by Hart et al. (2017), to classify sustainability-focused topics and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO’s) learning objectives for ESD (UNESCO, 2017) to classify sustainability-related topics. This paper analysed CUT’s study programs and faculties, the websites of the study programs and the (junior) professorships, using documentary analysis with a new set of keywords relating to the topic of incorporating sustainability in curricula.

The faculties and study programs of CUT are at different stages of integrating ESD. However, topics such as sustainable energy and production, recycling, sustainable management and innovation are prominent in the educational offerings of CUT. As the university is a technical university, the focus on these topics reflects the general direction of the organisation. Based on this study results, this study gives recommendations for further development for ESD at CUT.

This paper presents the case of CUT and a new guide for analysing sustainability at HEI, including recommendations for further development in relation to ESD.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the predictors of consumers’ annual monetary expenditures on clothing and footwear in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, a developing Latin American country.

The research followed an exploratory, sequential, mixed methods design. The first phase consisted of in-depth interviews with adult individuals. The second phase involved surveying a similar segment of the population.

The present study supports the importance of demographic and psychological factors as predictors. The study also identifies two new groups of predictors: consumers’ reception of used clothing and physical space at home and its management.

In addition to demographic variables, consumer panels that measure expenditures on clothing and footwear should include psychological measures of participants, particularly clothing involvement. Clothing manufacturers and retailers in developing countries should consider the impact of receiving used clothes by consumers. Because clothing buying and disposal behaviors are positively associated, companies should become more involved in their customers’ disposal behavior.

The contribution of the present study is twofold. First, it contributes to the understanding of clothing and footwear expenditures by considering the individual consumer as a unit of analysis. Furthermore, it provides insights into this behavior from a little-studied context.

This study aims to analyze the influence of political regime on economic growth.

The methodology was based on an inter-period comparison of the evolution of macroeconomic fundamentals in three different political regimes in Ecuador, a South American country.

The results showed that what determines the evolution of macroeconomic fundamentals is not the political regime that oversees it, but the size of a positive exogenous shock on the price of raw materials, which, by providing higher incomes, considerably increases the level of investment and net exports. However, the political regime does affect the distribution of income in sectors such as health and education.

As far as the authors know, this may be the first paper to explore the importance of a positive exogenous shock on a political regime for the case of primary-exporting Latin American economies, which are price takers subject to exogenous shocks.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relevancy of traditional managerial role frameworks as perceived by practicing managers, and to identify emerging role requirements or skills required for career success.

A mixed-methods approach was conducted including survey research, empirical analysis and semi-structured consensual qualitative research interviews with 259 managers from 200 organizations.

This study demonstrates a widening gap between entrenched organization role constructs and emerging practice-driven role skills. The empirical analysis indicated little to moderate relevancy of traditional role constructs by practicing managers while follow-up interviews revealed new role requirements driven by contemporary market realities and changing managerial motivations. The findings suggest that inclusion of new practice-driven role requirements or skills are likely to be mutually beneficial and influence career success.

The findings may limit the ability to generalize without further comparative analysis in similar/dissimilar economies.

Individuals will benefit by the inclusion of revised role requirements and policies that are designed to support employee-driven needs and “employability” skills that are more consistent with a careerist orientation. The organization will also benefit by having a more highly skilled workforce in key areas of competitive advantage including networking, innovation and opportunity identification.

The value of this examination is twofold. First, it extends the understanding of the diminishing relevancy of traditional managerial roles within a context of major global and social transformation. Second, it underscores the growing importance of “employability” skill sets and capabilities for managerial career aspirants facing new market realities.

In the academic field of business management, several potential theories were established during the last decades to explain companies' decisions, organizational behavior, consumer patterns, and internationalization, among others. As a result, businesses and scholars were able to analyze and decide based on theoretical approaches to explain the current conditions of the market. Secondary research was conducted to collect more than 36 management theories. This chapter aims to develop the most famous theories related to business applied in the international field. The novelty of this chapter relies on the compilation of recognized previous research studies from the academic literature and evidence in international business.

Film provides an alternative medium for assessing our interpretations of cultural icons. This selective list looks at the film and video sources for information on and interpretations of the life of Woody Guthrie.