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This paper aims to investigate whether citizens censor their own expressions regarding large corporations in social networking sites (SNS) and how self-censorship is associated with the perceived power of, knowledge about and media exposure about large corporations.

A nationwide survey was conducted in South Korea (N = 455). The data were analyzed with structural equation modeling.

As exposure to news about large corporations increased, the degree of self-censorship regarding large corporations increased. This effect of media exposure on self-censorship was mediated by the amount of knowledge about large corporations and the perceived power of large corporations.

Although this study focused on the SNS context, the results of this study cannot provide the features of the self-censorship process that are distinct in SNS compared to other contexts. Although a causal model was provided based on theoretical reasoning, the nature of the data is correlational. Thus, one should be cautious when interpreting the results.

The findings suggest that, while establishing privacy protection policies with regard to the SNS, policy makers need to consider how to prevent invasion of privacy and misuse of personal data by large corporations, interest groups and the unspecified public.

This study extends the literature related to self-censorship by identifying the effects of economic power and the psychological factors involved in self-censorship.

This paper aims to offer a critical examination of the social impacts of large multinational corporations (MNCs) in the age of globalization.

The study adopts a multidisciplinary approach and relies on various scholarly resources in several disciplines including international business, international economics, sociology and international relations. The analysis is organized around eight major areas and constituencies of MNCs including the global scene, workers, competitors, entrepreneurs, government and tax payers, social justice, nations/states and natural environment.

Giant MNCs have benefited from favorable conditions in the past three decades and currently dominate the global scene. In general, the rising corporate profits come not to the benefit, but to the detriment of workers. Large MNCs benefit from their immense resources to develop sophisticated competitive advantages against smaller rivals. They impede small entrepreneurs from scaling up their operations and increasing their market shares. Furthermore, large MNCs often take advantage of their power to shape national and international policies in ways that enable them to enhance their profitability. Overall, large MNCs aggravate the rising economic inequality in different ways, thus contributing to social and financial instability. Furthermore, large MNCs erode state sovereignty and enormously contribute to environmental degradation.

While most international business studies focus on the concept of corporate social responsibility or sustainable development, the originality of this paper resides in adopting an alternative perspective and offering a multidisciplinary and critical examination of the social impacts of large MNCs.

The Nature of Business Policy Business policy — or general management — is concerned with the following six major functions:

To properly assess the relative places of China and the United States in the world system, the fact of the transformation of old, and the emergence of new, centers of capital accumulation needs to be established, and some attempt made to develop means of measuring these developments. This paper, working within the framework of Uneven and Combined Development, will suggest a new metric by which we can assess the geography of capital accumulation in the world economy, a metric with three components. The first component examines national income, both per capita and as shares of the world total. The second component refines the latter to an examination of share of world manufacturing, with a specific examination of distribution of the key sector of high-technology manufacturing. The third and final component examines the distribution of large corporations through the world economy, and introduces a new term – the relative weight of large corporations. All components of this metric suggest that key aspects of the modern economy remain “territorially bound” and clearly reveal the steady, long-term decline of the United States as the dominant center of capital accumulation, and the simultaneous emergence of new centers of capital accumulation in an increasingly multi-polar world economy.

This article develops Polanyi’s (2001) theme of harnessing the regulatory capacity of a social sphere by focusing on trust as an emotion for framing risk regulatory regimes. Using the global mining sector as its focus, it explores the role of trust in the regulation and corporate management of social and environmental risk.

Sociological perspectives on trust are employed to identify and analyze dynamics of trust in the mining industry. The article draws on data collected between 2004 and 2008 by way of participant observation, document analysis, and in-depth qualitative interviews with around 40 representatives of the mining industry, NGOs, and regulators. Trust-relationships are an example of harnessing the regulatory capacity of a social sphere, but they can also undermine regulatory effort where trust is abused. The effectiveness of trust-based regulation would be enhanced by sanctions for nonperformance that target corporate motivations and financial performance. This research focused on a selection of large, multinational mining corporations with a presence in Australia. Generalizations could not be made from this research about smaller mining entities or single-country or state-owned corporations.

A better understanding of corporate trust-building behaviors and motivations can help inform more effective regulatory strategy for improving corporate, social, and environmental impacts. This article contributes to the body of knowledge about the regulation of the social and environmental performance of the mining industry. This is important as many of the remaining accessible mineral deposits across the globe are in areas of environmental and social significance.

Recent theory and research suggests that local relational networks among business organizations play an important role in establishing and preserving a locale's identity. Such networks facilitate the development, dissemination, and enforcement of norms and cognitive frames that guide local business behavior. They also provide a vehicle for the consolidation of local business interests and for the coordination of local business strategic action. We examine the factors that influenced the likelihood that the CEOs of large corporations sat on the board of directors of large locally headquartered commercial banks in the 1960s. We focused on the 1960s because doing so allows us to make use of an exceptional comprehensive data set on the attributes and relationships of large firms and their leaders. We examine connections to commercial banks because these banks played a crucial role in community development in the 1960s. We find that both the class attributes of corporate CEOs (as reflected in their ownership of the firm and their affiliation with elite educational, social, and policy-making institutions) and the organizational attributes of their firms (as reflected in their financial structure, geographic reach, and age) influenced a CEO's propensity to sit on the board of a locally headquartered bank. These results suggest that future research on participation in local relational networks should take into account both class and organizational theories. They also suggest that future research on the class and organizational underpinnings of relational networks should pay closer attention to spatial relations.

The purpose of this study is to better understand the origins of modern corporate social responsibility. The paper seeks to examine some factors that enabled the new industrial corporation to expand its role in society.

Using institutional theory, this paper describes how some of the institutional characteristics of the modern corporation itself provided some opportunities or challenges in terms of gaining social legitimacy.

The institutional features of the corporation, its technology and management created new demands on the corporation by society. These in turn led to the development of such concepts of corporate social responsibility as: public relations, service, trusteeship, and public welfare.

Future research on social legitimacy should focus on demands placed by the institutional characteristics of new organizations. Other research might include comparative studies of corporate legitimacy in Europe or Asia or an examination of the evolving role of managers from the role of welfare capitalist to trusteeship.

Institutions that adapt to changing demands have the best chance to survive. Firms that adopt new social activities are likely to have to sustain them in the long run.

This study is the first to argue that the features of the modern corporation itself stimulated some of the social activities it undertook. Contributions of scientific management scholars to the shaping of the emerging corporate role are also noted.

This chapter explores the advantages (for large investors) of directly owning productive assets, compared with indirect ownership through stock in corporations. Significant factors are agency costs and recent changes in the tax and regulatory environment. Recent corporate scandals have led to legislative and regulatory responses that significantly increase the monitoring costs and other burdens of becoming or remaining a public corporation. As a result, there has been a substantial increase in going-private transactions, particularly among smaller public companies. Acquisitions and minority equity positions that allow large corporations to join with smaller companies have also increased. The pressures to go private are not entirely new, however. This chapter, reflecting collaboration by professors of finance and business law, traces the legal concept that the corporation is an entity separate and apart from its owners, showing how the legal status of corporations hinders resolution of conflicts among the parties to the enterprise. Thus, there have long been fundamental flaws inherent in the corporation as the form of organization for certain activities. The current wave of Sarbanes–Oxley restructuring via private equity firms is part of a significant increase in direct ownership of major assets by institutional investors. Direct ownership prevents management expropriation of resources, and is preferable to corporate ownership whenever other alternatives for indemnification or liability limitation are available (such as insurance, limited partnerships, limited liability companies, etc.). Finally, the renewal of direct ownership is not a radical shift, but a return to long-established tradition in the organization of business activities.

Strategic management researchers in Europe challenged the historical concern of the field with economic performance. As a result corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been transformed into a key strategic issue. Given the large amount of social problems in Latin America, much of them related to the large amount of foreign direct investments inflows over the last decade, the growing literature on strategic corporate social responsibility (SCSR) produced in the US has been reproduced in the region by consulting firms, big corporations firms and strategic management researchers. Drawing upon critical arguments of Latin American scholars on the dominance of the US literature in the region and on problematic outcomes of the large amount of foreign direct investments inflows this paper develops a critical analysis on the so‐called SCSR. The vantage point construed by big corporations within the fields of strategic management and organization studies, the increasing dependence of the field of strategic management on corporate resources, and the decreasing power of the state and civil society in relation to big corporations are pointed out as key issues for the development of a critical approach on SCSR in Latin America. In the end the author argues that the responsibilities of big corporations, especially in Latin America, are too important to be addressed only by the field of strategic management.