Search results

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the question of whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be used as a link of trust between business and society, and which role CSR plays in recovering distrust in businesses. It uses a mixed methods study of processes of moving businesses within the Danish water sector from a general trust-breakdown to trust recovery from 2003 to 2013.

Trust recovery is found to depend on stakeholders’ mutual engagement with each other and their willingness to share knowledge and learn from each other’s professional and institutional cultures and languages. An alignment of vocabularies of motives between regulation and voluntary CSR is found to be useful for building trust between conflicting parties. Furthermore the findings shows that the more stakeholders’ languages, motives and logics can coexist, the more trust can be recovered.

The research is limited by a study of one business sector in one country and the findings have implications greater than the local contexts of which it is researched, because it is usable in other sectors that suffer from severe trust-breakdowns such as government systems in both the public and private sectors.

This chapter suggests a theoretical extension of Bogenschneider and Corbett’s (2010) Community Dissonance Theory to embrace multiple stakeholders each having their own complex and unique culture and communication modus based on their institutional, professional or individual comprehensive language universes. This includes knowledge-sharing and educative diffusion of the stakeholders’ language universes’ vocabularies including its important nouns, verbs, terminologies, semantics, taxonomies and axioms as well as the stakeholders’ motives and logics implemented into these universes.

Most corporations consider their stakeholders to be those, who can be defined in a relatively narrow periphery. Customers, workers, investors, authorities, neighbours, suppliers and various interest groups, for instance NGOs. However, during the last decades, phenomena such as the financial crisis, the global warming, the disasters of global consumerism in terms of the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in the fashion industry, are examples of how the stakeholder concept cannot continue to be defined as narrow as corporations usually does. The butterfly effect of globalism has shown to be – yes, global. Even the smallest company, the single consumer and the tiniest decision made by anyone may in the future – perhaps even tomorrow – affect stakeholders, we didn’t know existed. The future generation is also to be considered as stakeholders, which decisions made today may affect. Companies, consumers, everyday people including children already know this even from the first day at school if not before. What we need is not knowledge about these phenomena – it is how to think globally when we decide locally: in companies, in daily households, in education of our future generations.

This chapter discusses how to revise the stakeholder concept according to corporate responsibility, company stakeholding and globalism. It points to shortcomings in various global trade systems such as banking, fashion and IT markets, and through these it suggests and discusses a new way of defining the stakeholder concept in a globalised and future perspective considering using the RESIST-model against ‘business-as-usual’ based on the butterfly effect of the smallest decision.

Quality is often defined as cognitive perceptual attributes or properties, and researchers often disagree about which terms should be appropriate in determining quality(Reeves & Bednar, 1994). Business research in marketing attaches value to the properties of quality (Zeithaml, 1988) and measures this in terms of ‘money’ and customer ‘expectations’. The idea of connecting quality to values through a persistent market – that is determining measurable accounts to products and properties – relies on the idea of an invisible hand controlling the market by competition (March, 1994; Smith, 1776/1976), and it assumes there is a reliable way to control quality and value. But discussions and debates arise when discussing the quality or value of abstract phenomena such as service.

The purpose of this chapter is to map out the role of arts and the transfer values of the case of intensified music education as a governance tool for cultural sustainability. It takes the form of a literature review, which reveals that the role of arts in terms of governance of cultural sustainability includes the arts as issues of cultural heritage; symbolic translations of cultural values; transferring learning about emotions and life-quality, cooperation and linguistic-logical skills and potential transmitters of socio-economic enhancement of individuals performing it. The negative outcome is that the arts are predominated by the elite and wealthy, and that the potential of the role of the arts in the public education curriculum has not been utilised nor preferred in many countries as a result of low government expenditure. Other projects may exist in non-academic public media that may confirm or reject the findings. The chapter suggests academia and practitioners study, impact and initiate better ways of including the arts in the governance of cultural sustainability through public education. The inclusion of the arts in public education can improve the livelihood of children in all socio-economic areas. It connects two different literatures – that of cultural sustainability and that of traditional art studies in education, and raises questions about current governance practices underestimating the value of including cultural sustainability in governance and the role of the arts herein.

All forms of organization have governance requirements and procedures. Often, these are quite similar despite the form and mission of the organization in question. They only consider governance in the organization environment and rarely look beyond their immediate stakeholders. In many corporations, the immediate stakeholders are even considered to be the investors and only those regardless of the apparency of other close stakeholders such as workers, customers, suppliers, authorities, and interest groups or non-governmental organizations. Even corporations with such narrow views and organizations with a broader stakeholder view are relatively unrealistic and are inappropriate in the modern global world, which we inhabit. Organizations of any form and size need to recognize both the need to consider radical changes in the modern global environment and the opportunities and possibilities presented by the current environment. Therefore, this chapter takes a broad approach and considers governance requirements in the modern world seen from a global perspective for all forms of organization. With global perspective, organizational governance is, here, called New Governance, and it includes the idea, that even the smallest decision can have a dramatic social, economic, or geopolitical impact in other parts of the world. The idea of New Governance is to put on the global lenses when making decisions to consider the potential effect – positive as well as negative – on the local as well as the global perspective, even on the unknown future and on future generations to come. Some may call this sustainable governance, but in this chapter, it is embedded in the New Governance as a concept, which can be nothing else but sustainable in its core idea. The future requirements for New Governance in any kind of organization are discussed, as the relationship between organizations and its global and future stakeholders, and how they form these requirements.

Fulya Akyildiz is Assistant Professor, Department of Public Administration, Usak University, Turkey.