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Stakeholders hold power because they hold resources essential to firm survival. Through their exercise of this power, they produce, or not, change in business practices. The social movements of united individuals, as well as the non-market strategies of firms and industries designed to forestall or counter these movements, succeed or fail based on their ability to influence stakeholders. Constraints on stakeholder cognition affect how stakeholders are influenced by social movements and non-market strategy to, in turn, exercise their influence over firms. Herein, the author overviews the nature of these constraints, highlights the need for further research on stakeholder attention allocation, and discusses how the three articles in this section fit into this framework.

In this chapter, we explain why firms selectively responding to the most powerful, legitimate, and urgent demands of their stakeholders will not bring about sustainability and offer suggestions on what we should do in light of this shortcoming. Sustainability issues tend to be wicked problems that require cooperation across parties and over time to define and resolve. Stakeholder pressures can bring sustainability to the fore, but government intervention is necessary to drive meaningful action to resolve such issues. Without government intervention, self-interested stakeholders can pressure firms to move away from the complex, long-term challenges of wicked problems. Yet, stakeholder pressure is also necessary, as without it, industries may self-regulate in self-serving ways. Our analysis thus suggests that collaboration between business, government, and other stakeholders is necessary to resolve the wicked problems of sustainability. We therefore urge the stakeholder literature to move beyond its libertarian underpinnings by (re)incorporating government into models of effective corporate governance.

This paper investigates the substance of institutions in the context of business ethics. In particular, I test a theory of stakeholder attention to resource commitments by firms that implement the Ethics and Compliance Officer (ECO) position, from 1990 to 2008. Results support the hypothesized curvilinear relationship between resource commitments and stakeholder attention – while both high and low levels of ECO implementation generate low levels of reported ethics transgressions (the former due to good firm behavior and the latter due to stakeholder disengagement), moderate ECO implementation produces elevated transgression reports (due to raised expectations and increased engagement). Contrary to extant theory, results are consistent across both internal and external firm stakeholder groups.

Recent publications, including Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2009) and A New Biology for the 21st Century (National Research Council, 2009), highlight needed changes for undergraduate science education. These include a shift away from traditionally structured lab courses toward more authentic scientific inquiry experiences in undergraduate science laboratories. The aim of these reform initiatives is for students to develop not only conceptual understanding of the big ideas of science but also the skills required to conduct an investigation and an understanding of science as a human process of constructing scientific knowledge (National Research Council, 2011). The work that we describe here examines the challenges and successes of engaging nonscience majors in a large introductory university-level science course in conducting scientific inquiry. To understand the course structure and the nature of the laboratory experiences, we describe two different lab experiences. In both cases, students engaged in guided inquiry and then were asked to engage in a more open-ended inquiry experience. Our findings suggest that students need significant scaffolding to make the transition from more guided inquiry to more open-ended inquiry.

While there are a number of theoretical traditions that study the interactions of business and society, research in these spaces has failed to sufficiently engage across these traditions. This volume aims to bridge these domains, creating a conversation among scholars working at the nexus of stakeholder theory, non-market strategy, and social movement theory. In this introductory chapter to the volume, we review the historical context of these three theoretical areas and explore how they connect in current research. We follow this discussion with our recommendations for common themes that might further integrate these subfields. Finally, we conclude the chapter with a description of each paper in the volume, highlighting how each contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of business and society, as well as the integration of our three focal subfields.