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The purpose of this paper is to understand how individuals seek to reduce the occurrence of unethical requests at work and the effects of such strategies.

The authors built a grounded theory through semi-structured interviews with 65 individuals who worked for companies involved in the Brazilian corruption scandal called Operation Car Wash.

The interviewees reported that they use two central strategies to avoid unethical requests: explicit moral communication (directly stating that they are not willing to adhere to an unethical request) and implicit communication (expressing such a refusal through moral symbols). Both strategies signal the morality of the communicator and lead the possible proponent of an unethical request to perceive a greater probability of being reported and, thus, avoid making such an unethical request. However, while explicit moral communication affects the perceived morality of the individual who would possibly make an unethical request, implicit (symbolic) moral communication does not. As a consequence, the risks of retaliation for making a moral communication are greater in the case of explicit moral communication, entailing that implicit moral communication is more effective and safer for the individual who wants to avoid unethical requests.

This paper broadens the literature on business ethics and moral psychology by shifting its focus from what organizations and leaders can do to prevent unethical behavior to what leaders can actively do to protect themselves from unethical requests.

As specific objectives, we intend to: (1) measure the connectivity between the spillovers of returns from the financial and nonfinancial sectors of the Brazilian stock market; (2) estimate the spillovers of individual returns for each sector to identify periods of higher and lower profits over a period of around eight years; (3) investigate the existence of relationships between these repercussions between pairs of sectoral indices, evaluating how much each specific sector transfers to each other and the market as a whole and (4) examine whether the connectivity of the Brazilian stock market itself and future interest rates in the USA and Brazil as well as the risk of the Brazilian economy, were explanatory variables of the dynamics of interdependence in the returns of these indices.

With a daily series of closing prices of sectoral indices from March 3, 2015, until June 21, 2023, we researched eight of the most relevant sectoral indices on the São Paulo Stock Exchange (B3). With this data, we estimate the Diebold–Yilmaz spillover index and frequency decompositions of Barunik–Krehlik.

The conclusions indicate that there is an overall connection of 66% in the financial and nonfinancial sectoral indices, with a peak of 83%. The consumer, energy and public services sectors stand out as significant sources of primary spillovers. When we classified secondary effects into periods, we saw that the shocks dissipated as time passed and the returns of the commodity index remained resilient across all periods.

Our conclusions highlight the influence of three main factors in sectors with a high degree of connectivity: periods of increased uncertainty; negative externalities in post-crisis periods and the impact of financial news on market sentiment. We think this study provides information that can be useful for policymakers, investors, investment portfolio managers, economists (financial, monetary and industrial), investment consultants and researchers who are interested in the complex interconnection among emerging market stock indices.

Corruption perception is essential to study because it can shape people’s attitudes toward the government. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to address this key question: what factors are associated with a non-expert’s judgment of whether Canada is corrupt?

This study uses the World Value Survey conducted in Canada in October 2020. This survey is based on a nationally representative sample of a cross-section of adult Canadian residents, including Canadian citizens and permanent residents and those who are neither Canadian citizens nor permanent residents.

Based on this study, some conclusions can be made. First, people accessing corruption news from the traditional news media are less likely than those receiving information from the new media to perceive the state (in this case, Canada) as corrupt. Second, people who have less confidence in public institutions are more likely to perceive a country as corrupt. Third, people who participate in electoral and non-electoral forms of political participation are more likely to perceive the state and its public officials as corrupt. Fourth, regardless of which political party is in power, individuals who lean right politically are more likely than those on the left to perceive the state as corrupt. Finally, immigrants are less likely than those born in Canada to perceive the state as corrupt. This work enriches the literature on the substantive understanding of the factors associated with corruption perception.

Studies investigating factors associated with public perception of corruption tend to focus on developing countries. The current study contributes to filling this gap in knowledge by examining correlates of corruption perception in Canada. As a result, this study contributes to the literature on factors associated with corruption perception, especially in the developed country context.

This paper refines the Digital Media–Arena (DMA) framework to address the diversity of stakeholders contributing to the production, (re)appropriation and (re)distribution of organisational messages in digital environments. It also presents a case analysis for the purpose of demonstrating the applicability of the revised conceptual framework to a critical situation.

Grounded in key public relations, corporate communication and strategic communication research, this study first extends the DMA framework by introducing six new forms of media-arenas. Next, the study takes a public sector perspective to analyse the revised framework against a critical situation involving the Finnish prime minister in summer 2022.

The application of the revised DMA framework to analyse the critical situation shows the importance of mapping and understanding diverse discourses across multi-arenas and their communication role in a rapidly unfolding scandal surrounding the prime minister of Finland. Findings also reveal the diversity of stakeholder voices forming their own versions of organisational messages and sometimes converging organisational messages within and across DMAs.

The DMA framework can offer practical suggestions to guide communicators to make strategic choices in what, where, how and with whom they can communicate.

The revised DMA framework contributes expanding the field's knowledge of the strategic communicative use of the digital environment in typically highly volatile and multi-vocal situations by offering instrumental understanding of the conflicting challenge between subjugating and liberating organisational messages across the digital spectrum.

In this article, we offer a contribution to the ongoing study of food by advancing a conceptual framework and interdisciplinary research agenda – what we term “food system resilience”. In recent years, the concept of resilience has been extensively used in a variety of fields, but not always consistently or holistically. Here we aim to theorise systematically resilience as an analytical concept as it applies to food systems research. To do this, we engage with and seek to extend current understandings of resilience across different disciplines. Accordingly, we begin by exploring the different ways in which the concept of resilience is understood and used in current academic and practitioner literatures – both as a general concept and as applied specifically to food systems research. We show that the social-ecological perspective, rooted in an appreciation of the complexity of systems, carries significant analytical potential. We first underline what we mean by the food system and relate our understanding of this term to those commonly found in the extant food studies literature. We then apply our conception to the specific case of the UK. Here we distinguish between four subsystems at which our “resilient food systems” can be applied. These are, namely, the agro-food system; the value chain; the retail-consumption nexus; and the governance and regulatory framework. On the basis of this conceptualisation we provide an interdisciplinary research agenda, using the case of the UK to illustrate the sorts of research questions and innovative methodologies that our food systems resilience approach is designed to promote.

Unlike other types of corporate disclosure, corporate political disclosure (CPD), which is the disclosure of corporate political contributions and the related governing policies and oversight mechanisms, does not provide completely new information to stakeholders. Some of the information disclosed in CPD is available from other public records (e.g. the Federal Election Committee website or OpenSecrets website). Given this unique feature of CPD, it is interesting to investigate the cost and benefit tradeoff for firms of altering their CPD practice in response to policy and political uncertainty.

This study employs recently developed indexes of aggregate economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and a novel dataset of CPD transparency to examine the impact of EPU on CPD transparency and how the proprietary cost of corporate political activities moderates this association. The sample consists of S&P 500 companies from the 2012 to 2019 period.

The authors document that firms mitigate the heightened information asymmetry associated with higher aggregate EPU by increasing CPD transparency. The positive association between EPU and CPD is less pronounced for firms that are more sensitive to EPU, for firms that more actively manage EPU through corporate political contributions or lobbying activities and for firms that are followed by more analysts. The authors also find that more transparent CPD helps to mitigate the information asymmetry caused by heightened EPU. This study’s results hold when the authors control for other types of voluntary corporate disclosure.

This study contributes to the emerging literature on the determinants of CPD transparency by identifying EPU's positive impact on CPD transparency. This study also provides empirical evidence that the proprietary costs arising from the controversial nature of corporate political activities dampen firms' incentives to provide transparent CPD in response to heightened EPU, and that information on corporate political activities gathered and processed by financial analysts seems to lower the marginal benefit to companies of publicizing CPD on their own website.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of polarisation on trust in government.

The authors use the ordered probit technique to model trust as a function of polarisation and various control variables. The authors apply the instrumental variables approach to address potential endogeneity in polarisation, using ethnic diversity as an instrument.

The results reveal that an increase in polarisation reduces trust in central government. However, trust in local government is non-responsive to this polarisation. The estimations controlled for government performance, and the authors found a positive association between government performance and trust in government, which, however, does not alter the relationship between polarisation and trust in government.

In ethnically polarised nations, policymakers should consider decentralisation measures. This can help sustain trust and development support, particularly in regions where citizens prioritise ethnicity over nationality.

The social implications of this research underscore the importance of promoting trust in government to foster social cohesion and stability, particularly in ethnically diverse societies.

The authors find that increased ethnic polarisation reduces trust in the central government, particularly among those prioritising their ethnicity over nationality. This adds a non-performance dimension to government trust literature, suggesting that policies focusing solely on performance may yield limited results. The research extends beyond central government trust to include local governments. Unlike central government, local government trust remains tied to performance attributes unaffected by polarisation. Hence, investing resources through local governments is a viable strategy for enhancing citizen support while mitigating polarisation’s adverse effects.