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Stakeholder capitalism (SC) advocates that organisations should focus on creating long-term value for all key stakeholders rather than maximising short-term profits for shareholders. This paper aims to explore whether and how business organisations have applied stakeholder capitalism principles (SCPs) during the COVID-19 pandemic and how these efforts were communicated in integrated reports.

This study is based on the content analysis of the text extracted from the integrated reports of 22 companies categorised as excellent in the 2020 EY Excellence in Integrated Reporting Award 2020. The research material consisted of paragraphs that reflected how the company observed the SCPs in practice.

The stakeholder responsibility principle was the most represented by the examined companies, followed by the principles of continuous creation, stakeholder engagement and stakeholder cooperation. The COVID-19 pandemic has propelled the necessity of implementing innovative solutions to counteract the virus's spread. It has also spurred the need for two-way digitalised communication between the executives and stakeholders. The new situation also required collaborative approaches in the forms of partnerships, joint initiatives and programmes to ensure employee safety and help communities recover from the social and economic impacts of the pandemic.

This study links SC with integrated reporting (IR) and contributes to the literature by providing new insights into how SCPs have been applied during the COVID-19 pandemic. This discussion suggests that whereas these principles determine how the companies must act to satisfy stakeholders expectations, integrating reporting may help develop a report that is stakeholder-oriented and which responds to their information needs.

Building on the institutional theory perspective on corporate governance change and based on interviews with investor relations (IR) managers in large Japanese companies, this study aims to examine Japanese IR managers’ perceptions of the influence of foreign shareholders on Japan’s corporate governance reform and stakeholder-based system. The paper examines tensions, conflicts and collaborations among different stakeholders involved in corporate governance changes in Japan, especially in the areas of firm ownership, employment relations and boards of directors. The paper explains why convergence does not happen in some large Japanese companies by investigating Japanese managers’ responses to and perceptions of foreign shareholders in multiple corporate contexts.

The author conducted in-depth interviews with ten IR managers at large, listed Japanese companies in Kyoto and Tokyo and two managers at foreign investment banks in Tokyo, between 2018 and 2021.

This paper explores five themes that emerged from my interviews: Chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) mixed perceptions of foreign investors, the effectiveness of CEO compensation and outside directors, managers’ reluctance to accept stock price-driven business strategies, foreign investors’ engagement vs investments in index funds and gender patterns, including the effectiveness of token female outside directors. The Japanese companies the author looked at incorporated foreign shareholders as consultants and adopted a few major shareholder-based customs, such as CEOs communicating with investors, having outside directors, increasing CEO compensation and slimming down unprofitable parts of the business via restructuring and downsizing. Simultaneously, they resisted a few major shareholder-based practices. Foreign shareholders’ pressure revealed tensions and contradictions between the Japanese stakeholder system and shareholder primacy-based customs.

This paper is one of the few qualitative studies that explores Japanese IR managers’ responses to and perceptions of foreign shareholders in corporate governance reform, with a particular focus on ownership, employment relations and board members. This paper provides examples of tension, conflict and cooperation between Japanese managers and foreign investors, as seen through the eyes of Japanese IR managers. Examining changes in Japan’s stakeholder-based system of corporate governance reform enables us to better understand the processes by which, with vigorous pressure from government and foreign shareholders, a non-western country like Japan may adopt shareholder-based customs and how such a change may also lead to institutional changes.

This study aims to provide a critical assessment of developments in the field of voluntary corporate non-financial and sustainability reporting and disclosure (VRD). The assessment is grounded in the empirical material of a three-year research project on integrated reporting (IR).

Alvesson and Deetz’s (2021) critical management framework structures the arguments in this paper. By investigating local phenomena and the extant literature, the authors glean insights that they later critique, drawing on the empirical evidence collected during the research project. Transformative redefinitions are then proposed that point to future opportunities for research on voluntary organisational disclosures.

The authors argue that the mainstream approaches to VRD, namely, incremental information and legitimacy theories, present shortcomings in addressing why and how organisations voluntarily disclose information. First, the authors find that companies adopting the International IR Council’s (IIRC, 2021) IR framework tend to comply with the framework only in an informal, rather than a substantial way. Second, the authors find that, at times, organisations serendipitously chance upon VRD practices such as IR instead of rationally recognising the potential ability of such practices to provide useful information for decision-making by investors. Also, powerful groups in organisations may use VRD practices to establish, maintain or restore power balances in their favour.

The paper’s limitations stem directly from its aim to be a critical reflection. Even when grounded on empirics, a reflection is mainly a subjective effort. Therefore, different researchers could come to different conclusions and offer different lessons from the two case studies.

The different rationales the authors found for VRD should make a case for reporting institutions to tone down any investor-centric rhetoric in favour of more substantial disclosures. The findings imply that reporting organisations should approach the different frameworks with a critical eye and read between the lines of these frameworks to determine whether the purported normative arguments are achievable practice.

The authors reflect on timely and relevant issues linked to recent developments in the VRD landscape. Further, the authors offer possible ways forward for critical research that may rely on different methodological choices, such as interventionist and post-structuralist research.

Both the academic literature and practitioners have long noted the need for an equity investment mechanism for worker-controlled firms that alleviates investor anxieties without undermining internal workplace democracy. The purpose of this paper is to outline one such possible mechanism.

The proposal locks together the interests of workers and external investors, via non-voting shares with dividends set by a pre-agreed value-added sharing formula. Each worker is paid a base wage, with the average across the firm being a pre-defined multiple of the national minimum wage. Any additional surplus is split into a number of equal “slices”, with each share receiving one slice as its dividend, and the average worker receiving a pre-agreed number of slices as a bonus.

Workers have an incentive to maximise their own incomes, and in so doing, will also automatically maximise the dividends received by investors, obviating the need for the shares to have normal voting rights. Working on this principle of aligned interests, the authors also discuss reinvestment, worker ownership of non-voting shares and possibilities for a secondary share market. The authors show how this proposal will be a significant step in aligning the interests of investors with owner-workers in a democratic, negotiated way that shares both risk and returns, thus making worker-controlled firms more attractive to equity investment.

In light of the recognised problem of underinvestment in worker-controlled firms and the risk of their degeneration, this paper will interest both academics and practitioners in employee ownership, co-operatives and various forms of workplace democracy.

Sustainability has long been known to present an epistemic challenge. In the corporate setting, this challenge translates into the difficulties experienced by managers not only in devising solutions to corporate sustainability problems, but even in developing the awareness of the latter. The paper explores how these difficulties may be overcome by corporate stakeholder management policies.

The paper develops a conceptual framework that reconstructs the Hayekian theory of market process in the context of Williamson's (1996) distinction between autonomous and cooperative adaptation.

Applying the Hayekian theory of market process to the process of engagement and collaboration of corporate stakeholders, the paper shows how the latter process may address the epistemic challenge of corporate sustainability and derives implications for the design of business models for sustainability.

The paper informs stakeholder theory in two ways: first, stakeholder theory is given a novel justification in terms of reflecting the growing prominence of cooperative adaptation and second, corporate stakeholder management is shown to be crucial for maximizing not only economic but also sustainability performance.

This chapter highlights how implementing circular economy principles can help companies working with sustainability to move from a reductionist and waste management approach to marketing competitive circular value propositions that intentionally design out waste (e.g. emissions and pollution) by rethinking, reinventing and redesigning the value chain. Schijvens, a Dutch family-owned corporate fashion textile company, acts as a case for exemplifying successful implementation of circular economy principles as a marketing strategy in a sector that struggles with finding solutions to the ethical challenges of producing and marketing textile fashion. The textile industry has, for many years, been accused of production that is based on environmentally harmful processes and conditions that are not socially fair. Circular economy principles provide a range of suggestions to address the ethical challenges occurring from covering the human needs of having clothes to wear. Yet, implementing circular economy principles is not a panacea. It is not only a question of delivering a technological quick fix but also a question of managing the new processes and human mindset guiding the actions in the value chain. This chapter, therefore, outlines reasons for a different perspective on the traditional linear value chain and related implications managers face when undertaking a journey from sustainability based on a reductionist approach to a closed-loop approach. It is argued that implementing circular economy principles by pro-actively managing the value chain processes based on eco-centric dynamic capabilities can provide even more radical changes than the incremental reductionist approach often associated with being a green sustainable company.

This paper explores how a firm's public stand on a social-political issue can be a salient signal of the firm's values, identity and reputation. In particular, it investigates how boycott participation–conceptualized as a cue of a corporation's stand on important social-political issues–may affect the stock market valuation of that corporation, as well as how corporations legitimise their stand on the issues.

The authors employ a mixed-methods design that uses both qualitative techniques (content analysis) and quantitative methods (event study methodology) to examine a sample of US firms who participated in a boycott campaign that sought to call attention to issues of hate speech, misinformation and discriminatory content on social media platform Facebook.

Findings from the qualitative content analysis of company statements show that firms legitimise their stand on, and participation in, the boycott by expressing altruistic values and suggesting to stakeholders that their stand aligns not only with organizational values/convictions but also with the greater social good. Importantly, the event study results show that firms who publicly announced their intention to participate in the boycott, on average, earn a statistically significant positive abnormal stock return of 2.68% in the four days immediately after their announcements.

Findings relate to a specific case of a boycott campaign. Also, the sample size is limited and restricted to US stocks. The signalling value of corporate social advocacy actions may vary across countries due to institutional and cultural differences. Market reaction may also be different for issues that are more charged than the ones examined in this study. Therefore, future research might investigate other markets, use larger sample sizes and consider a broader range of social-political issues.

The presence of significant stock price changes for firms that publicly announced their decision to side with activists on the issue of hate propaganda and misinformation offers potentially valuable insights on the timing of trades for investors and arbitrageurs. Insights from the study also provide a practical resource that can be used to inform organizations' decision-making about such issues.

Taking the lead to push on social-political issues, such as hate propaganda, discrimination, among others, and communicating their stands in a way that speaks to their values and identity, could be rewarding for companies.

This study provides novel evidence on the impact that corporate stances on important social-political issues can have on stock market valuation of firms and therefore extends the existing related research which until now has focused on the impact on consumer purchasing intent and brand loyalty.

This paper aims to establish a theoretical framework that can comprehensively explain the executive compensation in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) within the context of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The author develops a theoretical framework for executive compensation in SOEs from the perspective of Marxist economics and points out that the executives in SOEs are engaged in management labor, and their compensation should adhere to the principle of distribution according to labor contribution.

Based on this theory, the author posits that the continuous upward trend of executive compensation in SOEs, is consistent with the trend of SOEs' ongoing expansion, which reflects a continuous improvement of SOE executives' management labor in both quality and quantity.

It is necessary to start with Marxist economic theory and scientifically study the issue of SOE executive compensation, adhere to the principle of distribution according to work in the context of a socialist market economy and implement the specific guideline of the Party Central Committee; only in this way can the long-term healthy development of SOEs be promoted continuously.

Drawing upon a political economy approach, this article aims to analyze the transformations in the labor market within the context of contemporary capitalism, focusing on the phenomenon of financialization.

Financialization is defined as a distinct wealth pattern marked by a growing proportion of financial assets in capitalist wealth. Within financial markets, corporate performance is continuously assessed, in a process that disciplines management to achieve expected financial results, with consequences throughout corporate management.

We find that this phenomenon has implications for labor management, resulting in the intensification of labor processes and the adoption of insecure forms of employment, leading to the fractalization of work. These two mechanisms, added to the indebtedness of workers, constitute three elements for disciplining labor in contemporary capitalism.

We argue that these forms of discipline constitute a subsumption of labor to finance, resulting in an increase in labor exploitation. This formulation of the relationship between financialization and changes in the realm of labor also contributes to understanding the unrealizing potential of social free time in contemporary capitalism.

This paper aims to analyse the longitudinal performative effects of accounting, focusing on how accounting shapes the stability/instability of economic frames over time.

To explore the performative effects of accounting over time, a longitudinal case study narrates the transformation of a large, listed manufacturing company's financial strategy over 20 years. Using extensive document collection, the authors trace the shift from an “industrial” frame to a “shareholder value” frame in the mid-1990s, followed by the gradual entrenchment of this shareholder value frame until its decline in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008.

Our findings show how accounting has different performative temporalities, capable of precipitating sudden shifts between different economic frames and stabilising an ever-more entrenched and narrowly defined enactment of a specific frame. We conceptualise these different temporalities as performative moments and performative momentum respectively, explaining how accounting produces these performative effects over time. Moreover, in contrast to extant accounting research, the authors provide insight into the performative role of accounting not only in contested but also “cold” situations marked by consensus regarding the overarching economic frame.

Our paper draws attention to the longitudinal performative effects of accounting. In particular, the analysis of how accounting entrenches and refines economic frames over time adds to prior research, which has focused mainly on the contestation and instability of framing processes.