Search results

Neo-institutional theory suggests that organisations change occurs when institutional contradictions, caused by exogenous and endogenous dynamics, increase over time to the point where change can no longer be resisted. Human praxis will result, but only when sufficiently powerful interests are motivated to act. This paper aims to examine the role that the accreditation of business schools can play in increasing institutional contradictions and hence fostering organisational change towards stakeholder engagement and engagement with social responsibility and sustainability issues. Numerous accreditations are promulgated within the higher education and business school contexts and a number of these relate to, or have aspects that relate to, ethics, social responsibility and sustainability.

The paper first analyses the take up of accreditations across UK business schools and then uses a case study to illustrate and explore stakeholder engagement and changes related to ethics, social responsibility and sustainability linked to accreditation processes.

Accreditations are found to be an increasingly common interest for UK business schools. Further, a number of these accreditations have evolved to incorporate issues related to ethics, social responsibility and sustainability that may cause institutional contradictions and may, therefore, have the potential to foster organisational change. Accreditation alone, however, is not sufficient and the authors find that sufficiently powerful interests need to be motivated to act and enable human praxis to affect change.

This paper draws on previous research that considers the role of accreditation in fostering change that has also been carried out in healthcare organisations, public and professional bodies. Its findings stem from an individual case study and as such further research is required to explore whether these findings can be extended and apply more generally in business schools and universities in different contexts.

This paper concludes by recommending that the newly established UK & Ireland Chapter of PRME encourages and supports signatory schools to further embed ethics, social responsibility and sustainability into all aspects of university life in the UK. This also provides an opportunity to engage with the accrediting bodies in order to further support the inclusion of stakeholder engagement and issues related to this agenda in their processes.

This paper contributes by introducing accreditation as an institutional pressure that may lead indirectly to organisational change and supports this with new evidence from an illustrative case study. Further, it draws on the role of institutional contradictions and human praxis that engender organisational change.

This paper is based upon the initial findings of a CIMA research project into the way in which corporate performance measurement systems are influenced by the use of shareholder value management techniques. It compares and contrasts the techniques in use in a sample of 10 companies that either explicitly use shareholder value techniques also known as Value‐Based Management (VBM), or explicitly do not use such techniques. The analysis undertaken is based upon the finding of semi‐structured interviews with company representatives which formed the first part of the data collection process of the project. The analysis traces the interactions between corporate objectives, decision making criteria, performance measurement systems and executive incentive schemes in order to develop an understanding of the effects of such shareholder value techniques upon corporate behaviour. The literature reviewed suggests that the other aspects of the planning and control system should be aligned with the corporate objectives whether a company has adopted VBM or not. Therefore this research contributes new evidence on the use of VBM techniques in the UK and also more generally on whether VBM and non‐VBM companies internal planning and control systems are aligned.

Employers in the UK are under a legal obligation to ensure that their recruitment procedures conform with the Sex Discrimination Act (1975), which states that employers must not discriminate or indicate any hidden intention to discriminate against a potential employee on the grounds of their sex. Yet the very fact that many jobs are still viewed as ‘male’ or ‘female’ is often sufficient to prevent the non‐dominant gender group from applying for those positions (Ray, 1990). Managerial jobs have traditionally been male dominated and organisations are under a legal obligation to ensure that their recruitment procedures do not indicate any intention to discriminate, either overtly or covertly. Therefore, organisations need not only to demonstrate that they have no intention to discriminate, especially in traditionally male dominated occupations such as management, but they also need to ensure that their intention not to discriminate is clearly and explicitly communicated to potential job applicants (Ray, 1990). The aim of this article is to address the similarities and differences between the job search experiences of unemployed female and male managers, and to present the research findings from an in‐depth study of unemployed British managers.

Evidence suggests habitual entrepreneurs (i.e. those with prior business ownership experience) are a widespread phenomenon. Appreciation of the existence of multiple entrepreneurial acts gives rise to the need to examine differences between habitual and novice entrepreneurs (i.e. those with no prior business experience as a founder, inheritor or purchaser of a business). This paper synthesizes human capital and cognitive perspectives to highlight behavioral differences between habitual and novice entrepreneurs. Issues relating to opportunity identification and information search, opportunity exploitation and learning are discussed. Avenues for future research are highlighted.

This paper aims to clarify what ‘narrative analysis’ may entail when it is assumed that interview accounts can be treated as (collections of) narratives. What is considered a narrative and how these may be analyzed is open to debate. After suggesting an approach of how to deal with narrative analysis, the authors critically discuss how far it might offer insights into a particular accounting case.

After having explained what the authors’ view on narrative analysis is, and how this is linked with the extant literature, the authors examine the socialisation processes of two early career accountants that have been articulated in an interview context.

The approach to narrative analysis set out in this paper could help to clarify how and why certain interpretations from an interview are generated by a researcher. The authors emphasise the importance of discussing a researcher’s process of discovery when an interpretive approach to research is adopted.

The application of any method, and what a researcher thinks can be distilled from this, depends on the research outlook he/she has. As the authors adopt an interpretive approach to research in this paper, they acknowledge that the interpretations of narratives, and what they deem to be narratives, will be infused by their own perceptions.

The authors believe that the writing-up of qualitative research from an interpretive stance would benefit from an explicit acceptance of the equivocal nature of interpretation. The way in which they present and discuss the narrative analyses in this paper intends to bring this to the fore.

Whenever someone says he/she engages in narrative analysis, both the “narrative” and “analysis” part of “narrative analysis” need to be explicated. The authors believe that this only happens every so often. This paper puts forward an approach of how more clarity on this might be achieved by combining two frameworks in the extant literature, so that the transparency of the research is enhanced.

One of the features of current society is that of protest against environmental issues and this paper considers protest against road building and the ecoprotest movement. In doing so it considers both the local inhabitants and new age travellers who are involved in such protest to show that not only does ecoprotest, as a form of protest, raise the profile of environmental issues within public discourse but also opens up space for such discourse. Of greater significance is the effect which the ecoprotest, movement has upon a local sense of identity and community. Indeed the travellers themselves, through their action and engagement, demonstrate that the key determinant of community identity is grounded in self‐belief and shared aspirations rather than in an externally imposed definition or in any economic imperatives. This paper shows that the migration of this sense of self‐belief into mainstream society serves to demonstrate that community spirit and identity are extant in modern society but need a catalyst for their re‐emergence. In doing so the role of ecoprotest points towards a possible mechanism for the re‐emergence of an active and participatory sense of community identity within society as a whole.

This paper is located within the corporate social reporting and stakeholder management literature. It is concerned with the use of the Internet as a way of communicating with stakeholders and the extent to which this communication is or is not two‐way. The evidence from the electricity industry in the UK is that the Internet is used but this use is selective and there is little true dialogue. It appears that the Internet provides an opportunity for greater corporate accountability in the future but whether this potential will be fulfilled is as yet unclear. Further research of a longitudinal nature is required to see how the Internet and more specifically corporate social or stakeholder reporting develops over time.

Purpose – In this article, we examine the nature and the extent of corporate environmental and climate change disclosures in Bangladesh.

Design/methodology/approach – For this purpose, we have undertaken a content analysis of annual reports related to the year 2008 and websites of the 100 largest companies (according to market capitalization) listed on the Dhaka Stock Exchange. We have used 24 content analysis categories to capture the relevant disclosures related to climate change and other environmental issues.

Findings – Key findings of our analysis suggest that the level of environmental and climate change disclosures is very low in Bangladesh. Although 91% of companies made disclosures in at least one category, most companies disclosed information only on the “energy usage” category, which is a mandatory requirement. Even fewer companies made disclosures in the specific areas of climate change. No disclosure was made in the significant categories such as GHG emissions. The second most popular category related to climate change was adaptation measures. Among the other environmental disclosures, a significant finding is that only 5% of (website 6%) companies disclosed that they had an effluent treatment plant. Closer examination of the nature of disclosures suggests that most of the disclosures are positive and descriptive in nature.

Originality/value – As far as we are aware, this is the first study of its kind in Bangladesh which systematically examines corporate climate change disclosures as a particular focus of research.