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Companies develop and implement environmental initiatives in particular national governance and institutional contexts. The purpose of this paper is to study how the background governance conditions of legal systems, economic policies and national culture enable or impede the relationship between corporate environmental performance (CEP) and lagged corporate financial performance (CFP).

This is an empirical study of 427 MNCs headquartered in 22 different countries. The authors merged data from the SiRi database (generally known as SustainAnalytics now), which contains ratings of stakeholder relations for 427 large corporations with publicly available data from Datastream.

Drawing on the new institutionalism in economics and sociology, the authors show that common-law systems and high economic freedom in a company’s home country tend to strengthen the CEP-CFP link. In addition, the home-country cultural variables of uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and (to a lesser extent) masculinity may impede the deployment of CEP for maximum financial gain at the organizational level. The macrolevel analysis starts to move the field toward an understanding of the particular national governance configurations that provide the most supportive conditions for any CEP-CFP links.

One of the central questions in the field of organizations and the natural environment is about the background conditions that may incentivize and reward firms to be more environmentally responsive. The paper addresses this issue through a nation-level investigation of the background governance conditions that may help or hinder the relationship between CEP and CFP.

Purpose – This paper reflects on how does the mode, in which we ask questions, affect the responses? It explores the differences between the responses to the same questions obtained through two different modes – depth interviews and self-administered questionnaires (SAQs).

Approach – This paper is based on a series of serendipitous but enlightening insights that were obtained while conducting research that sought to examine the drivers of corporate environmentalism in firms based in Eastern and Western economies. The methodology adopted in the research project involved conducting depth interviews with senior-most managers in business organizations in India (Eastern) and New Zealand (Western). The insights that form the basis for this paper were gained when some managers treated the list of questions in the interview guide as a structured open-ended questionnaire and sent back detailed written responses.

Findings – This paper reports that the written responses obtained through SAQs in this project were different both in form and content; they were staid, reserved, clichéd and aimed at being politically correct. In contrast the responses to the same question asked in the interviews were open and candid admissions. Interview responses stood up to the triangulation tests, while the written responses did not. These differences were particularly evident in the eastern context.

Research implications – While both SAQs and interviews are prone to social desirability bias, this paper suggests that there is a greater opportunity to reduce social desirability bias in interviews. This is especially true if a trained interviewer can convince the participants of the credibility, importance and legitimacy of the study.

Originality/value – This paper contributes in two important ways:1.It addresses the issue of how responses to the same question differ across SAQs and depth interviews in strategy and management research.2.It also examines whether this effect differs across Eastern and Western organizational contexts.

This paper describes how Business and Society, a compulsory subject for all undergraduate students in an Australian business school, is used for a transformational approach. We explain how reflection is central in both the objectives and the pedagogy of the subject. Students conduct individual research projects and present that in a two-minute video presentation. The reflective activities are not only designed to develop a capability for reflection but also to show how reflection is an integral part of professional practice, grounded in the concept of reflection as “turning things over in the mind to a purpose,” after John Dewey. Developing these activities has required the teaching staff to reflect on the effectiveness and relevance of these aspects and to examine the various ways in which “reflection” is used in tertiary education. In the paper, we describe and explain some of the distinctive features of the course, and explain the practical, but conceptually sound, approach to ethics which underpins the design and teaching and show how it is possible to address the notions of the good life in a plural society. We also consider questions of assessment, including the assessment of reflective capacity and issues of moderation with large classes and multiple markers.