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The Nature of Business Policy Business policy — or general management — is concerned with the following six major functions:

Merely being known as a highly ethical or strong performer cannot shield a company from every kind of crisis. From product failures to environmental and social issues, a brand’s ability to manage crises and rapidly regain consumer trust is essential. This study aims to explore whether consumer perceptions of a brands’ prior commitments to two different areas of corporate responsibility (social and product responsibility) alleviate the postcrisis attribution of accountability and further build brand resilience, examining differences between two types of crisis situations – values versus performance crises.

A scenario-based online survey on product versus ethical labor issues was conducted. The data were collected from a highly valid, nationwide sample set of more than a thousand US consumers. Multigroup structural equation modeling was used as the primary data analysis method.

A brand’s precrisis commitment to social responsibility was found to decrease attribution of accountability across both types of crises. It also strengthened brand resilience, but this effect was more prevalent in a performance than a values crisis. The effects of precrisis commitment to product responsibility on brand resilience were minimal or insignificant across crisis types.

Previous research underexplores which types of corporate responsibility commitments provide a firm with a better protection against crises. This study significantly advances the knowledge regarding the type of commitments that can substantially increase brand resilience, which supports the rationale of making stronger commitments to social responsibility than to product responsibility. Practical insights are provided into how investments in corporate social responsibility help alleviate consumers’ negative perceptions during the outbreak of a brand crisis and build more brand muscle that enables resilience against future crises.

This paper aims to identify how the news media cover organizational crisis responsibility and crisis response strategies and, if at all, how they differ by crisis types.

The approach takes the form of a content analysis of level of responsibility (individual versus organizational level) and organizational response strategies in news coverage of major crisis events during 2006 in three newspapers.

Significant differences were found between preventable crises and accidental crises: most preventable crises news coverage focused more on the individual level of responsibility, while accidental crises news used the organizational level of responsibility. The significant differences of organizational response strategies indicated that preventable crises news coverage frequently reported denial strategies, while accidental crisis news covered deal with strategies more.

The study is limited to the samples of the three newspapers and the period 2006.

This study suggests that crisis managers should always check the crisis news coverage, and media bias and orientation, and try to have good relations with the media to deliver the right message to the public during a crisis.

Despite the importance of the media's role in the public's perception of crisis responsibility, there is a lack of systematic analysis of level of crisis responsibility.

Undertaking responsibility is basic to moral behaviour. However, the explicit act of undertaking responsibility may be derived from various motives. The purpose here is to investigate to what extent organisations tend to bound the level of responsibility and to disclose some of the different motives of undertaking responsibility. This is done by employing four different theories of behaviour which relate to conformity, compliance, needs and moral development. Although none of these theories directly treats the question of responsibility, an attempt is made to apply each to it. By way of a summary, six generalised types of responsibility are suggested: responsibility based on anxiety, shame, guilt, arrangement, ethics and freedom. Furthermore, an organisational boundary line of responsibility is suggested.

Considering rapid digitalization development, this study examines the impacts of digital technology innovation on social responsibility in platform enterprises.

The study applies the event study method and cross-sectional regression analysis, taking 168 digital technology innovations for social responsibility issued by 88 listed platform enterprises from 2011 to 2022 to study the impact of digital technology innovations for social responsibility announcements of different announcement content and platform attributes on the stock market value of platform enterprises.

The results show that, first, the positive stock market reaction is produced on the same day as the digital technology innovation announcement. Second, the announcement of the platform’s public social responsibility and the announcement of co-innovation and radical innovation bring more positive stock market reactions. In addition, the announcements mentioned above issued by trading platforms bring more positive stock market reactions. Finally, the social responsibility attribution characteristics of the announcement did not have a significant differentiated impact on the stock market reaction.

Most scholars have studied digital technology innovation for social responsibility through modeling rather than second-hand data to empirically examine. This study uses second-hand data with the instrumental stakeholder theory to provide a new research perspective on platform social responsibility. In addition, in order to explore the different impacts of digital technology innovation on social responsibility, this study has classified digital technology innovation for social responsibility according to its social responsibility and digital technology innovation characteristics.

This paper aims to classify different corporate responsibility (CR) actions into three types – philanthropy, CR integration and CR innovation – and examines different forms of corporate engagement with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) through this categorization. The focus is on the societal and business outcomes of engagement.

The study analyzes 20 business‐NGO collaborations of three case companies – Hindustan Unilever, Nokia and Stora Enso. Cases are chosen based on revelatory sampling and data are gathered through documentary research of corporate sustainability reports, project reports and websites. Data analysis focuses on engagement forms, business and societal outcomes of engagement and utilizes a categorization of CR.

Different CR types involve different forms of cooperation ranging from sponsorship to partnership. Furthermore, CR integration and CR innovation seem to have more potential for long‐term positive business outcomes than philanthropy. In terms of societal outcomes, CR innovation seems to have the highest potential in creating local income‐generating mechanisms and supporting local self‐sufficiency. A main suggestion of the study is that more in‐depth case studies of CR projects should be conducted to develop and improve indicators for business and societal outcomes.

First, the paper applies a new pragmatic categorization of CR types. Second, it studies empirically a topic that has received relatively little attention – business‐NGO collaboration. Third, it analyzes the business and societal outcomes of different types of business‐NGO engagement.

Empirical studies on corporate social responsibility disclosures have been conducted in Western countries to consider the possible sources of pressure for disclosure and also to examine the effect of corporate size, systematic risk, social constraints and management decision horizon upon such disclosure. This paper undertakes an empirical study in India, in order to extend the understanding of specific relationships between individual corporate characteristics and the types of social responsibility disclosures that public sector companies make. One hundred annual reports from ten industries are analysed use to consider the impact of four independent variables (size, industry, profitability, and presence of social responsibility committee) on the number of disclosures in each of the seven categories (environment, energy, fair business practices, human resources, community involvement, product safety and other disclosures). Regression analysis revealed, amongst other findings, that 28% of the variation in total number of disclosures is explained by four independent variables and that company size is the most significant variable.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss aspects of responsibility in relation to organizational contexts, the main focus being responsibility for consequences we cannot reach. Responsibility is a major underpinning of business administration and management and also an aspect of everyday life. Responsibility is about responding, to act as an answer to previous action/s, but we never know all consequences of our actions.

Literature from management, HRM studies and from philosophy scholars is used to discover different perspectives of responsibility and a typology of responsibility handling is developed.

In total, three types of responsibility are suggested and discussed in relation to managerial and organizational practices. The main contribution is the typology of responsibility combined with the relational focus of managerial and organisational processes. Imagining, fantasy and care are shown as important for the developing of responsibility.

The suggested typology is theoretically developed without empirical studies behind.

A conclusion is that valuing of long‐term survival of humanity and nature must be built into our judgments and our assessments processes in everyday organizational life, if we should be able to act responsibly.

The concept of responsibility is currently intensively discussed, because of successes and disappointments of the CSR movements, because of global economy, and because of climate changes, etc. The suggestion of three types of responsibility in this paper can contribute to sorting out theoretical and practical possibilities in different contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how customers respond to a service provider’s invitation to share responsibility for the experience of an “impersonal” service that is not customized but available to all customers on an equal footing; specifically to assess the extent to which the tendency to psychological reactance moderates their responses.

Four studies investigate the effects of such invitations on perceptions of shared responsibility, the mechanism underlying that process, the effect of trait reactance on susceptibility to an invitation, and the extent to which a predisposition to reactance moderates the effect of an invitation on willingness to share blame for service failure.

Service customers are more likely to feel a sense of shared responsibility and less likely to experience reactance in response to a “reciprocal” invitation to participate in “co-creation” of the experience than to a more “unilateral” invitation. That heightened perception of shared responsibility was restricted to low-reactance individuals, who were also more willing to share the blame for service failure in response to a unilateral invitation and even more so when it was reciprocal. The willingness of high-reactance individuals was unaffected by the type of invitation.

Whereas the relevant literature has focussed mainly on person-to-person service transactions, the studies reported here show how customers may be converted into active partners in an “impersonal” service encounter.

Discrimination against workers because of their family responsibilities can violate federal law, yet scholars know little about the context surrounding perceived family responsibilities discrimination (FRD). This chapter investigates both the types of caregiving responsibilities that put workers at risk of FRD and the organizational contexts that give rise to perceived FRD.

We identify features of FRD which make detecting it particularly difficult and theorize the mechanisms by which caregiving responsibilities and organizational contexts lead to perceived FRD. We draw on data from the 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce for our empirical analysis.

Caregivers who provide both child and eldercare are more likely to perceive FRD than caregivers who provide one type of care, as are people who experience high levels of family-to-work interference and who spend more daily time on childcare. Certain family-friendly and meritocratic organizational contexts are associated with lower perceived FRD.

We measure perceptions, not actual discrimination on the basis of family care responsibilities. Our research cannot pinpoint the factors which intensify or lessen actual discrimination, just perceptions of it.

By pinpointing the characteristics of organizations in which perceived FRD occurs, this chapter shows how organizations can create workplaces in which perceived FRD is less likely.