For-profit Corporations Research Articles

A Precise Description of the Economic Responsibility of the Department of Purchases and Storehouses According to The Concepts of Effectiveness and Efficiency: A New Initiative to Enrich the Thought of CSR

Purpose: This study aims to identify and describe the economic responsibility of PWD, based on the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency. Method: To determine and describe the economic responsibilities of the departments that make up the FOS in any corporation, the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency in accomplishing the tasks assigned to those departments were chosen, taking into account the criteria for evaluating the level of quality of effectiveness and efficiency. Result: Through the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency in completing tasks, this study was able to determine and describe the economic responsibility for PWD that was chosen to be the subject of this study, as follows: Providing the tangible and intangible needs for other departments included in the corporation’s FOS in a timely manner, with the specified specifications and at the lowest possible cost. Originality/Value: The idea of this study, which depends on the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency in performing tasks, can be adopted in defining and describing the economic responsibilities of the departments included in the FOS of any for-profit corporation. The economic responsibility of the departments lies in the extent of their commitment to the standards of effectiveness and efficiency in the performance of the tasks assigned to them. This study is an enrichment of the thought of CSR and it will be considered the starting point for many studies and research in this field.

Examining the "Culture of Assessment" in Public Libraries

The introduction of the New Public Management (NPM) approach to public libraries globally brought with it a quality management paradigm typical of that used in for-profit corporations, characterized by an audit-intensive environment. This led to a desire for a “culture of assessment” to be the preferred standard within public libraries, largely in response to the threat of budget reductions and library closures. This review examines literature from the last two decades on the impact of this strategy, including themes such as the apparent consensus around library value (both in terms of qualitative facets and quantitative economic measures such as return on investment) and traditional and more recent approaches to measuring that value in both research and professional practice publications. Issues identified in the literature with the quantitative emphasis and threat narrative of the culture of assessment are discussed, as well as studies which examine the direct impact of NPM’s neoliberal ideology on public libraries.

Care for a Profit?

We vindicate the widespread intuition that there is something morally problematic with for-profit corporations providing care to young children and elders. But instead of putting forward an empirical argument showing that for-profit corporations score worse than not-for-profits when it comes to meeting the basic needs of these vulnerable groups, we develop a philosophical argument about the nature of the relationship between a care organisation, its role-occupants, and care recipients. We argue that the correlation between profit and lower-quality care is a result of intrinsic features of a for-profit model, combined with conceptual features of meaningful caring relationships, such that non-profits are the most reliable institutional providers of adequate care. Our claim is that care requires a kind of commitment that for-profit institutions are constituted to avoid, and that non-profit institutions are constituted to embrace.

Mainstreaming Standardized Sustainability Reporting: Comparing Fortune 50 Corporations’ and U.S. News & World Report’s Top 50 Global Universities’ Sustainability Reports

Research has shown that sustainability reporting can positively influence organizational accountability and transparency. However, little research has been done to compare how sectors present their sustainability efforts. This research uses content analysis to examine how the two sectors leading reporting efforts detail their work. Specifically, sustainability reports published in 2020 were sought from the Fortune 50 and the top 50 institutions from U.S. News & World Report (USNWR)’s Best Global University rankings to examine compliance with the standard reporting frameworks and how the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals were presented. Results suggest Fortune 500 companies and educational institutions did not report sustainability in the same fashion, nor did either grouping follow a standardized reporting framework. For-profit corporations were more likely to publish a stand-alone sustainability report and more likely to address more of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Evaluating the Quality of Corporations' Commitment to their Economic Responsibilities: A Theoretical Study to enrich the Thought of CSR

Abstract -- The researcher presented the following argument, which is that, making a profit is not a sufficient indicator of the corporation’s commitment to its economic responsibility. The profit figure appearing in the financial statements indicates that there is a commitment by the corporation to its economic responsibility, but it does not reflect the level of quality of that commitment -whether the commitment is poor, good or excellent. For this reason, the researcher suggested the necessity of evaluating the economic responsibilities of the departments that make up the organizational structure of the corporation and contribute to achieving that profit. Unfortunately, the thought of CSR did not specify and describe those responsibilities. Therefore, this study is conducted as an attempt to get out of this predicament. This study aims to identify and describe the economic responsibilities of the departments included in the FOS of the corporation as the economic entities that contribute to achieving profit and through which the quality of the corporation's commitment to its economic responsibility can be judged. To determine and describe the economic responsibilities of the departments that make up the organizational structure in any corporation, the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency in accomplishing the functions assigned to those departments were selected as an approach to define those responsibilities, with the need to define criteria for evaluating the quality of effectiveness and efficiency.Through the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency in completing functions, this study was able to determine and describe the economic responsibilities for the senior management, the purchasing department, the production department and the marketing department that were chosen to be the subject of this study as they made the most impact on the profit figure. The idea of this study, which depends on the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency in performing the functions, can be adopted in defining and describing the economic responsibilities of the departments included in the FOS of any for-profit corporation. This study is an enrichment of the thought of CSR, and it will be considered as the starting point for many studies and research in this field. 

Pump Technology Interchange—As Embraced by Dr. S. Gopalakrishnan, Vice President, Technology of Flowserve Pump Division

Abstract Himself a major technical team player in a for-profit corporation, the stance adopted by Dr. S. Gopalakrishnan vis à vis the wider engineering community is examined and found to be instructive for technology leadership in general. First, in the context of his particular experience, are highlighted the mutual benefits of a corporation maintaining relationships with universities. Then come the similar advantages of his participation in professional societies and symposia and the attendant contributions to the open literature, including the competitive drive for doing so. Such activity fortuitously led him to the more direct relationships with competitors that characterize a research consortium of manufacturers in the same industry.

Philanthropy and the For-profit Corporation: The Benefit Corporation as the New Form of Firm Altruism

Currently the issue of sustainability is at the heart of the debate on corporate governance of business companies. In Europe, an intense activity of revising and updating European rules applicable to financial markets and company law has started. In Italy, such debate became more intense after the legal transplant of the US benefit corporation model in late 2015. The Italian società benefit allows, through a voluntary choice of the founding members or the shareholders’ meeting, to internalise values typical of corporate social responsibility in the articles of association, making them legally binding on the company and the directors. Considering the traditional dichotomy between for-profit entities and non-profit entities, hybrid models such as the benefit corporation appear to struggle in finding an adequate space within capitalist systems and corporate governance theories. This study attempts to offer an interpretative key for understanding these hybrid models, abandoning the classical homo economicus paradigm to embrace a reading based on behavioural law and economics and the Yale approach to economic analysis of law, according to which altruism and beneficence should be considered as ends in themselves, as goods desired by people and for which they are willing to pay a price. In this line of reasoning, benefit corporations and other hybrid models, because of their ability to bring altruistic values into the corporate purpose, departing from shareholder value maximisation as the raison d'être of the corporate form, can be considered as a further manifestation of ‘firm altruism’, given that they are characterised by a deep and lasting impact on the environment and civil society.

An Organization's role in anchoring community health: How for-profit hospitals' balance corporate and social responsibility

Hospitals serve as anchor institutions by using economic and institutional power to perform community outreach and engagement in ways that benefit local residents. Because the percentage of for-profit hospitals is growing, it is important to understand if and why for-profit hospitals act as community anchors, even if not legally required to do so like more often studied nonprofit hospitals. Using an inductive, qualitative approach, we conducted interviews with 28 for-profit hospital leaders, personnel, and members of hospital advocacy organizations, followed by thematic analysis. Participants believed for-profit hospitals engage in similar anchor activities as nonprofit hospitals due to being motivated by corporate responsibility to shareholders, social responsibility to meet local expectations that hospitals of any type should strive towards healthier communities, and to adapt to the growing focus on health equity. In carrying out anchor work, for-profit hospitals identify strategic reasons to strengthen bonds with potential patient bases and balance both community and business commitments.

Benefit Corporations in the U.S.

The benefit corporation (BC) is a for-profit corporation required to create a positive impact on workers, communities, society, and environment. The purpose of this paper is to explore how BCs reconcile dominant and alternative frames of profit. This study presented here explores three BCs in the U.S. through a dual-method approach based on observations and interviews. The study reveals how BC members understand and express the idea of profit. Furthermore, it shows the formation of an alternative frame of profit and elucidates three processes whereby the dominant and alternative ideas are reconciled. It highlights both interpretive capabilities and limitations of social actors within the dominant discourse of the contemporary social-economic system.

A Study on Improvement Plans for Public Interest Performance and Tax Balance: Focusing on public interest, and tax benefits

A Study on Improvement Plans for Public Interest Performance and Tax Balance: Focusing on public interest, and tax benefits

Workplace Integrated Safety and Health Program Uptake in Nursing Homes: Associations with Ownership.

Workers in nursing homes are at high risk of occupational injury. Understanding whether—and which—nursing homes implement integrated policies to protect and promote worker health is crucial. We surveyed Directors of Nursing (DON) at nursing homes in three US states with the Workplace Integrated Safety and Health (WISH) assessment, a recently developed and validated instrument that assesses workplace policies, programs, and practices that affect worker safety, health, and wellbeing. We hypothesized that corporate and for-profit nursing homes would be less likely to report policies consistent with Total Worker Health (TWH) approaches. For each of the five validated WISH domains, we assessed the association between being in the lowest quartile of WISH score and ownership status using multivariable logistic regression. Our sample included 543 nursing homes, 83% which were corporate owned and 77% which were for-profit. On average, DONs reported a high implementation of TWH policies, as measured by the WISH. We did not find an association between either corporate ownership or for-profit status and WISH score for any WISH domain. Results were consistent across numerous sensitivity analyses. For-profit status and corporate ownership status do not identify nursing homes that may benefit from additional TWH approaches.

Negotiating the value of “corporations’ capital” in Norwegian Early Childhood Education and Care provision

ABSTRACT In this article I investigate how corporate Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) providers negotiate their position by contributing to a national ECEC policy development process. I discuss how their political engagement connects to changes in the institutional arrangements of the ECEC sector. The ECEC provider corporations’ written responses to a policy consulting process are obtained and analyzed in light of Bourdieu-inspired theories of institutonalized organizational fields. The proposed new regulations are both countered and reframed in their responses. Providers with corporate organizational structures in unison call for for firmer national guidelines on ECEC centre quality and funding. I interpret their responses as attempts to increase the relevance of ‘corporations’ capital’ over the raditional, local network embedded capital forms in quality ECEC provision. At this juncture, the corporate providers failed to shift competence from municipalities to national ECEC authorities The following parliamentary debate illuminates how non-profit provision in corporate organizational structures may appeal to left-wing parties rejecting commercial welfare provisions. A subgroup of for-profit corporate providers emphasizes sector cost-efficiency, connecting strongly to right-wing politicians’ ambitions to limit public spending. Corporate providers hence represent an impetus for institutional change, able to build allies across the whole left–right spectre of politics.

Expanding Conflicts of Interest in Public Health Research

Expanding Conflicts of Interest in Public Health Research

Are trade unions a stakeholder in corporate social responsibility? An empirical study

Trade unions and CSR are two of the self-regulating outcomes of the exploitative intentions of for-profit corporations and business climate. These exploitative intentions have increasingly affected these organisations' social and environmental sustainability and have also brought them in negative limelight, which has harmed their social image and reputation. Its impacts are seen in further repulsion of external stakeholders and investors from these firms. To avoid falling in this rabbit hole of unsustainability and repulsion, many organizations have started looking for strategies to achieve a socially sustainable image. This study investigates whether higher levels of trade union representation can influence employee friendliness, natural resource use, and social controversies. Drawing from the existing literature on CSR, it also investigates the impact of management effectiveness and shareholders effectiveness on these constructs of CSR and social sustainability. It also further extend these relationships to explore their association with business ethics and CSR reporting. The results of the study demonstrate trade unions as a strategic resource in CSR and sustainability, along with management effectiveness and propose a further exploration of a collective framework between them to enhance environmental and social sustainability.

Hall of Mirrors: Corporate Philanthropy and Strategic Advocacy

AbstractInformation is central to designing effective policy, and policy makers often rely on competing interests to separate useful from biased information. We show how this logic of virtuous competition can break down, using a new and comprehensive data set on U.S. federal regulatory rulemaking for 2003–2016. For-profit corporations and nonprofit entities are active in the rulemaking process and are arguably expected to provide independent viewpoints. Policy makers, however, may not be fully aware of the financial ties between some firms and nonprofits—grants that are legal and tax-exempt but hard to trace. We document three patterns that suggest that these grants may distort policy. First, we show that shortly after a firm donates to a nonprofit, the nonprofit is more likely to comment on rules on which the firm has also commented. Second, when a firm comments on a rule, the comments by nonprofits that recently received grants from the firm’s foundation are systematically closer in content to the firm’s own comments, relative to comments submitted by other nonprofits. Third, the final rule’s discussion by a regulator is more similar to the firm’s comments on that rule when the firm’s recent grantees also commented on it.

Competition, Grading, and Group Work: The Path to Cooperation

Assigning group work in library science courses facilitates student learning about the role of competition and cooperation in management. Competition is embedded in American culture, but one way to succeed is to sabotage colleagues, which harms organizations by reducing overall performance. Thus, organizations should establish goals and evaluation measures that favor internal cooperation over competition. While libraries are less competitive than for-profit corporations, competition does not disappear. In library education, a grading system that overly encourages competition can hinder learning by making it reasonable for students to consider their colleagues as rivals. A structured group work assignment can give students valuable experience in working cooperatively to achieve goals. Group size and formation, the emergence of group leaders, and professor availability are important parts of the learning experience. One suggested innovation is to require a graded log to encourage full participation by all students and to force students to analyze group dynamics as preparation for their future careers.

Corporate Activism and Corporate Identity

Research shows that corporate engagement in social issues often backfires. We suggest this may be because the corporate organizational form is viewed as inappropriate for social activism in general and/or because a particular campaign or organizational action is viewed as hypocritical. To test these ideas, we conduct three studies. In the first study, we examine subject ratings of 90 real-world corporate social movement campaigns and show that subjects support campaigns that involve nonprofit or public organizations, which are of an appropriate organizational form, and penalize campaigns that are inconsistent with the firm business practices, which may be seen as hypocritical. In a second study, we experimentally validate these effects by directly manipulating appropriateness of organizational form and hypocrisy of organizational action. We show that benefit corporations (B Corps) do not suffer from the same hypocrisy penalty in donation and recruitment as do other for-profit corporations, evidencing an interaction between organizational form and action. In a third study, we show that firm collaboration with a social movement organization (SMO) reduces the inappropriateness penalty, while collaboration with an SMO that has organizational practices consistent with the campaign issue reduces the hypocrisy penalty.

The Seeds of Their Own Destruction: Lessons from Utopian Experiments in Nineteenth-Century America, Part 1

Nineteenth-century America provided an unusually fertile ground for economic and social experimentation. The combination of young nation's commercial and religious freedom and its expansive frontier enabled hundreds of social entrepreneurs to attempt utopian societies and--according to their ambitions--a template for changing the world. None of them succeeded, but their parallel challenges provide clear lessons from their failures. This paper focuses on the some of the best organized and longest-lived experiments, each starting with the compelling vision promoted by the community's founder, tracing the problems that plagued their community as it grew, and how their responses to those responses led to further problems in a cycle that eventually undid their societies. We follow up those examples with a discussion how progress was ultimately achieved in the larger societies that these experimental communities had inhabited, including how the lack of ideological constraints enabled them to succeed where the utopians had failed. The overall paper is developed in three parts: Part 1: The Other American Dream Part 2: This Company Town Will Be Wonderful Part 3: Intelligent Design vs. Evolution of Societies The present submission is Part 1, describing the rise and fall of Hopedale, Oneida, and Amana as socialistic communities, and their respective revivals as successful for-profit corporations. We describe the fundamental challenges to societal viability that they all faced, including the incentive problem, the public choice problem, and the knowledge problem.

Relational Enforcement of Stock Exchange Rules

Stock exchanges, as regulating entities supervised by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), have wielded their rulemaking power on various corporate governance issues, ranging from the independent board committee requirement adopted in 2003 to the board diversity requirement approved in 2021. Simultaneously, as for-profit corporate entities, major stock exchanges have been competing against each other to attract and retain more companies. This dual status of stock exchanges—as regulators and as profit-driven entities—brings into question the stock exchanges’ incentive to enforce their own rules against listed companies. What happens if a listed company violates stock exchange rules? As the first study that offers an analysis of original hand-collected data on 838 enforcement actions by stock exchanges in 2019, this Article finds that (1) stock exchanges’ detection of noncompliance is mostly on the failure to meet mechanical criteria, such as the $1.00 minimum stock price requirement; (2) listed companies tend to self-report violations of corporate governance requirements before the stock exchanges detect them; and (3) even after noncompliance is detected, stock exchanges tend to extend cure periods and rarely impose the only substantive sanction for stock exchange rule violations: delisting. Focusing on stock exchanges’ corporate governance requirements for listed companies, our analysis of S&P 1500 companies’ board composition data shows that despite this low likelihood of detection and enforcement, most companies diligently comply with the stock exchanges’ requirements. This Article argues that this curious coexistence of lax enforcement and diligent compliance can be explained as an extension of the relational contract theory to the relationship between a regulator and a regulated. Competition among stock exchanges makes a long-term, interactive relationship between stock exchanges and their listed companies valuable to both sides. The fact that the stock exchanges’ enforcement mechanism relies on a single, drastic measure of terminating the relationship (i.e., delisting) and that listed companies’ noncompliance hardly triggers delisting incentivize cooperative compliance between the regulator and the regulated. Such “relational enforcement” of stock exchange rules indicates that where there is an extended regulatory relationship that offers a substantial benefit to the regulated entity, diligent compliance can be expected even in the absence of rigorous, formal policing.

The New Anchors: Corporate Engagement with Lower-Income Communities in Smaller Cities

Anchor institutions are large or otherwise influential organizations that participate in community engagement activities and have relatively deep roots in (are unlikely to move from) their communities. We explore the motivations and strategies of for-profit corporations’ engagement as anchor institutions with lower-income communities in four smaller cities: Amarillo, TX; Fort Wayne, IN; Richmond, VA; and Syracuse, NY. Using case studies, we present detailed findings about companies’ motivations and strategies in engaging with lower-income communities that are either home to or located near their facilities. We find that: For-profit companies are often anchored in and engage with a broader geographic area than their nonprofit counterparts. The perceptions of anchor leadership shape community engagement activities, especially in lower-income communities. Banks, utilities, and companies that are privately held, larger, or have a headquarters in a region seem to be most engaged with lower-income communities in their regions. Companies whose CEOs or owners grew up in or have similarly deep ties to lower-income communities are often more engaged with lower-income communities. Very few of the anchors we interviewed formally track the impacts of their community engagement efforts and neither do their nonprofit, foundation, and government partners. Creating a pipeline of workers is a common motivation for companies. Banks, utilities, and some other business-to-consumer companies, such as retail stores, often care about the visibility of the community engagement initiatives that they support more than do other types of companies. The connection between community prosperity and long-term business success motivates some for-profit anchors to engage with lower-income communities. Identity is a distinct motivator for many for-profit anchors. For-profit anchors have different methods of choosing the subjects on which they engage with lower-income communities but usually shape their strategies based on leaders’ or employees’ perceptions about what is important. Some for-profit anchors leverage their subject-matter expertise to develop community engagement programs. Some for-profit anchors implement shared value strategies for lower-income community engagement. Some companies deliberately create new jobs in lower-income neighborhoods and hire local residents to fill them. For-profit anchors rarely collaborate with other for-profit anchors on community engagement efforts even though they believe that such collaboration would make those efforts more effective. We suggest ways in which local practitioners and policymakers in government, philanthropic, and nonprofit organizations can encourage more for-profits to engage as anchor institutions with lower-income communities. We also make recommendations for for-profit companies themselves to deepen, expand, or begin initiatives to support lower-income communities.