Business Commons^™

Well Traveled: Strong Relationships And Unique Challenges Are Revealed In “Driving Richmond: Stories And Portraits Of Grtc Bus Drivers”, Laura Browder

English Faculty Publications

Here’s a well-kept secret: The regional GRTC Transit System is among the most progressive organizations in Richmond. The nonprofit plays a major role in reducing pollution, easing traffic congestion and connecting people to jobs. Its reform-minded leadership is eager to play a larger role. Its unionized bus drivers, which included some of the first waves of black and female drivers, help hold it all together.

And those drivers love their jobs — to a degree unusual for workers in any profession. That’s what I learned through interviews with 16 current and former drivers this summer for an exhibition at the …

Upstream Corporate Social Responsibility: The Evolution From Contract Responsibility To Full Producer Responsibility, Judith Schrempf-Stirling, Guido Palazzo

Management Faculty Publications

The debate about the appropriate standards for upstream corporate social responsibility (CSR) of multinational corporations (MNCs) has been on the public and academic agenda for some three decades. The debate originally focused narrowly on “contract responsibility” of MNCs for monitoring of upstream contractors for “sweatshop” working conditions violating employee rights. The authors argue that the MNC upstream responsibility debate has shifted qualitatively over time to “full producer responsibility” involving an expansion from “contract responsibility” in three distinct dimensions. First, there is an expansion of scope from working conditions to human rights and social and environmental impacts broadly defined. Second, there …

Slavery Is Bad For Business: Analyzing The Impact Of Slavery On National Economies, Monti Narayan Datta, Kevin Bales

Political Science Faculty Publications

This article, using a novel dataset, demonstrates that slavery is empirically bad for business. Building upon the work of Robert Smith, the authors analysis examines the relationship between the prevalence of slavery in a country (in terms of the proportion of the population enslaved) and several economic measures (the United Nations Human Development Index, growth domestic product in terms of purchasing power parity, access to financial services, and the Gini coefficient). In each instance, controlling for alternative explanations, greater levels of slavery are associated with a decline in economic growth and human development. The findings imply that beyond the morality …