Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

“Making The Bed”: Challenging Ideologies Of Ownership, Nonlocality, And Romanticism In The Age Of The Anthropocene, Ainsley P. Foster

Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

The current Age of the Anthropocene marks a recent and rapid transition into a period in climate history that is notably defined by human impact. Modern Western sentiments of grief, frustration, and romanticism as a result of the interplay between domestic and corporate spaces seem to culminate in an overall attitude of apathy and acceptance of the Age of the Anthropocene. Various art forms collaborate to create the current conversation of the causatory and reactionary relationship that humans have with the Anthropocene, offering interpretations of how individuals and corporations view ownership of and responsibilities to the environment. There is a …

Nonprofits Should Adopt A User-Centric Change Model To Scale Corporate Environmental Action Faster, Doug Miller

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Pollution levels and ecosystem degradation continue to worsen, suggesting the insufficiency of current approaches to reverse these problematic trends. For environmental nonprofits, the current theory of change revolves around developing techno-economic analysis about environmental problems and available solutions, building public awareness around this analysis, and motivating decision makers to set goals. Given present environmental realities and the limited success of their current theory of change, environmental nonprofits should transform how they execute their work, what they produce, and how they coordinate with each other. Instead, nonprofits should begin putting the user—business decision makers as well as policymakers—front and center as …

Brand Activism And Democratic Legitimacy: Exploring Pitfalls Through A Habermasian Analysis, Roxan Degeyter

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

Brand activism has emerged as a prominent practice among corporations, as they publicly take a stand on contentious socio-political issues such as gender inequality, climate change, or discrimination, often through advertising. While extensive research has been conducted on the impact of brand activism as a marketing tool, examining its effects on sales, brand image, consumer attitudes, and authenticity, only a limited number of studies have studied its influence on public debate and processes of democratic legitimation. The latter have portrayed brand activism as an empowering force for the supported social movements, the public sphere, and democratic legitimacy, largely ignoring the …

Book Review: Kings, Conquerors, Psychopaths: From Alexander To Hitler To The Corporation, Tim Bakken

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

The book Kings, Conquerors, Psychopaths is a survey of a vast amount of human wrongdoing. It lays bare the motivations of aggressors who wish to subjugate nations or groups of people and corporate executives and government bureaucrats who make discretionary decisions that harm people. Along with cataloging mass killings by despots and soldiers, the book includes stories about Ponzi-schemers and the deaths of automobile drivers and passengers who were killed by vehicle defects known to the manufacturer. The book posits that “[p]owerful, elite forces are trying to force us backward toward a non-democratic state, one where power, wealth, and prerogative …

Lived Experiences Of African American Women Encountering Barriers In Executive Level Advancement In The Business Services Industry, Sheriley Yvonne Smith

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

It is unknown how African American Women (AAW) perceived experiences involving the experience of the barriers faced when attempting to advance to executive levels in their corporate jobs. Existing literature showed that AAWs experienced several forms of discrimination, including racism, oppression, and limitations which were critical to examining their work experience and progressing up the corporate ladder. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to develop an understanding of lived experiences of AAWs when they apply for and fail to reach executive positions in the business services industry. The glass ceiling theory (GCT) and intersectionality theory (IT) were used …

The Caretaking Of Eve Online: Institutional Ethics And Enactments At Ccp Games, Joshua William Rivers

Theses and Dissertations

This ethnography examines the Icelandic video game developer CCP Games, the makers of EVE Online—a massively-multiplayer online game (MMO) that takes place in a star cluster far, far away. Through my exploration of CCP Games as an institution over the span of fourteen months, I highlight how corporations are culturally-situated, enacted entities. Simultaneously, I demonstrate that these culturally-located actors who serve as the architects of our digital infrastructures undertake such efforts from their situated vantage points, thereby embedding particular ethical commitments into the digital landscapes they craft and within which we live our social lives. Created with the intent to …

The Transnational Investment Bloc In U.S. Policy Toward Saudi Arabia And The Persian Gulf, Mazaher Koruzhde, Ronald W. Cox

Class, Race and Corporate Power

U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf is driven by the economic and geopolitical interests of a U.S.-Saudi transnational investment bloc that derives steady profits from the region.

The Supreme Court And The Pro-Business Paradox, Elizabeth Pollman

All Faculty Scholarship

One of the most notable trends of the Roberts Court is expanding corporate rights and narrowing liability or access to justice against corporate defendants. This Comment examines recent Supreme Court cases to highlight this “pro-business” pattern as well as its contradictory relationship with counter trends in corporate law and governance. From Citizens United to Americans for Prosperity, the Roberts Court’s jurisprudence could ironically lead to a situation in which it has protected corporate political spending based on a view of the corporation as an “association of citizens,” but allows constitutional scrutiny to block actual participants from getting information about …

Just Say Yes? The Fiduciary Duty Implications Of Directorial Acquiescence, Lisa Fairfax

All Faculty Scholarship

The rise in shareholder activism is one of the most significant recent phenomena in corporate governance. Shareholders have successfully managed to enhance their power within the corporation, and much of that success has resulted from corporate managers and directors voluntarily acceding to shareholder demands. Directors’ voluntary acquiescence to shareholder demands is quite simply remarkable. Remarkable because most of the changes reflect policies and practices that directors have vehemently opposed for decades, and because when opposing such changes directors stridently insisted that the changes were not in the corporation’s best interest. In light of that insistence, and numerous statements from directors …

Reconsidering The Evolutionary Erosion Account Of Corporate Fiduciary Law, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article reconsiders the dominant account of corporate law’s duty of loyalty, which asserts that the courts have steadily relaxed standards of fiduciary scrutiny applied to self-dealing by corporate managers across more than a century of history—to the great detriment of the shareholder interest. The account originated in Harold Marsh, Jr.’s foundational article, Are Directors Trustees? Conflicts of Interest and Corporate Morality, published in The Business Lawyer in 1966. Marsh’s showing of historical lassitude has been successfully challenged in a recent book by Professor David Kershaw. This Article takes Professor Kershaw’s critique a step further, asking whether the evolutionary …

Interpretive Entrepreneurs, Melinda (M.J.) Durkee

Scholarship@WashULaw

Private actors interpret legal norms, a phenomenon I call “interpretive entrepreneurship.” The phenomenon is particularly significant in the international context, where many disputes are not subject to judicial resolution and there is no official system of precedent. Interpretation can affect the meaning of laws over time. For this reason, it can be a form of “post hoc” international lawmaking, worth studying alongside other forms of international lobbying and norm entrepreneurship by private actors. The Article identifies and describes the phenomenon through a series of case studies that show how, why, and by whom it unfolds. The examples focus on entrepreneurial …

Restoration: The Role Stakeholder Governance Must Play In Recreating A Fair And Sustainable American Economy A Reply To Professor Rock, Leo E. Strine Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

In his excellent article, For Whom is the Corporation Managed in 2020?: The Debate Over Corporate Purpose, Professor Edward Rock articulates his understanding of the debate over corporate purpose. This reply supports Professor Rock’s depiction of the current state of corporate law in the United States. It also accepts Professor Rock’s contention that finance and law and economics professors tend to equate the value of corporations to society solely with the value of their equity. But, I employ a less academic lens on the current debate about corporate purpose, and am more optimistic about proposals to change our corporate governance …

Corporations And The American Polity, Patrick Labossiere

Student Theses and Dissertations

Research on corporate communications’ effects on politics presents an acknowledgement of a relationship between the two topics, leaving a void in the explanation and examination of this topic. The void presents an opening to introduce a conceptual process for how corporations are able to craft communications to influence the American Polity, the democratic social organization within the United States. This research begins with a historical review of how corporations gain prominence in American society, capturing the ability to participate in the democratic social organization of the polity. A qualitative analysis of several conceptual frameworks serves as data, to establish an …

A Letter To The United States Government On Wealth And Income Inequality, Matthieu Maier

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

The United States of America is the world’s hotspot when it comes to income and wealth inequality. The wealthiest Americans are accumulating more and more wealth everyday while most Americans, who fall somewhere around middle-class, remain struggling and stagnant. The United States’ unchecked and deregulated system of capitalism is the root cause of our country’s inequities along with our government’s refusal to set aside self-interests and biases in order to combat these issues. From the inequality caused by rouged American systems larger issues are created that lead to complications in health, wages, standard of living, and race relations within our …

Whitman And The Fiduciary Relationship Conundrum, Lisa Fairfax

All Faculty Scholarship

While the law on insider trading has been convoluted and, in Judge Jed S. Rakoff’s words, “topsy turvy,” the law on insider trading is supposedly clear on at least one point: insider trading liability is premised upon a fiduciary relationship. Thus, all three seminal U.S. Supreme Court cases articulating the necessary elements for demonstrating any form of insider trading liability under § 10(b) and Rule 10b-5 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 made crystal clear that a fiduciary relationship represented the lynchpin for such liability.

Alas, insider trading law is not clear about the source from which the fiduciary …

How Government Created And Shaped The U.S. Nursing Home Industry, Leslie King

Sociology: Faculty Publications

Beginning in the 1960s, U.S. government policy largely created, and subsequently facilitated the corporatization of, a powerful, multi-billion dollar nursing home industry. Using data from trade publications, government agency reports, Congressional hearings, newspaper reports and existing scholarly research, I chart the relationship between the state and the U.S. nursing home industry over four time periods to reveal how, at different moments, government policy contributed to first the creation, then the corporatization and consolidation of the industry. I argue that the trajectory of Medicare and Medicaid policy is not wholly neoliberal but neither should it be considered progressive.

Advancing U.S. Latino Entrepreneurship: A New National Economic Imperative, Marlene Orozco, Alfonso Morales, Michael J. Pisani, Jerry I. Porras

Purdue University Press Books

Advancing U.S. Latino Entrepreneurship examines business formation and success among Latinos by identifying arrangements that enhance entrepreneurship and by understanding the sociopolitical contexts that shape entrepreneurial trajectories. While it is well known that Latinos make up one of the largest and fastest growing populations in the U.S., Latino-owned businesses are now outpacing this population growth and the startup business growth of all other demographic groups in the country.

The institutional arrangements shaping business formation are no level playing field. Minority entrepreneurs face racism and sexism, but structural barriers are not the only obstacles that matter; there are agentic barriers and …

Corporate Social Responsibility (Csr) Programs In Philippine Libraries, Joseph Marmol Yap, Martin Julius Villangca Perez, Elijah John Fernando Dar Juan

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Libraries are sometimes the least priority of a public school, a state university, a local government unit or an enterprise. With the efforts of its administrators and help of the innovative librarians, these libraries could solicit book donations and other information products, collaterals, library equipment and furniture if they have the right contact person – the CSR managers from the generous donors. More often than not, these libraries try to squeeze in the meager funds they get from their institutions and try to work it out based from their day-to-day needs.

This paper presents 14 organizations / corporations that are …

Corporations, Associations And The State: The International Subsidy System For Film, Michael S. Wartenbe

Class, Race and Corporate Power

Rather than increasing competition in the market and decreasing government spending, neoliberalism has driven states to compete by appealing to transnational corporations. Direct subsidization to attract investment has become one of the most egregious normalization of this process, and Hollywood and the film industry have become some of the most active participants to this system. Indeed to have a functioning film industry, government subsidies are essential, commonly paying out up to a third of the production costs. Per employee these are some of the highest subsidy rates of any industry, and with most of the world participating, they offer little …

Toward Fair And Sustainable Capitalism: A Comprehensive Proposal To Help American Workers, Restore Fair Gainsharing Between Employees And Shareholders, And Increase American Competitiveness By Reorienting Our Corporate Governance System Toward Sustainable Long-Term Growth And Encouraging Investments In America’S Future, Leo E. Strine Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

To promote fair and sustainable capitalism and help business and labor work together to build an American economy that works for all, this paper presents a comprehensive proposal to reform the American corporate governance system by aligning the incentives of those who control large U.S. corporations with the interests of working Americans who must put their hard-earned savings in mutual funds in their 401(k) and 529 plans. The proposal would achieve this through a series of measured, coherent changes to current laws and regulations, including: requiring not just operating companies, but institutional investors, to give appropriate consideration to and make …

The Reverse Agency Problem In The Age Of Compliance, Asaf Eckstein, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

The agency problem, the idea that corporate directors and officers are motivated to prioritize their self-interest over the interest of their corporation, has had long-lasting impact on corporate law theory and practice. In recent years, however, as federal agencies have stepped up enforcement efforts against corporations, a new problem that is the mirror image of the agency problem has surfaced—the reverse agency problem. The surge in criminal investigations against corporations, combined with the rising popularity of settlement mechanisms including Pretrial Diversion Agreements (PDAs), and corporate plea agreements, has led corporations to sacrifice directors and officers in order to reach settlements …

Is Charismatic Leadership More Influentiai, In Societal Or Organizational Settings, Anna Kessler

Augsburg Honors Review

It is important to contrast charismatic leadership in the political-societal context with that in organizational settings to gain knowledge about the relative strengths and weaknesses of each of them. Regardless of the feasibility and validity of this comparison, it can be stated that the influence of to- day's large corporations is continually growing, also substantially affecting international politics and society as a whole. Hence, taking the increasing interconnectivity of nations and corporations into account, it is important to examine the similarities and differences of visionary leadership in both contexts in order to draw conclusions about their most successful application, which …

“Because I Care I Risk”: How Ceo Free Market Orientation Affects The Extent And Type Of Income Smoothing, Mirzokhidjon S. Abdurakhmonov

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The executive political ideology literature suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity because social and economic issues are conflated. This has created an inconsistency in empirical findings with the theoretical predictions of the political ideology construct. In this dissertation, I identify a distinct economic component, free market orientation, based on support for economic individualism, competition, and property rights to reconcile these inconsistencies. Specifically, I argue that these indicators of free market orientation will have a unique impact on the way executives run their organizations. I develop a novel scale that measures CEO economic values that I term free market orientation …

Journeys Through Rough Country: An Ethnographic Study Of Blind Adults Successfully Employed In American Corporations, Kirk Adams

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

Blind and visually impaired people in the United States face a dire employment situation within professional careers and corporate employment. The purpose of this research study was to gain insights into the phenomenon of employment of blind people through analyzing the lived experience of successfully employed blind adults through ethnographic interviews. Previous research has shown that seven out of ten blind adults are not in the workforce, that a large percentage of those who are employed consider themselves underemployed, and that these numbers have not improved over time. Missing from previous research were insights into the conditions leading to successful …

Corporate Stewardship, Danielle D'Onfro

Scholarship@WashULaw

Harnessing strategies both ancient and modern — hostages, surety, gatekeepers, and blame — this Article proposes a new tool for achieving more efficient corporate compliance. It begins with the premise that a handful of well-known factors, including agency costs, misaligned time-horizons, cognitive biases, and insufficiently deterrent legal regimes sometimes cause companies to ignore important public safety obligations even when those obligations are cost-effective and welfare-maximizing. The result is systemic undercompliance with certain regulatory obligations. Despite the seriousness of this problem, currently available options for motivating compliance mostly fail to make public-safety regulations sufficiently salient to the individuals who perform the …

Corporate Disobedience, Elizabeth Pollman

All Faculty Scholarship

Corporate law has long taken a dim view of corporate lawbreaking. Corporations can be chartered only for lawful activity. Contemporary case law characterizes intentional violations of law as a breach of the fiduciary duties of good faith and loyalty. While recognizing that rule breaking raises significant social and moral concerns, this Article suggests that corporate law and academic debate have overlooked important aspects of corporate disobedience. This Article provides an overview of corporate disobedience and illuminates the role that it has played in entrepreneurship and legal change. Corporations violate laws for a variety of reasons, including as part of efforts …

Corporate Urbanization: Between The Future And Survival In Lebanon, Deen S. Sharp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

If you look today at the skyline of downtowns throughout the Middle East and beyond, the joint-stock corporation has transformed the urban landscape. The corporation makes itself present through the proliferation of its urban mega-projects, including skyscrapers, downtown developments and gated communities; retail malls and artificial islands; airports and ports; and highways. Built into these corporate urban structures are edifices of politics, ideology and certain forms of socio-spatial and temporal organization. The corporation, however, has largely escaped critical scholarly analysis in Geography and/or Urban and Middle East Studies. In this thesis, I argue that the corporation is far more than …

Like, Post, Share, Buy: The Commercial Value Of Affective Networking On Social Media, Cáitríona Murphy

Irish Communication Review

The purpose of this article is to unpack the complexities of how economic value is generated in the digital economy, specifically on social media. This article looks at social networking sites (SNSs), such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, and analyses the labour that is carried out by SNS users.

This is a theoretically oriented project that has aimed to identify and analyse the ways in which SNS users create value and profit for corporations. The article explores the labour processes carried out on social media such as the generation of data, the creation of content and the creation of …

International Lobbying Law, Melinda (M.J.) Durkee

Scholarship@WashULaw

An idiosyncratic array of international rules allows nonstate actors to gain special access to international officials and lawmakers. Historically, many of these groups were public-interest associations like Amnesty International. For this reason, the access rules have been celebrated as a way to democratize international organizations, enhancing their legitimacy and that of the rules they produce. But a focus on the classic public-law virtues of democracy and legitimacy produces a theory at odds with the facts: The international rules rules also offer access to industry and trade associations like the World Coal Association, whose principal purpose is to lobby for their …

Governance By Contract: The Implications For Corporate Bylaws, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

Boards and shareholders are increasing using charter and bylaw provisions to customize their corporate governance. Recent examples include forum selection bylaws, majority voting bylaws and advance notice bylaws. Relying on the contractual conception of the corporation, Delaware courts have accorded substantial deference to board-adopted bylaw provisions, even those that limit shareholder rights.

This Article challenges the rationale for deference under the contractual approach. With respect to corporate bylaws, the Article demonstrates that shareholder power to adopt and amend the bylaws is, under Delaware law, more limited than the board’s power to do so. As a result, shareholders cannot effectively constrain …