How do work motivations and sector perceptions differ between graduate students at prestigious Business Schools and Public Policy in Asia? Where do Asia’s future business and government leaders want to work, and why? To answer these questions, we compare Asian Master of Business Administration students with Master of Public Policy and Master of Public Administration students from three leading Schools based in Singapore through a survey study and a series of seven focus groups. Our findings indicate that work motivations, sector (...) perceptions, and career preferences differ between both groups but slightly less so than between their Western counterparts. Moreover, future Asian leaders equally value being successful while many view government as bureaucratic and prone to cronyism regardless of degree program and employment preference. We discuss how our findings may advance a more robust management and leadership research agenda for Asia. (shrink)

In recent years, major disasters have figured prominently in the media. While corporate response to disasters may have raised corporate philanthropy to a new level, it remains an understudied phenomenon. This article draws on comparative research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate philanthropy to explore the geography of corporate philanthropic disaster response. The study analyzes donation announcements made by Fortune Global 500 firms from North America, Europe and Asia to look for regional patterns across three recent disasters: the South (...) Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the Kashmiri earthquake. The results reveal inter-regional differences in the overall likelihood of donations and in their cash value, in addition to the identification of home-region- and local presence effects. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed. (shrink)

In recent years, corporate social responsibility (CSR) of Multinational Corporations (MNCs) in developing countries has received more attention. However, in this literature, Africa is much less well represented than other regions, and existing studies about Africa have mainly focused on South Africa and Nigeria. This focus has resulted in scant research on other African countries where MNCs are located as well, and where their presence is notable. Settings largely unexplored include conflict-ridden areas in Central Africa where a limited number of (...) usually large MNCs can potentially have a large impact on the local situation and play a role in addressing the huge problems with which these countries are confronted. Moreover, the MNCs themselves face large CSR dilemmas, related to the contribution they can (or cannot) give in the different setting compared to their home countries as well as their attitude vis-a-vis ongoing conflicts. In order to help shed light on these issues, this article explores how MNCs report on CSR and conflict in three Central African countries (Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Republic of the Congo). Our analysis of company information reveals that opportunities are widely seen and that most MNCs report on their economic and social impacts. However, CSR reporting is fairly generic, and the specific context seems to bear little influence on the type of CSR activities. The conflict dimension also receives limited attention, although some companies show awareness and outline the limitations of their power and the dilemmas inherent to their presence in these countries. The potential for MNCs' involvement in (co)creating sustainable economies is recognised, and needs further research attention in the coming years. (shrink)

In this paper, we identify and discuss how sustainability reporting has spread throughout the Australian business community over the past twenty years or so. We identified all Australian business organisations that have produced a sustainability report since 1995, and we undertook an interview survey with managers of reporting companies. By incorporating a wide range and large number of reporting companies, we offer insights beyond those obtained from traditional report content analysis and from close analyses of singular case-study organisations. We reveal (...) that sustainability reporting has deepened in a few high-impact industries, and it has spread to a small number of firms in a wide range of low-impact industries. We tested whether there were any relationships between the drivers of reporting and the experiences of different types of reporting firms. Many of the relationships we observed were not as clear or as consistent as expected. Sustainability reporting is, however, of strategic importance to reporting companies. Given the small number of reporters in Australia, we raise the possibility of strategic differentiation as a key driver of reporting behaviour and suggest further studies to explore institutional fields that may be shaping sustainability reporting practice. (shrink)

We study companies that do not produce a sustainability report in contexts where institutionalisation is assumed. Based on a careful analysis of interaction patterns between non-reporting companies, sustainability interest groups, and peer organisations, we find patterns of discursive and material isomorphism that suggest sustainability reporting is confined to an issues-based field, rather than spreading as an institutionalised practice across the business community. We argue that the issues-based field exerts only weak pressure for sustainability reporting, and that encouraging more firms to (...) report rests on understanding what influences companies to interact more widely to become part of this field. (shrink)

The consequences of foreign direct investment (FDI) for human rights protection are poorly understood. We propose that the impact of FDI varies across industries. In particular, extractive firms in the oil and mining industries go where the resources are located and are bound to such investment, which creates a status quo bias among them when it comes to supporting repressive rulers (“location-bound effect”). The same is not true for nonextractive multinational corporations (MNCs) in manufacturing or services, which can, in comparison, (...) exit problematic countries more easily. We also propose that strong democratic institutions can alleviate negative impacts of extractive FDI on human rights (“democratic safeguard effect”). Using U.S. FDI broken up into extractive and nonextractive industries in 157 host countries (1999–2015), we find support for these propositions.1 Extractive FDI is associated with more human rights abuse, but nonextractive FDI is associated with less abuse, after controlling for other factors, including concerns about endogeneity. We find also that the negative human rights impact of extractive FDI vanishes in countries where democratic institutions are stronger. Our results are robust to a range of alternative estimation techniques. (shrink)