There are two different, and somewhat competing, strategic explanations for why firms certify for ISO 14001. On the one hand, firms may seek to reinforce their present strategies thereby further enhancing their competitive advantage. On the other hand, firms may use ISO 14001 as a mechanism to reorient their strategies, so that a clear signal is sent about the firm's change in strategic positioning. This paper aims to identify the most likely explanation for early adopters of ISO 14001. Using a (...) matched pair design, we test these alternative explanations on a sample of US firms that certified for ISO 14001 in the first two years after its introduction. In particular, we tested whether ISO 14001 was used to reinforce or reorient firm strategies in respect to the natural environment, corporate social responsibility, quality, and internationalization. We found that firms that certified early for ISO 14001 had considerable environmental legitimacy and a strong international presence. We also found that the firm's commitment to corporate social responsibility and quality were not significantly different between certified and non-certified firms. These findings suggest that early adopters of ISO 14001 leaned towards reinforcing rather than reorienting their firm strategy, which calls into question the ultimate reach of ISO 14001. (shrink)

Femicide is an ongoing public health and human rights crisis of global proportions. Currently, however, there is a relative vacuum of ethics theory and discussion about femicide amongst the health professions. This article draws from three illustrative case examples along the continuum of femicide to explore contemporary ethical concerns relevant to addressing gender-based violence and death through clinical medicine and public health. Using an epistemic justice framework, we analyze the relative invisibility of femicide in public health discourse today, and renew (...) a conversation about ethical issues inherent to health interventions and policy-making around femicide. (shrink)

This paper examines stakeholder responses to impression management tactics used by firms that express environmental commitment. We inductively analyzed data from 98 open-ended questionnaires and identified two impression management tactics that led respondents to believe that a firm was credible in its commitment to the natural environment. Approximately, half of the respondents responded to illustrative impression management tactics that provide images of, and/or broad-brush comments about, the firm's commitment to the natural environment. The other half responded to demonstrative impression management (...) tactics, which provide specific facts and details about the firm's operations. The research results provide important insights into the effects of organizational transparency. In this paper, we explore these findings and provide directions for future research. (shrink)

India today is facing value crisis. Drift started during the British era and since then it has been witnessing continuous erosion of values. At that time the man who came to India’s rescue was Mahatma Gandhi, man of principles and values who never compromised with his values. He along with his powerful values of truth and non-violence helped India regain its strength. Almost after 64 years of freedom there is a heartfelt need to go back to these values for effective (...) management and survival. This article is an endeavour for reviving these time-tested values and to draw insights for management of organization. The values like truth, non-violence, renunciation, humility, equanimity, etc., at the organization’s roots may provide it a firm footing in this turbulent scenario. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to investigate whether internal and external institutional environmental conditions play a role in the institutionalization of strategic commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR) among Indian firms in the wake of the mandatory CSR norms or not (where the firms of certain size and profitability are mandated to spend on CSR). The study examines the fixed effects regression on balanced panel data collected from the annual reports and Prowess database of Bombay Stock Exchange-listed firms. Our (...) results show that both internal and external institutional environments play a major role in diffusing a strategic commitment to CSR among firms. Furthermore, we find that firms indulge in frequency, outcome, and trait-based imitations while learning from peer firms to attain legitimacy from their stakeholders. Overall, our findings show that vicarious learning through imitation plays an important role in making firms truly committed to CSR instead of just donating money or greenwashing. To the best of our knowledge, our study is among the pioneering attempts to look at the impact of both internal and external environments on institutionalizing CSR commitment among firms in India. (shrink)

Prior research in strategic decision making has relied primarily on the application of economic and financial models within strategic decisions. Environmentaland social issues have, as a result, been force-fit into existing models, rather than developing a deep understanding of how these ‘soft’ issues are actually incorporated into strategic decisions. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating how social and environmental concerns are addressed in strategic decisions. It does so inductively, by interviewing 29 professionals addressing corporate social responsibility and (...) 110 strategic decision makers in 19 companies in Canada. This paper reports some of the interim findings. (shrink)

BackgroundIt has been argued that ethics review committees—e.g., Research Ethics Committees, Institutional Review Boards, etc.— have weaknesses in reviewing big data and artificial intelligence research. For instance, they may, due to the novelty of the area, lack the relevant expertise for judging collective risks and benefits of such research, or they may exempt it from review in instances involving de-identified data.Main bodyFocusing on the example of medical research databases we highlight here ethical issues around de-identified data sharing which motivate the (...) need for review where oversight by ethics committees is weak. Though some argue for ethics committee reform to overcome these weaknesses, it is unclear whether or when that will happen. Hence, we argue that ethical review can be done by data access committees, since they have de facto purview of big data and artificial intelligence projects, relevant technical expertise and governance knowledge, and already take on some functions of ethical review. That said, like ethics committees, they may have functional weaknesses in their review capabilities. To strengthen that function, data access committees must think clearly about the kinds of ethical expertise, both professional and lay, that they draw upon to support their work.ConclusionData access committees can undertake ethical review of medical research databases provided they enhance that review function through professional and lay ethical expertise. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an argument to show why we expect that multinational companies will ensure that they communicate credibly about their environmental responsibility, across all their subsidiaries. Credible environmental communication helps to increase the firm’s legitimacy and reduce its liability of foreignness on an issue that is globally relevant. We develop a measure to test if there is a standardized level of environmental communication credibility on the country-specific web sites of MNC subsidiaries around the world and find, in (...) fact, that there is considerable variation across countries, among subsidiaries of different firms and among subsidiaries of the same multinational. We discuss the reasons for this and the implications for firm legitimacy. (shrink)

Prior research on sustainability in business often assumes that decisions on social and environmental investments are made for instrumental reasons, which points to causal relationships between corporate financial performance and corporate social and environmental commitment. In other words, social or environmental commitment should predict higher financial performance. The theoretical premise of sustainability, however, is based on a systems perspective, which implies a tighter integration between corporate financial performance and corporate commitment to social and environmental issues. In this paper, we describe (...) the important theoretical differences between an instrumental and integrative logic in managing business sustainability. We test the presence of each logic using data from 738 firms over 13 years and find evidence of integrative logic applied in business. (shrink)

In 1843, Søren Kierkegaard said, “ It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.” Management researchers are often attracted to the business and society domain because of a desire to impact management practice to create a better world. However, they often do not have the impact that they hope, because researchers tend to rely on historical data, but managers seek insights that inform future (...) actions. In this commentary, we describe our impact journey in three distinct moments in time. In the last one, both researchers and managers live forward. (shrink)

Preventing sexual and gender-based violence—and mitigating its devastating impacts on individuals and societies—is a central challenge of public health. A Woman in Berlin is 34-year-old journalist Marta Hillers’s first-hand account of life during the 1945 Red Army occupation of Berlin at the conclusion of World War II, when Russian soldiers collectively raped 2 million German civilians. Reflecting upon Hillers’s testimony, I argue that historical narratives about large-scale acts of sexual and gender-based violence deserve a more central place in public health (...) discourse. I also question how the ethical challenges of memorializing and studying mass crimes might inform future public health efforts to advance gender equity and mitigate sexual violence globally. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to map the emotional competencies of Mahatma1 Gandhi through biographical analysis of his life which is divided into seven phases, as this will give the real insight that how he managed his emotions in different phases of his life and over the longer period of time. The Emotional Competency Inventory framework given by Daniel Goleman is used, which helps in mapping the Emotional Competencies on five parameters i.e., Self Awareness, Self Regulation, Self Motivation, Empathy, (...) Social Skills. Further, the article brings out that which particular component was low, medium or high in which particular phase of his life. (shrink)

This paper examines stakeholder responses to impression management tactics used by firms that express environmental commitment. We inductively analyzed data from 98 open-ended questionnaires and identified two impression management tactics that led respondents to believe that a firm was credible in its commitment to the natural environment. Approximately, half of the respondents responded to illustrative impression management tactics that provide images of, and/or broad-brush comments about, the firm’s commitment to the natural environment. The other half responded to demonstrative impression management (...) tactics, which provide specific facts and details about the firm’s operations. The research results provide important insights into the effects of organizational transparency. In this paper, we explore these findings and provide directions for future research. (shrink)

Talks about a man who had it all - looks, wealth, culture, fame, travel, career - and gave it all up to find for himself the answer to his question, Is there actually anything like freedom, enlightenment or liberation behind all the abstractions the religions have thrown at us? This book aims to introduce you to the unknown truth of life.

Context: Although there are rich descriptive accounts of skill acquisition in the literature, there are no satisfactory explanatory models of the cognitive processes involved. Problem: The aim of the paper is to explain some key phenomena frequently observed in the acquisition of motor skills: the loss of conscious access to knowledge of the structure of a skill and the awareness that an error has been made prior to the receipt of knowledge of results. Method: In the 1970s, the first author (...) implemented a computer program model of the cognitive processes involved in learning and skill acquisition, based on a series of empirical investigations. Recently, with assistance from the second author, the model has been reviewed, updated and re-implemented. Result: The model provides a constructivist account of skill acquisition and associated phenomena. Implications: The model adds to the understanding of motor skill acquisition and will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in physical therapy and sports science. It is also provides a constructivist cognitive architecture that can be fruitfully contrasted with non-constructivist cognitive architectures well-known in cognitive science. (shrink)

Monitoring of clinical trials is important to ensure adherence to protocol, to safeguard the rights of research participants and to achieve compliance with principles of good clinical practice. Recent regulatory changes in India require Ethics Committees to keep an oversight of ongoing clinical trials including on-site monitoring. In this article, we share the experience of on-site monitoring of clinical trials by the Ethics Committee of a tertiary care, academic and research centre in India. We found a large number of shortcomings (...) in the areas of informed consent, adverse events, insurance and reimbursement, which would not have been detected by off-site document review. Interestingly, many shortcomings were also not detected by on-site monitoring arranged by clinical trial sponsors. We therefore conclude that on-site monitoring of ongoing clinical trials is a highly important activity for Indian Ethics Committees. (shrink)

Collaborative filtering recommender system (CFRS) plays a vital role in today’s e-commerce industry. CFRSs collect ratings from the users and predict recommendations for the targeted product. Conventionally, CFRS uses the user-product ratings to make recommendations. Often these user-product ratings are biased. The higher ratings are called push ratings (PRs) and the lower ratings are called nuke ratings (NRs). PRs and NRs are injected by factitious users with an intention either to aggravate or degrade the recommendations of a product. Hence, it (...) is necessary to investigate PRs or NRs and discard them. In this work, opinion mining approach is applied on textual reviews that are given by users for a product to detect the PRs and NRs. The work also examines the effect of PRs and NRs on the performance of CFRS by evaluating various measures such as precision, recall, F-measure and accuracy. (shrink)

Recommender system depends on the thoughts of numerous users to predict the favourites of potential consumers. RS is vulnerable to malicious information. Unsuitable products can be offered to the user by injecting a few unscrupulous “shilling” profiles like push and nuke attacks into the RS. Injection of these attacks results in the wrong recommendation for a product. The aim of this research is to develop a framework that can be widely utilized to make excellent recommendations for sales growth. This study (...) uses the methodology that presents an enhanced clustering algorithm named as modified density peak clustering algorithm on the consumer review dataset to ensure a well-formed cluster. An improved recurrent neural network algorithm is proposed to detect these attacks in hybrid RS, which uses the content-based RS and collaborative filtering RS. The results are compared with other state of the art algorithms. The proposed method is more suitable for E-commerce applications where the number of customers and products grows rapidly. (shrink)

In recent years, in addition to financial and social objectives, the microfinance industry has started to look at its environmental bottom line. The objective of this paper is to identify why microfinance institutions decide to go green. Data was collected through a quantitative survey of 160 MFIs and qualitative semi-structured interviews of 23 MFIs’ top managers. Basing our analysis on the model of ecological responsiveness developed by Bansal and Roth :717–736, 2000), we discover that MFIs for which legitimation is (...) the dominant driver tend to adopt a defensive approach and set up more superficial negative strategies to appear green. In contrast, MFIs for which social responsibility is the dominant driver tend to be more proactive and innovative and develop adapted financial and non-financial services to promote environmentally friendly practices. (shrink)

The relationship between time and voice about unethical behaviour has been highlighted as a key area for exploration within the voice and silence field (Morrison Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 10:79–107, 2023). Previous studies have made only modest progress in this area, so we present a temporal lens which can act as a guide for others wishing to better understand the role of time and voice. Applying the concept of theory adaptation (Jaakkola AMS Review 10:18–26, 2020), a (...) method which attempts to build on a given field through the application of a new theoretical lens, we begin by reviewing what is known in relation to voice about unethical behaviour specifically. Then we introduce two temporal frameworks, one suggested by Ancona, Okhuysen, and Perlow (Ancona et al. The Academy of Management Review 26:645–663, 2001a; Ancona et al. The Academy of Management Review 26:512–529, 2001b) as a useful way of analysing time in organisations, and a second one by Bansal, Anna, and Wood, (Bansal et al. Academy of Management Review 43:217–241, 2018) focusing on the way organisations include voice into their temporal rhythm. We then draw conclusions about the role of time in relation to voice about unethical behaviour and identify three insights; a) it takes time for voices to generate evidence for unethical behaviour, b) perceptions of unethical behaviour change over time, and c) it is most difficult to voice about unethical behaviour at the time it is most needed. Our recommendations for future avenues of research based on these insights recommend new research designs better suited to explore the relationship between voice and time and a focus on how the formality of voice mechanisms shapes the timing of voice. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “A Cybernetic Computational Model for Learning and Skill Acquisition” by Bernard Scott & Abhinav Bansal. Upshot: The Computational Theory of Mind suffers from an inherent weakness owing to its difficulty in taking semantics and embodiment properly into account. It is suggested that these difficulties could be alleviated if it were recognized that the fact that the model presented here employs a computer as a tool, to highlight certain key features of its dynamics, does (...) not necessarily involve assuming that the underlying processes that are modelled are themselves strictly computational in nature. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “A Cybernetic Computational Model for Learning and Skill Acquisition” by Bernard Scott & Abhinav Bansal. Upshot: The target paper acknowledges some early computer modelling that I did in the years 1966–1968 when working with Pask at System Research Ltd in Richmond. In the commentary, I revisit the roots of this kind of modelling and follow the trajectory from then to today’s growing understanding of the dynamics of cognitive systems.

Open peer commentary on the article “A Cybernetic Computational Model for Learning and Skill Acquisition” by Bernard Scott & Abhinav Bansal. Upshot: The paper is an admirable example of first-order cybernetics. It does not appear to be developed as part of the constructivist paradigm and of second-order cybernetics. It neglects research as the context that generates problems of observation.

Open peer commentary on the article “A Cybernetic Computational Model for Learning and Skill Acquisition” by Bernard Scott & Abhinav Bansal. Upshot: Scott and Bansal’s assessment of the limitations of their work relies on a concept of simulation that I find problematic. It assumes that the ultimate goal of a model is a replication of the phenomena it applies, whereas a limited model produces only simulations. I argue that this position leads to unfortunate epistemological results, and it ends (...) up assigning an unduly exclusive role to the study of the biochemical substrate of cognition. (shrink)

In 1987, the World Commission on Economic Development popularized the term “sustainable development” in its well-cited report, Our Common Future. According to this report, sustainable development is defined as “the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The WCED asserted that sustainable development required simultaneous adoption of environmental, economical, and equity principles. Bansal, 197–218, 2005) has conducted a study of Canadian firms in the oil and gas, (...) mining, and forestry industries from 1986 to 1995. The study found that both resources based and institutional factors influence corporate sustainable development. This paper studied the corporate sustainable development of Mysore Paper Mills Ltd. from 1995 to 2011 using the same model. The study found that independent variables with significant impact on environmental integrity and overall sustainability were fines, penalties, court cases involved by the company, and log of total assets. On economic prosperity, the independent variable with significant impact is log of total assets. For social equity, the independent variable with significant impact is foreign sales as percentage of total sales, number of fines/penalties/court cases, number of fines/penalties/court cases, log, and return on equity. (shrink)