Labour rights abuses are one of the most corrosive and complex social challenges business faces, and one that is set to worsen as the onslaught of climate change continues. Current estimates suggest that 27.6 million people globally work under conditions of forced labour (Walk Free, 2024), and climate change is likely to see this number increase, as the impact of drought, soil erosion, overfishing and rising temperatures threatens traditional livelihoods and forces people who are already more vulnerable and deprived to flee in ways that are not always safe, making them more vulnerable to exploitation (Boyd et al., 2018; Bharadwaj et al., 2022). Supply-chains is a business function particularly exposed to the challenges at the intersection of climate change and forced labour, since both problems directly affect supply-chain practices, yet in very different ways. Whereas the impact of climate change can be felt in e.g. delays in delivery and increased costs due to extreme weather and higher energy bills (Halldorsson and Kovacs, 2010), the challenges of forced labour are more insidious, since they often occur further upstream in the supply-chain beyond the purview of the buyer or final consumer. The direct impact of forced labour is also not felt on a societal level in the way that climate change is, but rather on an individual level, which makes it both harder to identify and potentially costlier to address. Both climate change and forced labour are viewed as wicked problems, which are issues that require solutions from multiple stakeholders, are beyond the responsibility of any one firm and where knowledge is often fragmented (Klag and Langley, 2023). To overcome these hurdles, research suggests that meta-organizations – organisations that have other organizations as members – may prove to be part of the solution (Meehan and Pinnington. 2023), as these organizations by their nature extend beyond the boundaries of a given firm, and collectively can summon economies of scale and scope that exceed a given firm. In this study we ask through what mechanisms can meta-organizations facilitate field level change to address wicked problems across supply chains?

Firms are under increasing pressure to create positive societal value. Both shareholders and stakeholders demand that firms’ report tangible progress and performance. However, to date it has been a complex and costly process for firms to uncover which areas (e.g. biodiversity, mental health) are important (or material) for their company to create societal value. Firms should pay attention to topics that are both financially material – when performance on the social value area affects the business case– and stakeholder material – when stakeholders are affected by companies’ operations. While research has acknowledged the importance of this double materiality perspective, the academic debate has centered primarily on financial materiality only.

A major reason for the lack of theoretical and measurement progress in the field of double materiality is the lack of corresponding data. This paper builds on Upright, a novel and unique firm-level dataset of companies’ impact, by quantitatively linking double materiality to financial performance. The Upright model uses objective public data to calculate the impact of a company’s products and services (including their value chains) across 19 topics.

Our preliminary findings point towards the importance of improving in the knowledge, environmental and health dimensions, which are positively related to market-based and/or accounting-based financial performance. Interestingly, paying taxes as contribution to the context in which a company operates is not financially rewarded. When differentiating between financial material and stakeholder material aspects, the results indicate that both bear financial consequences depending on the category (society, health, knowledge or environment).

The growth of international cross-sector partnerships (ICSPs) has sparked business ethics scholars’ interest in their processes, outputs, and impacts, mainly through case-study analyses. These often overlook important questions about ICSPs’ financial and organisational nature which can reveal the influence and power of the respective partnership members. This paper examines who funds ICSPs and how donor identities (sectors and nationalities) shape the ICSP solutions in their choices of implementation partners, focal issues, and implementation methods. We do so through analysing a novel database of 109 ICSP initiatives addressing worker safety in the Bangladesh ready-made garment industry, following the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013. The paper first reveals that, contrary to inferences that might be made from the business ethics literature, governments, particularly from the global North, play a dominant role in financing ICSPs. Secondly, the paper demonstrates that the initiatives’ preferred solutions reflect the identity of the ICSP donors in terms of sector (governmental, business, or civil society) and nationality (North American or European), raising questions about the power of donors in ICSPs. Thirdly, the paper shows how ICSPs offer diverse solutions to the common target problem, worker safety, prompting discussion about the merits of pluralism versus orchestration of overall ICSP effort.

This study explores how supply chain network structures influence sustainability controversies—both social and environmental—across industries. Utilizing panel data from FactSet and Refinitiv, and drawing on network theory, we zoom in on key variables such as geographical concentration and supplier bargaining power. In particular, we investigate the impact of these network elements on CSR controversies and the role of brand visibility in amplifying or mitigating reputational risks for multinational enterprises (MNEs). Our analysis spans multiple key sectors such as energy, industrials, technology and healthcare, and covers 776 firms. We employ panel regressions and find that both supplier bargaining power and supplier geographical concentration have a negative association with the CSR controversy score of an MNE. We then test the interaction effect of brand visibility of these relationships. This research aims to provide insights into how MNEs can better navigate their supply chain relationships to meet increasing sustainability demands while mitigating controversy risks.

We are interested in delving into when stakeholder activists can pressure targeted firms to expend resources and take substantive steps toward addressing pressing environmental problems. While quite a few different definitions of success exist in social movement research, a prevailing definition is that a firm’s responsiveness to stakeholder activists ranges from inactive, to symbolic and/or substantive (Durand, Hawn & Ioannis, 2019; Nason, et. al., 2018). According to Durand, et.al. (2019: 304), a firm’ symbolic response means that firms are taking nominal actions such as “ceremonially adopting a code of ethics”. Falling in the symbolic categories are firms who employ deflective and/or defensive postures to undermine the claims of activists (Briscoe & Gupta, 2016). McDonnell and King (2013) found that targeted firms issued more pro social claims intended to mitigate the impact of the stakeholder activists (Briscoe & Gupta, 2016: 696). A substantive response means that a firm is undertaking changes that are more extensive and costly to address stakeholder activist pressure (Durand, et. al., 2019: 304). For example, Flammer et. al, (2021) finds that shareholder activists, especially institutional investors succeeded in pressuring the targeted firms to disclose more climate risk information.