There has been a growing interest among corporate social responsibility (CSR) scholars to understand how CEO characteristics can affect CSR performance. While this line of research has been valuable in understanding the role of CEOs in CSR, it has disregarded that others’ evaluations of CEOs can also matter for CSR. In this paper, we examine how a CEO’s social status - the extent to which a CEO is respected or admired by stakeholders - affects the focal firm’s CSR performance. Drawing on social status literature and by studying CEOs from S&P 1500 firms for the period of 2004 and 2022, we theorize and empirically demonstrate how CEOs with higher social status boost CSR performance by directing CEO attention towards stakeholders’ demands. We also show that CEO tenure negatively moderates this relationship. Our findings highlight the importance of CEO social status, and more broadly, others’ evaluations of CEOs, for creating stakeholder value.

Organizing beyond hierarchy, organizational agility, and the future of work spark contemporary discussions. Notably, the concepts of self-organization and organizational democracy are seldom explored together in academia, despite being commonly integrated in business practices. Bridging this gap is essential for a comprehensive understanding of organizations navigating beyond traditional hierarchies. Our qualitative research, involving 71 interviews across four organizations, revolves around understanding how organizations navigate arising tensions. Utilizing an in-depth analysis rooted in grounded theory and the Gioia methodology, we have developed a model that classifies three areas in which organizations need to navigate tensions: freedom, empowerment, and collaboration. We find three organizational approaches: idealism, seeking to create a superior work environment; conflict based on binary interpretations; and structuration based on constructive acceptance. We contribute to the academic debate by demonstrating the interrelatedness of organizational democracy and self-organization, identifying emergent paradoxes, and categorizing types of orientations navigating tensions. Ultimately, we show how organizing beyond hierarchy results in innovative dynamics of structuration and find indication that the ethical principle of subsidiarity serves processes of structuration. Our paper provides a foundational framework for future research at the intersection of self-organization and organizational democracy, advancing the academic discourse in this field.

We examine how board environmental expertise may help firms create strategic differentiation in environmental performance when regulatory pressures to safeguard the environment are removed. We investigate our theory in the context of former U.S. President Trump’s controversial withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord in 2017. Using a difference-in-difference method based on a sample of S&P500 firms, we find that board environmental expertise reduces firms’ CO₂ emissions following Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord; this relationship is further shaped by the degree of internationalization, family ownership, and board financial expertise. Our study contributes to the resource-based view and corporate governance literature, highlighting the importance of strategic leaders’ relevant expertise to address sustainability challenges in the absence of institutional pressure or support from their policymakers.

Corporate governance, defined as “the process of decision making and control over firm resources” (Aguilera and Jackson, 2003), is gradually shifting away from a sole focus on creating value for shareholders towards balancing various stakeholder expectations and mitigating the risks emerging from negative externalities for social and environmental stakeholders (Jain et al., 2023; Jain and Xie, 2022). In this unprecedented situation, corporations are now expected to contribute to social welfare, beyond their classical profit objectives. To better understand this new, evolving, and ongoing relation between Corporate Governance (CG) and social welfare (SW), this chapter presents a historical perspective, describing the evolution of CG theory and practice over the last decades. Throughout this chapter, we highlight how corporations have been governed with the idea of contributing to SW, even while the idea of SW itself, its scope and priorities, is contextual to time and multiple disciplinary understandings. Our perspective echoes the recent resurge in interest for historical studies in management (for instance, Argyres et al., 2020, Bucheli et al., 2023), as a better understanding of the past can cast further light on the challenges of today.