Value Attunement: Exploring the Potential for Responsible Executive Decision Making

Marc Orlitzky and Diane L. Swanson
Additional contact information
Marc Orlitzky: Pennsylvania State University Altoona
Diane L. Swanson: Kansas State University

Chapter 3 in Toward Integrative Corporate Citizenship, 2008, pp 63-77 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract As mentioned in the Introduction, society increasingly expects corporations to respond affirmatively to a wide variety of social concerns (Butler, 2001; Grace & Cohen, 1998). This expectation is consistent with the origin of the business corporation as a creation of government to be held accountable for serving the public interest (Waddell, 2000). Yet this institutional mission has become increasingly complicated as large corporations operate across the globe and small firms develop worldwide stakeholder networks (Vidaver-Cohen & Altman, 2000). Faced with such complexity, it is difficult for corporate leaders to know how to proceed. Their hesitation is not helped by the widely-held fallacy, addressed in Chapter 2, that values — or normative beliefs about right and wrong — are subjective preferences that cannot be identified and analyzed (Frederick, 1986; Treviño & Weaver, 1994, 1999, 2003). Given this fallacy, it is not surprising that many executives place low priority on integrating policies of social responsibility into organizational cultures and core business practices (Birch & Batten, 2001;Milne, Owen & Tilt, 2001). Accordingly, they may downplay social issues, unless the values at stake just happen to coincide with their own personally held beliefs (Swanson, 1999). And even this ‘value coincidence’ may be uncommon (see Birch & Batten, 2001).

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility; Business Ethic; Infant Formula; Corporate Social Performance; Corporate Citizenship (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-59470-8_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230594708

DOI: 10.1057/9780230594708_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().