Dror Etzion

Climate (in)action by small business owners is not driven only by policy or economic considerations but also by sociological and psychological factors, as leaders mimic the behaviors they perceive among their peers. We find that these social inferences about what others believe are often incorrect. In this registered report of 4,432 small-to-medium business owners and leaders across seven countries, we observe a persistent gap between perceived and actual beliefs. And this gap matters: small-to-medium enterprise owners exhibiting a larger gap have fewer sustainability policies in place. These results highlight how peer effects can spur climate action among business leaders.

Climate (in)action by small business owners is not driven solely by policy or economic considerations, but also by sociological and psychological factors, as leaders mimic the behaviours they perceive among their peers. We find that these social inferences about what others believe are often incorrect. In this registered report of 4432 small-to-medium business owners and leaders across seven countries, we observe a persistent gap between perceived and actual beliefs. And this gap matters: SME owners exhibiting a larger gap have fewer sustainability policies in place. These results highlight how peer effects can spur climate action among business leaders.

Much research on organizations and the natural environment relies on self-reported corporate data of dubious reliability and accuracy. A new wave of data, originating in satellite observations, forensic genetics, hydrological maps and other sources, can help overcome these shortcomings. We identify several data sets from the natural sciences that are easily accessible and highly accurate, and provide roadmaps for management researchers to utilize them. We further explore the types of research questions these data sets enable, extending beyond the confines of environmental-financial performance relationships that have dominated previous research. By leveraging these and similar data sets, corporate sustainability researchers can obtain clearer insights into corporate environmental impact, opening doors to new avenues of inquiry.

I remember reading the original I&S paper and thinking that the econometric setup was somewhat Rube Golbergesque. It wanted to assess whether there was a trend over the years in CSR ratings, but rather than calculating that trendline and seeing whet...

Can measuring and valuing the impact of business on society and the planet lead to a more environmentally and socially oriented style of capitalism? This is the main hope and assertion of corporate environmental and social impact measurement and valuation (IMV), which calls on organizations to measure their positive and negative impacts on their stakeholders and the environment and to subsequently translate them into monetary units. This curated dialog critically examines the components of this concept—environmental and social impact, its measurement, and its monetary valuation—by bringing together leading experts in the field who discuss the opportunities and risks of IMV. The purpose of this article is to place IMV under deep investigation and envision new ways that work with, complement, or replace organizations’ desire for management via quantification and financialization.

Purpose: This conceptual paper presents a proposal for improving a performance measurement (PM) system implementation process based on enterprise engineering (EE) guidelines, which gives the process a sense of completeness.Design/methodology/approach: This paper analyzes a well-known process for PM systems implementation organized in two phases: identifying, designing and implementing the top-level performance measures; and cascading the top-level measures and identify appropriate lower-level performance measures. The proposed improvements to the studied process derive from the EE guidelines, which establish a basis for the structure of an organizational management system, the formalization and synchronization of processes, performance expectations, exception handling and change management.Findings: The study reveals that not all EE guidelines are covered by the analyzed process, with four of them having no evidence of being adopted: involvement of people in process design and implementation; ensuring interoperability between different systems in the information structure; addressing of all possible exceptions; coherence and consistency of semantics across all processes.Originality/value: By the lens of EE guidelines, this paper advances a how-to-guide. This paper can support managers and researchers on PM system design and implementation, given the importance and relevance of EE recommendations having a consistent and well-structured procedure.

Non-technical summary: By the end of 2020, 190 universities and colleges worldwide had publicly committed to divest partially or fully from fossil fuel holdings, to help mitigate global heating. We find a statistical correlation between the status of universities in the world rankings and decisions to divest endowments from fossil fuel. Further analysis suggests causation in both directions. Not only do the best divest, but divestors get better. Technical summary: Previous studies have explored connections between environmental responsibility and the financial performance of business firms. Here, we explore connections between a particular form of environmental responsibility, divestment from fossil fuel, and the reputational status of a different form of organization, universities. We find a strong and robust link between world university rankings and commitments to divest endowments from the fossil fuel industry, with higher-ranked universities divesting at higher rates compared to lower-ranked universities. Rates of divestment also differ significantly between countries, and according to the political orientations of provinces and states. We do not find evidence for links between divestment treated as a binary variable and a university's number of students, size of endowment, or type of endowment. We use time lags to test whether the rank-divestment correlation may arise due to effects of rank on divestment and/or vice versa. These tests indicate influence in both directions. In light of these results, we predict universities that have not yet divested will face mounting peer pressure to do so. Social media summary: Higher-ranked universities divest more frequently, and divesting universities improve more in the rankings.

What should the post-COVID conference look like? In our attempt to answer this question, we first describe the primary functions and affordances of conferences. Our frank appraisal reveals the breadth of reasons why academics attend conferences, and how conference attendance often blends personal and professional motivations. We also elaborate some of the shortcomings of in-person conferences, spanning personal, professional, and societal concerns. Recent alternative (virtual) formats for convening scholars provide means for alleviating some of these shortcomings, but do not seem entirely up to the task of providing a fully satisfactory solution to all that conferencing can be. Moreover, we extrapolate from prior history and ongoing trends to predict that technological solutionism to conferencing is likely to unleash both positive and negative dynamics, some of which will exacerbate current ills in our profession. We then sketch out a values-based approach that can serve as a basis for reimagining academic conferences. This vision promotes a federated model of conferencing, grounded in principles of inclusion, diversity, community, and environmental stewardship.