Frank Wiengarten

Purpose: This study examines the relationship between the reverberation of follow-up news of a firm's human rights allegations concerning working conditions on share price volatility and social score. These allegations may generate reputational risks that are amplified by NGO and media coverage, thereby shaping financial and social analysts' evaluations of the firm's ability to manage such risks. We also test whether the adoption of human rights policies moderates these potential negative effects. Design/methodology/approach: To test our hypotheses, we constructed a firm-year panel comprising 147 US-based firms from 2015 to 2022. We combined data on human rights allegations against firms and their follow-up news from the Business and Human Rights Research Center, sustainability information from the Bloomberg ESG module, financial data from Compustat and stock market data from the CRSP database. Findings: Our results show that follow-up news reverberation of a firm's human rights allegations is associated with reduced share price volatility, as sustained information may make a firm's actions more visible and predictable to shareholders. Conversely, this reverberation negatively affects a firm's social score, especially in the case of negative follow-up news and in the presence of human rights policies. Reverberation may reveal a decoupling between a firm's stated commitments and its actual behavior regarding human rights. Originality/value: This paper reframes human rights allegations as reputational and human rights risks perceived by investors and social evaluators, who respond differently based on the reverberation of such allegations as amplified by NGOs and the media.

Purpose: Prior research has treated workplace accidents and safety violations detected in OSHA inspections as interchangeable measures without empirical justification. Drawing on organizational learning theory, this study investigates whether and how organizations learn differently from inspections and violations to improve workplace health and safety. Design/methodology/approach: We analyze a five-year panel dataset (2016–2020) comprising 32,943 firm-year observations from 9,004 U.S. manufacturing establishments. We collect secondary data from the OSHA Establishment Specific Injury and Illness Data, OSHA Enforcement Data, and QuantGov. We employ a linear mixed-effects model to examine associations between OSHA inspections, violations found in these inspections, and subsequent accident rates. Findings: An OSHA inspection by itself is associated with approximately a 2% lower accident rates in the following year, regardless of whether any violations are found, suggesting that inspections function as attention-activating events. However, isolated violations show no significant association with subsequent accident rates. In contrast, repeated OSHA-identified violations over multiple years are associated with higher accident rates, indicating the institutionalization of unsafe practices among persistent offenders. Inspection type matters: referral-based and planned inspections are associated with reduced accidents, while complaint-based inspections are not. Research limitations/implications: This study examines associations rather than causal relationships. Findings are limited to U.S. manufacturing over a five-year period and may not be generalizable to other industries or regulatory contexts. Practical implications: Regulators should differentiate enforcement approaches for occasional versus repeat offenders. Expanding inspection coverage may be more effective than increasing penalty severity. Managers can use internal inspections as learning triggers even without penalties. Originality/value: This study challenges the assumption that violations and accidents are equivalent safety measures. By applying organizational learning theory, we provide evidence that inspections and violations operate through distinct mechanisms – inspections as attention-directing events, violations as weak signals unless repeated.

Purpose: Although supply chain research has extensively examined various aspects of network dynamics, insight into how these relationships affect supplier performance remains limited. This study utilises triads as the smallest observable unit of the supply network and draws on balance theory, complemented by social exchange theory. The study examines how different configurations of buyer-supplier-supplier triads affect the supplier’s operational performance as perceived by the buyer.Design/methodology/approach: A multi-method approach is employed to capture the conjunctive and equifinal nature of triadic relationships. First, a sample of 33 buyer-supplier-supplier triads was surveyed in 2017. These survey data were analysed using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Then, a selection of triad members was interviewed in 2021. This interview data was analysed using a process tracing approach to contextualise the survey results.Findings: The results show that high supplier performance in a buyer-supplier-supplier triad is achieved through strong social bonds between the buyer and one supplier, high supplier dependence and intense competition among the two suppliers. In contrast, low-performing triads show weak social bonds between the buyer and suppliers and low interdependencies and coopetition between the two suppliers.Originality/value: Research has primarily focused on the dyadic buyer-supplier relationship when considering the impact of relationships in the supply network on supplier performance. This study offers the first indications of how buyer-supplier and supplier-supplier relationships jointly influence supplier performance and provides relevant insights for managers to leverage the relationships with and among their suppliers to their advantage.

Purpose: Operations management research and practice has started to embrace sustainability in all its forms, including worker safety. Worker safety is a pivotal component of social sustainability, with accidents occurring largely in a firm’s operations. Nevertheless, workplaces are still not safe. To further understand why, we explore how workplace accidents are affected by who manages occupational safety (i.e. owner/partner, managing director/site/branch manager, OHS officer or safety representative), and if this effect is dependent on the size of the establishment. Design/methodology/approach: Stakeholder-agency theory is utilized to develop a theoretical framework on the efficacy of having different job roles manage safety in establishments of different sizes. The derived hypotheses are tested using health and safety survey data from the EU-OSHA ESENER I (2014) and ESENER II (2019) surveys. Findings: We provide evidence that it is not beneficial to have owners manage safety in establishments. When owners manage safety in establishments, accidents increase, even when controlling for firm size. When exploring size more deeply, we find that in smaller establishments, it is more beneficial to have an employee representative manage safety, while in larger establishments, a dedicated safety officer should be in charge of managing safety. These findings are highly relevant for creating a path towards safer operations. Originality/value: This study contributes to our understanding of socially sustainable operations by exploring a path to making workplaces safer. It advances knowledge on how to effectively enhance operational safety. This perspective contributes to the expanding worker safety literature in operations management by introducing organizational job responsibilities as a relevant level of analysis, complementing existing explorations in our domain that have primarily focused on traits of the operations. The findings not only enhance scholarly and managerial knowledge but also offer clear guidance to policymakers for creating safer workplaces.

Last-mile delivery platforms have recently emerged as effective business models to match supply and demand, even though they have been criticized for potentially exploiting their workers. This paper investigates the corporate sustainability and socio-economic trade-offs of platform companies in relation to working conditions (i.e., work relationships, social subsystems, and technical subsystem). A survey of 392 paid-per-order workers from six food delivery platforms across Spain was conducted to validate our research framework. Our findings provide a nuanced understanding of the impact of working conditions on corporate sustainability in platform companies. On the one hand, there are positive implications for both social and economic sustainability in the presence of higher earnings, rights and protections, and empowerment for workers. Conversely, prolonged work relationships between workers and platform companies are negatively related to workers’ perceived stress and individual performance. Based on these insights, we advance our understanding of how platform companies can deal with conflicting objectives regarding working conditions by adopting an instrumental approach in the case of short-term workers and an integrative approach with long-term workers.

Supply chains often match the supply of labour to uncertain demand by using precarious workprecarious workers. This increases flexibility and lowers costs for the supply chain by shifting risk to the workers and costs to society. Supply chains are maximizing profits, often literally, on the backs of their workers by creating serious negative externalities for society. We address this issue using a powerpower perspective because powerpower is asymmetrically oriented against workers in many supply chain contexts. This allows us to identify examples of how to reverse this trend and shift powerpower back to workers. The goal is to get to where stakeholders understand the costs and limited benefits of precarity, where we can separate the notion of flexibility from low costs, and where through a combination of incentives, policy, social norms of ethical behaviour, and consumer action, we can get to a better place than where we are now.

Purpose: Firms are increasingly required to make ethical choices when selecting suppliers for their supply chains, and the decisions often rest on individual purchasing managers within the firm. This study builds on the literature on ethical decision-making and the concept of decision frames to investigate the decision-making process of purchasing managers in financially distressed firms. Codes of Conduct (CoC) and how they are enforced (financial rewards and codified procedures for oversight) are studied in terms of their effectiveness in informing and guiding purchasing managers in their supplier selection decisions.Design/methodology/approach: Four sequential experiments were conducted with a total of 648 purchasing managers from manufacturing firms.Findings: The results indicate that purchasing managers in firms facing financial distress are more than four times more likely than purchasing managers in the control groups to select the less ethical supplier in favor of better operational performance. As a potential remedy, it is found that enforcing the firm's CoC help to counteract this tendency and increase ethical supplier selection decisions by 2.1- to 2.6-fold. However, CoC enforcement that invokes multiple conflicting decision frames simultaneously is more likely to impair than promote ethical supplier selection decisions, compared to situations where only one enforcement method is present.Originality/value: These findings develop an improved understanding of purchasers' decision-making processes and shed light on how to effectively use CoCs to guide these decisions.

How do firms respond after being exposed to a low‐probability, high‐consequence (lp‐hc) disruption event? This study examines inventory and flexibility patterns in manufacturing firms in the years following an lp‐hc event, the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. We find patterns suggesting that most firms exposed to the event began to increase their raw material inventories (RAW) over the longer term and increased their volume flexibility for a shorter period. Furthermore, we found that firms increased their RAW mainly when inventories were already at high levels, while the opposite is true for volume flexibility. Firms that were classified as risk‐averse before the event show stronger swings after the event. Preliminary explorations suggest that the performance of firms that have engaged in these inventory shifts is significantly impeded. This study provides insight into a previously unexplored phenomenon, namely, the longer‐term responses of firms to exposure to lp‐hc events. It opens the possibilities of new research regarding causality, economic consequences, and mechanisms of the identified patterns. Increased efforts in this direction should enable our discipline to provide improved normative guidance both socially and operationally.