A market for vice: The foundations of corporate strategic irresponsibility

1 online resource (141 pages) : PDF

2016

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Organizational scholarship has assumed that corporate irresponsibility (CI) is largely detrimental to firm financial performance. Alternatively, CI may sometimes work in firms’ favor, though at the expense of stakeholders. Exploring this reality, many firms may engage in corporate strategic irresponsibility (CSI) because there are short-term financial benefits to doing so or at least no clear financial payoffs for behaving otherwise. CSI is conceptualized as a pervasive and persistent firm strategy employed toward competitive advantage. In this research, it is hypothesized first that firms engage in CSI to enhance short-term financial performance. It is then hypothesized that firms engaging in CSI will corporate social responsibility as a buffering mechanism against external control agents, as well as corporate political activity to reduce environmental uncertainty around their CSI. Using a random effects model of unbalanced panel data, the results provide mixed support for the hypotheses. The primary hypothesis is that CSI leads to competitive advantage. This hypothesis is supported. Next, there is partial support for the buffering hypotheses. In particular, CSI predicts corporate philanthropy, as the coefficient of CSI is significantly positive.

doctoral dissertations

Management
Sociology
Ethics

Ph.D.

Competitive Advantage
Corporate Irresponsibility
CSR
Neoinstitutional Theory

Organizational Science

Arnold, Denis

Beck, Tammy
Rubin, Beth
Goodstein, Jerry
Zhao, Wei

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2016.

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