International companies may develop global policies for their HR practices – but one of the key challenges is ensuring that practices are adapted to the national culture and legal frameworks. A recent study by IÉSEG professors from ICON and Guanghua School of Management (Peking University) has analyzed how three different HRM practices can impact corporate innovation across different national cultural contexts.
At the beginning of this new year, five experts from the IÉSEG centers of excellence and research, including Frank DE BAKKER from ICOR, outline some of the key issues or trends they will be following this year in their fields. He explains that there are several key issues in the domains of sustainability, corporate social responsibility (CSR), ethics, equality and social entrepreneurship that will persist in 2024. These focus on four different areas: climate change Impact, business and society intersection: technology driven sustainability and socially responsible supply chains.
The world’s financial authorities — central banks, financial regulators and supervisors — now recognize both climate change and declining biodiversity — the loss of animal and plant species, as well as the degradation of ecosystem diversity and genetic biodiversity within species — as a significant source of systemic financial risks, and they’re developing policies to mitigate their effects. But to make real progress, they need to see the connection between the two problems and take a more proactive approach.
In this article, ICOR member Hugues CHENET speaks about his paper “Biodiversity loss and climate change interactions: financial stability implications for central banks and financial supervisors,” co-authored with Katie KEDWARD and Josh RYAN-COLLINS of University College London,.
Research shows that many companies have programs, guidelines, or written codes in place to promote ethical behavior and prevent misconduct. But this hasn’t necessarily prevented unethical conduct or some of the corporate scandals that have made the headlines over the last decades, notes ICOR member Simone DE COLLE. In this interview, the expert in stakeholder theory, speaks about the development and design of corporate ethics programs and how they can be implemented effectively to improve ethics within organizations.
Read the full interview.
A new report published during the COP 28 highlights that the world has reached a pivotal moment as threats from Earth system tipping points, and progress towards positive tipping points, accelerate.
The report was produced by an international team of more than 200 researchers, coordinated by the University of Exeter in partnership with the Bezos Earth Fund.
Professor Hugues Chenet, a member of ICOR, was one of the team of researchers that contributed to the work on the potential of financial systems to enable positive tipping points.
Find out more here.
In this video, ICOR member Benjamin HUYBRECHTS presents research he has co-authored on moral markets. These are markets that produce goods with an explicit social or environmental added value and examples include organic and local food, ethical fashion, socially responsible investment and fair trade.
Through the case of Fairtrade International, the main certification organization for fair trade products, his study explores a typical dilemma facing organizations developing these markets.
Find out more in this video:
More information is available in the paper in the Journal of Management Studies, coauthored with Helen Haugh from Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, and Bob Doherty from the School for Business and Society, University of York.
In the latest episode of the Changemaker stories podcast, Professor Mamta BHATT (member of ICOR) speaks about diversity and inclusion in the workplace. She outlines the differences between diversity & inclusion and why it is important from both a business and moral perspective that organizations address both in their strategy.
Professor BHATT also speaks about some of the challenges of implementing DEI strategies but also provides some examples of companies with interesting initiatives.
Listen to the full podcast here:
In this episode of the Changemaker stories podcast, Professor François Maon (a member of ICOR) discusses the development of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ways of measuring and certifying CSR. He also discusses the steps organizations can take to create sustainable value in the long term.
You can listen to the podcast here:
Over the last years, a profusion of business models and structures have emerged as a response to different social and environmental challenges. New types of corporate (for-profit) entities with a social mission, such as the benefit corporations in the US, enterprises à mission in France, or community interest companies in the UK, have developed rapidly and blurred the boundaries between traditional nonprofit organizations and classic for-profit companies.
Professor François Maon (a member of ICOR), and his coauthors Coline Serres and Marek Hudon (Université libre de Bruxelles) have recently carried out a comprehensive international study of social corporations – for-profit entities that have the social mission formally stated in their articles/bylaws. Their work aims to provide a clear overview/typology of the types of corporations that have developed in different countries and their legal and governance structures; and secondly to identify the key mechanisms that enable such companies to be successful in pursuing their dual mission.
Read the full article.
In this video, Professor Farah Kodeih (a member of ICOR) speaks about some of her recent research that looked at how a local NGO supported Syrian refugees in their efforts to rebuild meaningful lives and become less dependent on aid.
Together with her coauthors Henri Schildt from Aalto University in Finland, and Tom Lawrence from Oxford University in the UK they studied an entrepreneurial training program that helped the refugees set up small businesses and they identified different ways in which this NGO empowered refugees.
The full paper can be viewed here: “Countering Indeterminate Temporariness: Sheltering work in refugee camps”, Organization Studies (2022)