The emergence of environmental governance practices raises a fundamental question as to whether they are substantive or symbolic. Toward that end, we analyze the relationship between a firm’s environmental governance and its environmental management as reflected in its ultimate outcome,...

Two fundamental business ethics issues that repeatedly surface in the academic literature relate to business’s role in the development of public policy [Suarez, S. L.: 2000, Does Business Learn? (The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI); Roberts, R. W. and D. D. Bobek: 2004,...

This paper investigates potential motivations for late adopting U.S. companies to begin disclosing environmental liability amounts in their financial statements. Based on a review of 10-K reports filed from 1998 through 2012, inclusive, we identified 55 firms initiating environmental liability...

In this paper we investigate whether, and how, corporate management strategically uses disclosure to manage the perceptions of different organizational audiences. In particular, we examine the interactions between the FIAT Group and three of its key organizational audiences—the local press,...

This paper presents a case study examining the environmental disclosure decisions and practices of Total SA (hereafter, Total), one of the largest integrated oil and gas companies in the world. Because the company has a substantial international presence and operates in environmentally sensitive...

How do consumers react when they believe that a transaction partner will view them through the lens of a stereotype? We predicted and found that being aware of a negative stereotype about a group to which one belongs (e.g., gender) made consumers sensitive to whether service providers were...

Two studies examine how different emotions of the same valence influence product evaluation when products make specific emotional claims. Vacation products with adventurous (serene) appeals were evaluated more favorably when participants felt excited (peaceful) rather than peaceful (excited)....

What political candidates say during their campaign and when they say it are critical to their success. In three experiments, we show that abstract, "why"-laden appeals are more persuasive than concrete, "how"-laden appeals when voters' decision is temporally distant; the reverse is true when...