This article examines how local organizations respond to the global norm of corporate social responsibility (CSR), focusing on the case of workplace gender diversity in Japan. Though many global institutional investors have declared their commitment to CSR principles, whether and how their investments actually improve local practices has yet to be examined. We hypothesize that changes implemented by local firms in response to pressure from global institutional investors are shaped by political dynamics among competing professional groups in organizations. Through interviews with CSR managers and consultants in Japan, we find that CSR managers push for gender diversity only in the upper ranks of their organizations. This helps managers limit resistance from human resources managers, who want to maintain the traditional employment system, while still gaining support from investor relations managers, who support changes that are visible to investors. Our findings from panel data analysis further document this change above the glass ceiling. Analyzing more than 800 Japanese firms between 2001 and 2009, we show that both foreign investment and the within-firm influence of CSR and investor relations managers significantly increased the number of women on boards and in managerial positions but did not improve the lot of those in non-managerial or entry-level positions. Our study contributes to research on diffusion and organizational change by illuminating interprofessional politics in the local implementation of global norms.
It is well documented that earnings inequalities have risen in many high-income countries. Less clear are the linkages between rising income inequality and workplace dynamics, how within- and between-workplace inequality varies across countries, and to what extent these inequalities are moderated by national labor market institutions. In order to describe changes in the initial between- and within-firm market income distribution we analyze administrative records for 2,000,000,000+ job years nested within 50,000,000+ workplace years for 14 high-income countries in North America, Scandinavia, Continental and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. We find that countries vary a great deal in their levels and trends in earnings inequality but that the between-workplace share of wage inequality is growing in almost all countries examined and is in no country declining. We also find that earnings inequalities and the share of between-workplace inequalities are lower and grew less strongly in countries with stronger institutional employment protections and rose faster when these labor market protections weakened. Our findings suggest that firm-level restructuring and increasing wage inequalities between workplaces are more central contributors to rising income inequality than previously recognized.
Once a preferred strategy, corporate diversification into disparate lines of business has gradually declined in the U.S. over the past several decades. We argue that changes that occurred in a closely related domain—graduate business education—are important in understanding variation in de-diversification across firms. Building on a historical account of the transformation of business education, we explain how the rise of financial economics and agency-theoretic logic in business education changed students’ views about diversification. Nearly 20 years later, these MBA graduates rose to top decision-making positions and put the brakes on diversification. Using data on CEOs who ran 640 large U.S. corporations from 1985 to 2015, we show that CEOs who earned an MBA before the 1970s actively pursued diversification, whereas the next cohort of CEOs, who had been exposed to agency-theoretic logic in financial economics, refrained from it. We also demonstrate that the degree of managerial discretion moderated the effect of the CEO’s MBA education. Our study shows that institutional change in one domain (i.e., business education) contributed to change in another domain (i.e., corporate diversification), albeit with a considerable time lag.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.