1,720,957 research outputs found
Banking for a low carbon future: a multi-stage model of corporate climate change responses in a low-salience industry
Get PDFWhile there is a great sense of urgency in the scientific community to act now in order to slow the imminent negative effects of global warming, most organizations continue to run their operations as though the external context has not changed significantly. For the banking sector, in particular not much research has been conducted in the area of their strategic engagement with climate change (CC), despite the fact that the engagement of this sector is crucial for the transition to a low-carbon economy. This is why this thesis focuses on the banking sector. Through an exploratory comparative case study of four banks, this thesis investigates mechanisms that have led to, or have been prevented from, the integration of climate change in the respective bank’s corporate strategies. In particular, it answers the following questions: How are banks interpreting climate change in their organizational context? To what degree does the initial individual interpretation influence the attentional distribution through structures and communication of the issue internally? Can this explain the variance in observed strategic choices? In order to answer those questions, a multi-level analysis was conducted using three different theoretical perspectives: the macro, meso and micro.1. The macro lens, grounded in institutional theory, is important in order to generate understanding about the perception of current institutional pressures possibly influencing corporate responses.2. The meso lens, grounded in the Attention Based View of the Firm, serves to analyze how attention structures inside the banks influence the distribution of attention towards the topic and influence the degree of integrating climate change-related aspects across the organization.3. The micro lens, based on the concept of moral intensity (Jones, 1991), serves as an alternative interpretation model to explore how managers make sense of climate change as individuals. Further, the concept of “issue selling” investigates what language managers use to generate attention regarding climate change while using different attentional structures explored through the meso lens.The findings are based on four case studies of banks located in Europe, each of which show a different degree of climate change integration in their corporate strategy. The case studies drew upon field research including 23 semi-structured interviews with senior managers and members of the executive teams from those four banks, six interviews with stakeholders and a comprehensive analysis of publicly available corporate documents, company-related media releases, videos and further interviews, but also confidential corporate material that was made available to me. Through analysis of the data, the following findings can be made:Most banks perceive climate change in terms of pressure: coercive pressure from clients, very limited pressure from regulators in the area of risk and as mimetic pressure to respond. Some banks, however, also perceive climate change to be a moral issue that demands their contribution to act. In those banks, climate change is regarded as a morally intense issue — this term being defined as a commonly accepted phenomenon with extreme consequences for the future of the society they are embedded in and that they serve. One bank mainly had a scientific view on climate change as a human-induced natural phenomenon. Depending on these first interpretations, the findings suggest that different languages are deployed to further distribute the issue across the organization. In the case of scientific and institutional interpretations, the main language used to sell the issue inside the organization and to justify its incorporation as part of strategy was economic. climate change was translated into financial risk, business opportunity or a potential for cost reduction. Banks that mainly interpreted climate change as a moral imperative to act, communicated this issue differently. They proffered moral arguments that were grounded in the organization’s mission to serve society and based their strategic engagement on this mission. Economic arguments were only deployed at the stage of operationalization of climate change. These different languages influenced the arenas where conversations linked to climate change took place and how widely attention was subsequently distributed across the organization. In the case of a scientific language, climate change was not incorporated into strategy and remained as a topic of general interest, managed by the corporate social responsibility (CSR) function. In the case of an economic language, climate change was strictly contained to a few of already existing governance channels and sometimes even ignored entirely. No further attention to the issue within the companies could be observed. Strategic engagement and change were strictly related to fields where economic impact could be generated at the lowest transaction cost possible. In the instances where moral language was used within governance channels, conversation yielded a different level of engagement. In these cases, governance structures provided a platform for generating a common and more holistic understanding of the phenomenon and its impacts. The attentional engagement with the complexity of the issue grew across the organization and led to creation of new governance communication channels to help address emerging issues. As a result, the strategic integration of climate change was more holistic and comprehensive. The thesis makes theoretical contributions to institutional theory, Attention Based View of the Firm, the issue selling literature and Governance Ethics. Its results also have important implications for practice
Sphere Mapping and Leadership in Business
No full textLeadership in business has been a significant concern in management studies for decades. Our paper is an interdisciplinary attempt to contribute to the literature on business leadership. We bring together research from management studies, applied ethics and corporate responsibility to offer a preliminary approach to business leadership. This preliminary approach involves application of Martha Nussbaum’s concept of sphere mapping in business leadership. The yield of this approach is a shortlist of specific virtues—fairness, honesty, open-mindedness and non-malevolence—that we hold business leaders should adopt
Transcendent leadership
No full textLeadership theories abound, but few have provided a means to integrate the depth and breadth of the vast literature available. Building on the research of Crossan, Vera, and Nanjad (who propose Transcendent Leadership as an integrative framework), we describe the key leadership challenges of leading across the levels of self, others, organization, and society. We argue that much of the leadership discourse has focused almost exclusively on leadership of others and occasionally on the leadership of the organization as a whole, yet little has focused specifically on the integral component of leadership of self. We provide evidence of the necessity of multiple levels of leadership, as well as some practical guidance, by drawing from in-depth interviews of six leaders in various contexts.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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