1,720,982 research outputs found
Demand for CSR: Insights from Shareholder Proposals
No full textAcceptedThis is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Social and Environmental Accountability Journal on 19 October 2015, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/0969160X.2015.1094396.Motivated by the increasing popularity and attention shareholder proposals on corporate social responsibility (CSR) attract, the purpose of this study is to provide a detailed portrayal of shareholders' demands for CSR through their proposals. To this end, we conduct a descriptive longitudinal study of the CSR proposals submitted to US corporations for the fiscal years 1996–2009. We use a unique coding process in which we identify both the CSR area of concern to the shareholders and the desired effect the proposal is intended to stimulate on the corporation. Our findings expose how shareholders engage with corporations mostly around the issues of governance and environment, requesting more transparency from the companies but also improved actions or business decisions. Firms from a wide range of industries are targeted, with their levels of CSR performance, profitability and size attracting different kinds of requests in terms of CSR areas and expected outcomes for the corporation. Shareholders can be relatively intense in their requests for CSR, with the majority of firms in our sample being targeted with more than one proposal annually. Our study deepens our understanding of shareholders' concerns and requests for improvements in CSR.Chaire de recherche en gouvernance de societes of the Universite Lava
The marketization of a social movement: Activists, shareholders and CSR disclosure
No full textIn this paper, we conceptualize shareholder activism demanding CSR transparency as an outcome of the marketization of a social movement. We argue that the infusion of profit-oriented motivations into the social justice ideals on which the original shareholder activism movement was founded has contributed to create a conceptualization of CSR as a risk to be managed. As marketized solutions to risk management privilege the provision of information, they contribute to explaining the emphasis placed by shareholders on transparency in their proposals. Drawing on a sample of U.S. firms over 2006–2012, our evidence suggests a marked increase in CSR disclosure for the sample firms targeted by transparency proposals. However, our analysis reveals that concerns over the CSR practices of the same firms worsen, suggesting that shareholder activism demanding CSR transparency does not inspire change in corporate activities beyond disclosure, at least in the short term. Our contribution to the accounting literature lies in conceptualizing how the emphasis placed on CSR disclosure contributes to ensconcing the social movement into a corporation-centric, market-driven approach, moving away from the initial ideals of social justice aiming to push corporations to act on societal concerns. Altogether, we expose how the accounting practice of CSR disclosure is complicit in the attrition of the initial ideals of shareholder activism on CSR
Shareholder activism and the environment
No full textThe significance of shareholder activism on (social and) environmental issues has grown in importance over the years. Through dialogue and engagement with companies, filing of shareholder proposals or/and discussions at the annual general meeting, activist shareholders take on a proactive role (as opposed to simply selling their shares) to stimulate transformations into environmental practices. This chapter aims to offer a portrayal of shareholder activism on environmental issues, in terms of its nature, history and current developments. The antecedents, process and outcomes associated with environmental activism are covered, followed by a descriptive overview of which environmental topics and corporate actions are being publicly pursued by activist shareholders in recent years. The chapter ends with some reflections arising from our integration of academic research and trends in practice, which highlight issues arising from the environmental activism phenomenon, offer some rays of hope and point out some causes for concerns, culminating in avenues for future research
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Full text link“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
Full text linkWe 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
Full text linkWe 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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