The corporate citizenship (CC) concept introduced by Dirk Matten and Andrew Crane has been well received. To this date, however, empirical studies based on this concept are lacking. In this article, we flesh out and operationalize the CC concept and develop an assessment tool for CC. Our tool focuses on the organizational level and assesses the embeddedness of CC in organizational structures and procedures. To illustrate the applicability of the tool, we assess five Swiss companies (ABB, Credit Suisse, Nestlé, Novartis, and UBS). These five companies are participants of the UN Global Compact (UNGC), currently the largest collaborative strategic policy initiative for business in the world (www.unglobalcompact.org). This study makes four main contributions: (1) it enriches and operationalizes Matten and Crane’s CC definition to build a concept of CC that can be operationalized, (2) it develops an analytical tool to assess the organizational embeddedness of CC, (3) it generates empirical insights into how five multinational corporations have approached CC, and (4) it presents assessment results that provide indications how global governance initiatives like the UNGC can support the implementation of CC.
Most research on organizational identity tends to take an essentialist perspective, differentiating between an identity construed internally by members of the organization and an image construed by external actors. However, the duality of identity and image struggles with capturing more fluid, open, or partial organizational arrangements, where it is difficult to uphold this distinction. Looking at the case of the hacker collective Anonymous as an extreme example of organization, this paper proposes to adopt a communication-centered perspective in order to better understand the formation of organizational identity. Drawing on the emerging “communicative constitution of organizations” (CCO) framework, we transcend both an essentialist and a member-centered view by arguing that organizational identity is achieved through communicative events that demarcate the boundaries between actions attributed either to the organization or to the organizational environment.
In this article, the authors discuss critically the use of “anthropomorphic” metaphors in organization studies (e.g., organizational knowledge, learning, and memory). They argue that, although these metaphors are potentially powerful, because of frequent usage they are at risk of becoming taken for granted and contextually disconnected from their source domain, the human mind. To unleash the heuristic potential of such metaphors, it is necessary to take into account the inherent dynamics and bidirectionality of metaphorical language use. Therefore, the authors propose a methodology for the context-sensitive use of metaphors in organization studies. They illustrate this approach by developing the new metaphor of organizational insomnia, which is informed by recent neuroscientific research on human sleep and its disruptions. The insomnia metaphor provides an alternative way of explaining deficits in organizational knowledge, learning, and memory, which originate in a state of permanent restlessness.
This paper analyses whether tertiary education of different types, i.e., academic or vocational tertiary education, leads to more or less favourable labour market outcomes. We study the problem for Switzerland, where more than two thirds of the workforce gain vocational secondary degrees and a substantial number go on to a vocational tertiary degree but only a small share gain an academic tertiary degree. As outcome variables, we examine the risk of being unemployed, monthly earnings, and variation in earnings (reflecting financial risk). We study these outcomes at career entry and later stages. Our empirical results reveal that the type of tertiary education has various effects on these outcomes. At career entry, we observe equal unemployment risk but higher average wages and lower financial risk for vocational graduates. At later career stages, we find that these higher average wages disappear and risk of unemployment becomes lower for vocational graduates. Thus, by differentiating the tertiary system into vocational and academic institutions graduates face a variety of valuable options allowing them to self-select into an educational type that best matches their individual preferences.
