Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to suggest a need to widen stakeholder theory to include non-human influences to better describe the complex corporate environment. Drawing from actor-network theory, non-human entities may “translate” new, unexpected stakeholders to support their aims.Design/methodology/approach – The paper employs a theoretical conceptual approach with three illustrative examples.Findings – The examples provided show that corporate crises result partly from previously unacknowledged non-human spheres of influence and cause corporations serious losses. Corporations that take a proactive stance and monitor the weak signals of change are able to improve their standing and maintain legitimacy.Research limitations/implications – The framework created requires more testing with different examples across contexts and cultures. Future studies should examine the process of translation more deeply and examine who can potentially be translated into a stakeholder. Practical implications – Corporate communication should play “the devil's advocate” on issues and analyze not only stakeholders, but also non-human entities that may be able to translate others into joining their cause. Originality/value – This paper broadens stakeholder theory to better describe the current corporate environment by highlighting the process of translation among stakeholders and non-human entities.

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to describe and qualitatively explain certain observations concerning corporate social responsibility from the personnel standpoint with special reference to various stakeholders.
Design/methodology/approach – The observations were made in connection with earlier studies on organizational change. The paper draws on stakeholder thinking and offers a view regarding the way employees perceive business issues concerning CSR in relation to corporate stakeholder groups. Should a business give priority to the interests of its owners or take all stakeholder groups equally into account? How do employees see their own relations with other stakeholder groups, and do their views change in the course of a post-merger integration process? The interviews were conducted at two points in the change process in Nordic energy sector companies: first in the pre-merger situation in 2001 and then in the post-merger situation four years later in 2005.
Findings – The main contribution of the study is the observation of the changing positions of stakeholder groups in a merger process. The findings show that two of these primary stakeholder groups – namely, management and owners – shift places in a merger, with owners replacing the management in the corporate core and the old, pre-merger management joining the stakeholder group of other personnel.
Originality/value – The paper produces new and validated scientific information about energy-sector mergers from the employees' point-of-view.

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to explore the interrelations between organizational trust and ethics management tools as well as ethical organizational practices in a post-socialist context.
Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual framework of the interrelations among organizational trust, ethics management tools and ethical organizational practices is reasoned and the interrelations among the variables are explored using quantitative methods of data analysis. The method of data gathering is a questionnaire survey that was carried out in Lithuania which is taken as an example of a post-socialist society where trust is rather low. In total, answers from 519 respondents were collected.
Findings – The empirical findings confirm the interdependence of the variables. A significant dependence of organizational trust on ethical organizational practices has been established.
Research limitations/implications – The research findings imply that ethics management tools just weakly predict emergence of organizational trust in the organizations operating in a post-socialist context. Rather, organizational practices which integrate ethical principles are considerably more important to building organizational trust. This is a peculiarity of a post-socialist context where people were used to the relativity of the declared values and ideas, therefore, tend to search for evidence of value realization in practice. However, since post-socialist societies differ in their socio-historical past, this claim is not a generalization.
Practical implications – The paper provides managerial implications how to advance organizational trust in a post-socialist context.
Originality/value – The research paper provides empirical evidence on the interrelations among organizational trust, ethics management tools and ethical organizational practices, which is scarce in the existing literature on organizational trust. In particular, neither the interrelation between ethics management tools and organizational trust nor a combined effect of ethics management tools and ethical organizational practices on organizational trust has been empirically tested. Thus, the paper fills in this gap in the related literature.

During the last decade, any questionable or illegal behaviour on the part of businesses has received considerable attention in the media. Using a critical discursive perspective, we here investigate how the media constructs one type of questionable business as illegitimate. Our data draw upon articles dealing with cartels and cartel agreements in Finnish business media covering the five year period 2002–2007. Our contributions are following: We add to the current literature on CSR and national businesses, suggesting that regardless of globalization socio-cultural history plays an important role in constructing the illegitimacy of business practices. We therefore emphasize the importance of media as an arena where social actors construct the social contract between business and society. We further contribute to studies on questionable business by reconstructing a discursive framework used to construct cartels and cartel agreements.

In this article the author critically analyzes underlying discursive statements on managerial and leadership issues in relation to ethics and responsibility in information and communication technology enterprises – the firms and people involved in the case have a Finnish and/or Nordic background. The topic of the study is remarkably broad, and so this fact indicates the existence of limited, subjectively constructed views on multiple theoretical, methodological and empirical insights and dimensions. The issues of context, discourse and text are important in these kinds of qualitative interpretations. The triangle formed by technology, business and organization has some essence in contemporary society. According to this study, the size, hierarchy and scale of companies cause differing ethical dilemmas, actual leadership and management practices raise other problems and the specific managerial and leadership actions in turn bring about new discourses. The governance and control of an enterprise's performance, decisionmaking procedures, activities, moments of truths and other illustrative elements are often intertwined.

This study describes and interprets differences in stakeholder interaction as rhetorically constructed in environmental reports and in interviews with environmental managers. It also interprets the role of the natural environment among stakeholders, and discusses how that role is justified or not justified. The study focuses in a business perspective on stakeholder interaction in environmental management. Characteristically, stakeholder studies of environmental management have concentrated on stakeholder influence or the creation of stakeholder management models. In contrast to those, the present study identifies different types of stakeholder relationships: power-based, collaborative, conflicting, and one-sided. Through descriptions of those relationships, business actors participate in the power to define responsibility, share responsibility among actors, question environmental interest, and justify environmental impacts. The results of the study demonstrate that, when regarding environmental issues in business, instead of analysing single stakeholder attributes or a single stakeholder relationship, business professionals should be able to manage differences in stakeholder relationships. No universal stakeholder management tools can be created for this purpose, rather stakeholder interaction in environmental management requires analysis of the actors involved, the attributes of relationships, and the attributes of stakeholder interests and identification of differences in those. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

The paper is based on a prior study that investigates the interrelations among ethics management tools, ethical organizational practices and organizational trust in a post-socialist context (Pučėtaitė et al., 2010). The study identified fair and just human resource management practices, open communication and employees’ participation as the strongest predictors of organizational trust. An ethics code and ethics auditing had a weaker effect on organizational trust and only in a small number of cases. This paper aims to further explore the findings, discussing socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents and their organizations that make implications to building organizational trust in a post-socialist context which is characterized by rather low societal trust (Pučėtaitė and Lämsä, 2010; Sztompka, 1999). The research findings indicate that the respondents’ gender, position in the organization and education can be significant in perceptions of organizational trust. Age is important in perception of ethical organizational practices, in particular the ones related to communication and participation. Small organizations are more sensitive to fair and just HRM practices. Private and foreign-capital organizations are favourable contexts for developing organizational trust. These companies could be regarded as “light-houses” with the strongest potential to advance organizational trust if proper managerial efforts are made. Beside managerial implications the paper makes suggestions for further research.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present four examples of stakeholder relationships related to issues of corporate environmental management (CEM) and analyze them based on the model of Mitchell et al. (1997). Design/methodology/approach – Secondary data are used in the case studies.Findings – The four cases presented show that basically any stakeholder can become definitive over time in the complex network of stakeholders with mutual relationships. The definitive stakeholders in CEM are no longer merely the NGOs and policymakers but now include many diverse groups such as customers, locals and suppliers.Research limitations/implications – These case studies cannot be generalized, but they could contribute to more comprehensive studies on stakeholder strategies in the future by raising up new CEM issues.Practical implications – The paper indicates that stakeholder strategies need to be changed in corporations over time. Latent stakeholders can become expectant and definitive stakeholders gradually over time.Originality/value – The paper presents and analyzes four different cases of corporation-stakeholder relations in the field of corporate environmental management

This paper describes an exploratory research study to develop a typology showing the diversity of expatriation from the viewpoint of cross-cultural adaptation. The study draws on a narrative approach and concentrates on not-for-profit organizations, which have been overlooked in prior research. We conducted 30 in-depth interviews in an Israeli-Palestinian context for the study. Based on a narrative analysis of these we defined four types of expatriates: global careerists; balanced experts; idealizers; and drifters. The study indicates that cross-cultural adaptation does not necessarily require deep involvement or communication with the host society, as has traditionally been assumed in the literature. Cross-cultural adaptation does, however, require a focus which the expatriate can find meaningful in the long run. Three such focuses were identified: career advancement; local host community; and ideology. Our results suggest that the definition of expatriation needs to be expanded to cover the heterogeneity of expatriates.