Marketing as exchange has been the sine qua non of the field for over thirty years. While buyer–seller dyads dominate traditional conversations, other forms of transactions are included as long as value transfer occurs. The most logical extension is Stakeholder Theory, an approach with the same basic structure for understanding, maintaining, and advancing important relationships among firms and their constituencies. Together, they posit that self-contained individuals or units have a marked impact on one another, which passes across defined boundaries at discrete periods of time. Yet the failure to capture organic and dynamic ways in which such entities interact necessities a new approach, such as the naturological perspective that recognizes porous boundaries and reverberating consequences of marketing exchanges, especially among consumers and other impacted parties who survive at or near the proverbial bottom of the economic pyramid.

The literatures of business ethics and international business have generally had little influence on each other. Nevertheless, the decline in the power of nation states, the emergence of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the proliferation of self-regulatory bodies, and the changing responsibilities, roles, and structure of multinational corporations make constructive engagement between these two disciplines imperative. This changing institutional landscape creates many areas of common concern. In this article, the authors describe the changing institutional context of global business and suggest ways in which both business ethics and international business may inform each other more fruitfully.

In the Financial Accounting Standards Board's (FASB) project, "Disclosure of Certain Loss Contingencies," a central issue underlying the debate is whether existing implementation of FASB Accounting Standards Codification Topic 450-20 (previously Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 5) provides sufficient and timely information to financial statement users. The Exposure Draft explains that constituents' assertions of inadequate disclosures are the primary motive underlying the FASB's re-examination of this issue (see, for example, page v of the Exposure Draft). However, little actual data are available to indicate the extent of the alleged problem. This manuscript presents the results of a study undertaken to provide such data. For a sample of litigation-related losses, the authors find a surprisingly large incidence of non-disclosure of contingent losses that cannot be readily explained. Moreover, even where there is disclosure, they find many cases where firms do not provide estimates of expected losses, presumably under the permitted exception for cases where firms claim to be unable to estimate the magnitude of expected losses. On the other hand, the authors find relatively frequent disclosure of the items called for in the Exposure Draft, consistent with the conjecture that at least some of these items are being demanded by users.

The technological capabilities in a virtual environment enable a wealth of information concerning consumer characteristics and preferences to be gathered, combined, and disseminated, with relative ease, during electronic commerce (e-commerce) transactions. Consumers continue to be concerned about the corporate use of personal information collected during the course of such transactions, despite government oversight. This paper examines the types of consumer information collected and the concerns associated with such practices. Consumer concerns give rise to the necessity for corporations to self-regulate by assessing the risks associated with information privacy practices. In response, the authors present a conceptual framework for the corporate risk assessment of consumer privacy expectations. This framework can be used by corporations to assess and explain their self-regulation of consumer internet privacy.

In this article, the authors present the findings of a study examining the exploding problem of counterfeit trade via the opinions of U.S. executives as compared to their counterparts from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Tahiti. Their responses provide insight as to how companies in different countries are attacking piracy and consumer complicity with counterfeit products. Per this study, executives in Australia, Tahiti, and the U.S. had similar perspectives: they viewed the seller as the main driver of counterfeit trade for reasons of profit. These executives perceived the demand for counterfeits as being driven by desirable product attributes and the ease of obtaining them. Likewise, they cited two anti-counterfeiting actions: site licenses and reduced price/rebates, as being able to reduce the demand for illicit products. In contrast, South African executives observed the main reason for piracy as weak enforcement of intellectual property (IP) and the lure of exorbitant profits, with little value in any anti-counterfeiting actions other than special packaging. These executives put forth that South African consumers are complicit due to limited education and low disposable income, and the ready availability of counterfeits. Executives from New Zealand were the most optimistic, believing that piracy and complicity can be reduced by many anti-counterfeiting actions, including special packaging, reducing price, emphasizing product benefits/warranties, stressing the harmful effects of using fake products, offering site licenses, and listing of authorized sellers.

A consensus has emerged in the burgeoning literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) that "virtuous" firms are often rewarded by the marketplace. Unfortunately, the mechanisms through which those rewards materialize are not well understood. Furthermore, it is difficult for managers and investors to know whether a company is actually engaged in responsible behavior. Thurs, many stakeholders rely on institutional assessments of a firm's social practices to inform their own judgments about that company's CSR reputation. In this article, the authors draw on institutional theory and research on reputation and legitimacy to investigate the relationship between institutional endorsements (and repudiation) of CSR and firm financial performance. The empirical results indicate that institutional intermediaries influence market assessments of a firm's social responsibility and highlight the importance of the legitimacy-conferring function of expert bodies in understanding the relationship between social and financial performance. The findings also illustrate the delicate interplay among different social performance assessments, reputation, and measures of financial and operating performance such that operating performance may serve as an advanced indicator of social performance and one type of social performance assessment may temper market reactions to another.

The balanced scorecard (BSC) allows firms to place importance on both financial and nonfinancial performance measures in four perspectives for developing and implementing corporate strategy and performance evaluation. The BSC literature however provides minimal insight on how to set targets, how to weigh measures when evaluating managers and the firm, and how to resolve conflicts that arise in the BSC process. Researchers have attempted to fill these gaps using two contending approaches. In particular, Datar et al. (2001) uses an agency model to select the optimal set of weights and more recently Herath et al. (2009) develop a mathematical programming–based collaborative decision model to find the optimal (or approximately optimal) set of target and weights considering inputs from two parties. In this article, the authors apply the Herath et al. (2009) model to a detailed BSC example. The authors demonstrate how the collaborative BSC model can be implemented in Microsoft Excel by practitioners to minimize BSC conflicts. Finally, they discuss how the model facilitates alignment and a culture of open reporting (information sharing) around the BSC that is necessary for its effective implementation.

In this paper, the authors review and critique two prominent theories in the international business and international economics literatures regarding the role of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in host country development: the "spillovers" perspective on the impact of MNE investment in host countries and the liabilities of foreignness (LOF) view that specifies the constraints MNEs must overcome to succeed in local, developing country markets. The authors then propose an alternative conceptualization of MNE-host country relations in which MNEs and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) pursue collaborative relationships that make a positive, collective contribution to host country development and to MNE and NGO strategic goals in ways that neither sector is positioned to do alone.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports that counterfeit goods seizures were up 83% in 2006. While a plethora of anti-counterfeiting strategies target distribution channels, international organizations, pirates, and company-based initiatives, few reports debate the effectiveness of these distinct anti-counterfeiting tactics to curb the problem. For this study, the authors conducted in-depth interviews with United States managers to gauge the efficacy of various anti-counterfeiting tactics to preserve intellectual property rights. The results indicate that corporate managers find the practice of encouraging distributors to notify the manufacturer about counterfeits, as well as educating both employees and channel members about the counterfeit problem, to be some of the most effective ways to fight pirates. However, the managers report many other tactics are futile, including providing financial incentives for distributors to reject counterfeits and stressing the harmful effects of fake goods in advertising. The authors recommend a specific program that firms can employ to deter counterfeiting, including managing the registration of all trademarks and patents in key markets, establishing a company-based enforcement team, monitoring the growth of fakes through a central information repository, developing a multi-pronged action plan, and preparing to fight pirates through investigative work in conjunction with local law enforcement.