MSC professor wins 2021 Best Published Article Award of the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation

At the annual Reputation Symposium 2022, hosted by the Centre for Corporate Reputation at Saïd Business School in Oxford, Professor Dennis Schoeneborn won the 2021 Award (covering the years 2019-2021) for the Best Published Article, jointly with his co-authors, Professor Patrick Haack (HEC Lausanne) and Associate Professor Dirk Martignoni (University of Lugano).

In their article, “A Bait-and-Switch Model of Corporate Social Responsibility”, published 2021 in the Academy of Management Review, the three authors explore alternative approaches to understanding the role of transparency for CSR adoption.

In the words of the authors:

‘We advance a dynamic perspective that conceives transparency and opacity as transitory phenomena, and we specify the boundary conditions for which either enduring or transitory forms of transparency and opacity further the substantive adoption of CSR.

Our analyses reveal that, for circumstances under which the motivation of ceremonial adoption is hypocritical (rather than opportunistic) and where both substantive adoption and practice abandonment are difficult, the former can be maximized by first allowing organizations to adopt a CSR practice ceremonially under opacity (“bait”), and then prompting ceremonial adopters to become substantive adopters through a shift to transparency (“switch”).

Specifying this bait-and-switch mechanism and its underlying contingencies reveals a hitherto unexplored, and potentially effective, pathway toward the institutionalization of CSR.’
(please find the AMR article here and an open access version here; a video with the background story here).

The Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation is an independent research centre within Saïd Business School which focuses on understanding ‘how the reputations of organisations are created, sustained, enhanced, destroyed and rehabilitated.’

Find further information about the Centre for Corporate Reputation (including more about the annual Reputation Seminar) on the Centre website. Read more about the Best Published Article Award and see a list of recent winners here.