Why Institutions Matter: Stakeholder Attention to Organizational Ethics Commitments

David Chandler
Research in the Sociology of Organizations (Institutions and Ideals: Philip Selznick’s Legacy for Organizational Studies), Volume 44, March 2015, Pages 201-235

This paper investigates the substance of institutions in the context of business ethics. In particular, I test a theory of stakeholder attention to resource commitments by firms that implement the Ethics and Compliance Officer (ECO) position, from 1990 to 2008. Results support the hypothesized curvilinear relationship between resource commitments and stakeholder attention À while both high and low levels of ECO implementation generate low levels of reported ethics transgressions (the former due to good firm behavior and the …