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Crane and Matten have left the building

This blog is no longer being updated. We had seven great years writing for the Crane and Matten blog but due to a variety of factors we decided it was time to move on. The site will continue to be hosted here though so that our backfile of articles is freely available. We would like to thank all our readers for taking the time to read and engage with us on so many critical corporate responsibility issues over the years. We hope that you continue to do so. You can follow our latest thinking on Twitter at @ethicscrane and @dirkmatten. We also continue to post on the following blogs: Andrew Crane is now Professor of Business and Society in the School of Management at the University of Bath, UK where he writes on the Bath Business and Society blog . Dirk Matten is still the Hewlett Packard Chair in Corporate Social Responsibility in the Schulich School of Business at York University, Canada and is an occasional guest blogger for the Business of Society blog of Copenhagen Business School.
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What does American Apparel’s bankruptcy mean for responsible business?

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This week’s announcement of American Apparel’s bankruptcy and subsequent filing for Chapter 11 protection could spell the end of a unique experiment in responsible business . Although it has been a fixture along with global retailers such as Zara, Gap, and H&M on high streets across the world for the past decade or so, American Apparel is unlike virtually all of its counterparts in the apparel industry when it comes to responsible business. While other global clothing companies outsource their production to suppliers in emerging economies, American Apparel has steadfastly stuck to a made-in-America philosophy, promising that its clothes are ‘sweatshop free’. According to the company, the average American Apparel stitcher earns more than $2,000 month, along with a range of employee benefits including subsidized health insurance, an on-site medical clinic, subsidized public transport, and English classes. By contrast, according to the ILO , garment workers in key Asian export countri...
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The Volkswagen diesel deception - 5 key questions

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News about Volkswagen's (VW) emerging emissions test rigging  scandal makes one wonder if there is ever a story in business ethics too preposterous to be true. But it certainly raises some interesting and important questions about the nature of corporate responsibility that demand some pretty quick answers. In some ways, it is not a complicated story, and even the CEO Martin Winterkorn today admitted to the firms culpability and apologized. "We totally screwed up" the carmaker's US chief  was also reported as saying . So, VW deliberately manipulated the software that manages their diesel engines so that the emission data in test mode appeared significantly lower (up to 40%) than in reality. And this is not just pretending the cars are more fuel efficient than they really are. The EPA clearly states that the substances whose level of emissions were concealed: "penetrate deeply into sensitive parts of the lungs and can cause or worsen respiratory disease, such as...
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Exciting Case Competition with Final Round in Davos 2016

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Decarbonize Norway’s sovereign wealth fund in this year’s Business for a Better World MBA case  competition Team registration is now open for the third-annual CK-Schulich Business for a Better World case competition, a partnership between Corporate Knights magazine and York University’s Schulich School of Business. With a prize pool in 2015/2016 of $10,000, the final round of this MBA competition will see three top teams present their case analysis in front of a live panel of high-profile judges in Davos, Switzerland, coinciding with the World Economic Forum in January. Student teams will be asked this year to decarbonize the holdings of the Norway Government Pension Fund Global, the largest sovereign fund in the world with a value of $940 billion (USD). Managed by Norges Bank Investment Management, the fund is commonly referred to as The Oil Fund because it has been built from the surpluses of Norway’s petroleum income. Teams will have four key objectives: Minimize the carbon foo...
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Should business leaders speak out more on public issues?

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Business leaders are among the most powerful people on the planet. At the helm of huge corporations, with billions of dollars of assets to leverage, their decisions have a profound influence on all of us. At the same time, however, those very same business leaders only very rarely seem to speak out on many of the public issues that actually affect us. Consider when the former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was engulfed in a crack-smoking scandal that put the city in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. The response from the city's business elite was a deafening silence . Nonetheless, the scandal must have prompted considerable anxiety among business leaders about its effect on the business and investment climate of Canada's largest city. Are CEOs right to hold back in such instances or should we expect them to take a more prominent position in public debates? There are no black and white answers to this; it largely depends on context. So here are four things to consider when decidi...
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Why aren't there benefit corporations everywhere?

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Today we have a guest post from Hans Rawhouser and Michael Cummings, both from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Hans and Michael have been working with Andrew on research about benefit corporation legislation in the US, and their paper has just been published in a special issue of the California Management Review about hybrid organizations. The short video above is from the special issue editors at CMR and provides a good introduction to some of the main issues and debates around hybrid organizations. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Social hybrid organizations mix characteristics of non-profit and for-profit organizations, and are receiving increased attention from management scholars and practitioners. A hybrid organization can be identified informally, based on an assessment of the organization’s practices, or it can be recognized more formally such as through third-party certification (...
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Why diversity quotas in the boardroom may be a good idea

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Today we feature a guest post from our colleague over in the law school, Aaron A. Dhir, who is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School. Aaron's book on boardroom diversity is out next month and it is causing quite a stir. So we asked him to tell us a little about the issue of diversity quotas on boards and why, despite the controversy, his research suggests that it might be a good idea.  The lack of diversity in the governance of business corporations is quickly becoming one of the most discussed topics in corporate governance.   It has ignited a heated global debate, leading policymakers to wrestle with difficult questions that lie at the intersection of market activity and social identity politics. My new book, Challenging Boardroom Homogeneity , will be published next month by Cambridge University Press.   In it, I draw on semi-structured interviews with corporate board directors in Norway and documentary cont...
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