Activists, journalists, and scholars have long raised critical questions
about the relationship between diversity, representation, and
structural exclusions in data-intensive tools and services. We build
on work mapping the emergent landscape of corporate AI ethics
to center one outcome of these conversations: the incorporation
of diversity and inclusion in corporate AI ethics activities. Using
interpretive document analysis and analytic tools from the values
in design field, we examine how diversity and inclusion work
is articulated in public-facing AI ethics documentation produced
by three companies that create application and services layer AI
infrastructure: Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce.
We find that as these documents make diversity and inclusion
more tractable to engineers and technical clients, they reveal a
drift away from civil rights justifications that resonates with the
“managerialization of diversity” by corporations in the mid-1980s.
The focus on technical artifacts — such as diverse and inclusive
datasets — and the replacement of equity with fairness make ethical
work more actionable for everyday practitioners. Yet, they appear
divorced from broader DEI initiatives and relevant subject matter
experts that could provide needed context to nuanced decisions
around how to operationalize these values and new solutions. Finally,
diversity and inclusion, as configured by engineering logic,
positions firms not as “ethics owners” but as ethics allocators; while
these companies claim expertise on AI ethics, the responsibility
of defining who diversity and inclusion are meant to protect and
where it is relevant is pushed downstream to their customers.
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Distilling the Interplay Between Corporate Environmental Management, Financial, and Emissions Performance: Evidence From U.S. Firms
This article investigates the relationship between firms’ carbon intensity, carbon management practices, and their financial performance. The extant literature on firms’ financial performance and their environmental performance has mostly considered a single dimension of firms’ environmental performance leading to restricted, and often, mixed outcomes. With panel data collected on financial statements and climate change related activities from 136 corporate firms in the U.S. between 2011 and 2018, this article integrates a process dimension based on an environmental management score with an outcome dimension represented by firms’ carbon emissions intensity. A regression model is employed to investigate the relationships between corporate environmental performance and corporate financial performance. We find evidence of a nonlinear relationship between corporate firms’ environmental performance and financial performance across both high and low-carbon intensive sectors. Specifically, we find that for firms in the high-carbon intensive sector, a U-shaped relationship exists between firms’ corporate environmental performance outcome dimension and their financial performance while for the low-carbon intensive sector, the converse is the case. The results show that the interaction between the outcome dimension of environmental performance and financial performance is moderated by the process dimension of environmental performance for firms in the low- and high-carbon intensive sectors.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1847077
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10212938
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management
- ISSN:
- 0018-9391
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 29
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Firms do not continue and prosper purely on their own individual endeavors, as each firm is influenced by the activities of others, and thus direct and indirect relationships shape the firm’s strategic management. These relationships form the tactics by which knowledge and other strategically important resources are accessed and created. Forming and maintaining ties among members of a network have been the subject for numerous research studies in the social, economic, and business literature. Our work is framed by the resource-based view of the firm perspective along with social capital theory and its shared constructs in network theory. Prior findings suggest that networking ties are strategic actions generated for firm growth and continuance. The ties may be short-term or develop into long-term relationships. The purpose of this research is to fill some of the gaps in interorganizational networking strategy by analyzing five antecedents that have been suggested in the literature as individually associated with entrepreneurs’ engagement in network ties. In this way, our work provides another research avenue for examining networking’s contribution to strategic management. We hypothesized positive connections to entrepreneurs’ engagement in network ties from antecedents involving the firm’s knowledge absorptive capacity, business goals, entrepreneurial orientation, social interactions, and support from their environment. We tested our proposed macrolevel direct and moderating connections through an online survey of 125 U.S. apparel manufacturing firms. The apparel manufacturing sector in the U.S., as in many countries, has struggled with multiple disrupting factors contributing to the sector’s decline in firm continuance. Networks, serving to build domestic and international supply chain ties, may provide one solution for adapting the firm’s resources enhancing global competitiveness. Findings from OLS regression analyses support our hypothesized connections in that each of the five antecedents significantly contributed to entrepreneurs’ engagement in network ties; however, when all five were collectively examined only absorptive capacity, social interaction, and business goals were significant (R2 = 0.58). Further examination of moderation effects found the entrepreneurs’ perceptions of a supportive environment to modify both entrepreneurial orientation and business goals. The effects of a supportive environment on business goals’ relationship with network ties were greater when perceptions of a supportive environment decreased, while the effects of a supportive environment on entrepreneurship orientation’s relationship with network ties were greater when perceptions of a supportive environment increased. Future studies may direct attention to other industry sectors or countries for replication with larger sample sizes as we recognize the limitations to generalizability and scale refinement due to our limited sample size. Examining the five constructs sheds light on how an organization’s decisions may relate to engaging in networking and provides theoretical as well as practical implications that contributes to the larger organizational system framework. This dataset contains responses from 97 U.S. apparel manufacturers collected via an online survey during the fall of 2019. The apparel manufacturing sector in the U.S., as in many countries, has struggled with multiple disrupting factors contributing to the sector’s decline in firm continuance. Networks, serving to build domestic and international supply chain ties, may provide one solution for adapting the firm’s resources enhancing global competitiveness. The purpose of the study was to examine connections to entrepreneurs’ engagement in network ties from antecedents involving the firm’s knowledge absorptive capacity, business goals, entrepreneurial orientation, social interactions, and support from their environment.more » « less
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Abstract Global professional service firms (GPSFs) are key actors in contemporary capitalism. They (co-) produce and disseminate new business practices, linking firms, sectors, and countries, integrating them into a global system. We examine a second, less studied function of these firms: underpinning capitalism’s status hierarchies. We ask whether these firms have emerged as producers of a new corporate nobility—as an extension of elite universities, and as a stepping stone in the selection and promotion of top executives. Focusing on the US, we ask: do global professional service firms merely amplify the credentials of elite universities, or can they compensate for an absence of an elite education in the careers of US top managers? and do professional service firms equip future top managers with specific expertise or merely with symbolic capital? Based on a sample of 2,610 top executive managers from leading American firms in 2005 and 2018, we study the role law, consulting, or audit firms played in their careers. Using multinomial regression analyses, we find that the career function of GPSFs varies: consulting firms amplify existing status and enhance the symbolic capital of alumni, aiding their ascent to the most prestigious jobs in US top firms. In contrast, top managers leverage audit firm roles to compensate for a non-elite background, yet then tend to be channelled into narrow, specialist roles in top management. We relate these results to Bourdieu’s state nobility analysis and propose an augmented typology of these firms at the heart of contemporary capitalism.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2020.3040158
