2023 “Responsible Research in Management” Award Winner Announcement

When our trust is broken, and when our own trustworthiness is called into question, many of us are left wondering what to do. We barely know how trust works. How could we possibly repair it?

Peter H. Kim has conducted over two decades of groundbreaking research to answer that question. In How Trust Works, he draws on this research and the work of other social scientists to reveal the surprising truths about how relationships are built, how they are broken, and how they are repaired. Dr. Kim’s work shows how we are often more trusting than we think and how easily our trust in others can be distorted. He illustrates these insights with accounts of some of the most striking and well-known trust violations that have occurred in modern times and unveils the crucial secrets behind when and why our attempts to repair trust are effective, and which breaches of confidence are just too deep.

How Trust Works transforms our understanding of our deepest bonds, giving us the tools to build strong and supportive relationships on every level. With our families, coworkers, and friends. With the groups, organizations, and institutions that touch our lives. And even with societies and nations.

The circular economy is presented as a novel solution to many environmental problems. Yet it comes with governance challenges making its progress in reality slow. Circular economy is about using residual waste and side-streams accruing from processes of other organizations: they are privately owned and not readily for sale like virgin resources in the linear economy, and knowledge about them is often withheld as a business secret.  These form “the tragedy privately owned residual resources”, a governance challenge which has not received much attention in management research. Building on institutional economics, and empirical research in Finland, Spain and USA, we develop the concept of polycentric governance of privately owned resources for circular economy. Our findings show how collective action between diverse organizations can enable effective, polycentric governance of circular economy. It involves actors mutually adjusting their activities to facilitate cooperation, engaging in cooperation and information sharing routines to enable new circularity opportunities, and building new infrastructures which maintain circular economy development over time. Alongside with refining the polycentric governance for management studies, our study offers lessons for managers and policymakers for how to develop and govern circular economy activities over larger, cross-industrial and cross-sectoral systems.

This research addresses corporate means of helping to develop and empower at-risk communities — those in which income and opportunity disparities manifest in social problems, including substance abuse, crime, inadequate education, health problems, and social dislocation.  Building a consortium of companies, non-profits and community partners, the longitudinal ethnographic qualitative design involved interviews and narratives, as well as epidemiological data in the communities, and survey research conducted in the companies, regarding longer term impact.  The data were analyzed both holistically through case comparison, but also at the level of individual psychological experiences through comprehensive content analysis. Three relational pathways were identified, mutual perspective taking, reciprocal respect, and communal advocacy.  The research documented significant intermediate-term psychological and behavioral outcomes in the communities (e.g., increased self-determination, strategic capability, proactivity). This was associated with longer term social impact — increased labor force participation, health outcomes and educational attainment, as well as reduced unemployment and crime. Company participants also experienced increased meaningfulness, thriving, intercultural competence, and prosocial behaviors.  In terms of longer term impact, corporations experienced increased loyalty, performance, and customer engagement. The approach identified helped to better direct the community investment toward meaningful and sustained changes in the communities and companies.

Companies are increasingly facing intense pressures to address stakeholder demands from every direction: consumers want socially responsible products; employees want meaningful work; investors now screen on environmental, social, and governance criteria; “clicktivists” create social media storms over company missteps. CEOs now realize that their companies must be social as well as commercial actors, but stakeholder pressures often create trade-offs with demands to deliver financial performance to shareholders. How can companies respond while avoiding simple “greenwashing” or “pinkwashing”? Suggesting that the shared-value mindset may actually get in the way of progress, bestselling author Sarah Kaplan shows in The 360° Corporation how trade-offs, rather than being confusing or problematic, can actually be the source of organizational resilience and transformation. Using in-depth case studies of companies like Nike and Walmart, this book lays out a roadmap for organizational leaders who have hit the limits of the supposed win-win of shared value to explore how companies can cope with real trade-offs, innovating around them or even thriving within them.