When corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a sensemaking process is assessed from a corporate governance perspective, this implies that stakeholders do not only influence companies by promoting and enforcing regulations and other corporate guidelines. They also influence companies by promoting regulation on influence pathways, by demanding that companies develop formal mechanisms that allow companies and stakeholders to discuss and in some cases agree on changes to principles and policies. This perspective suggests that regulation is an outcome of power relations and is, as such, a reflection of certain mental models. As such, mental models reveal the political bias in corporate governance perspectives. For this reason, CSR research needs to be clear about the underlying assumptions about corporate governance, and corporate governance research needs to disclose which mental models of CSR influence the outcomes. Taking a governance perspective on the development of mental models of CSR helps to understand the interaction between CSR and processes of sensemaking at the institutional, organizational and individual levels.
Corporate Social Responsibility affects Corporate Governance as it stretches the accountability of companies beyond its traditional boundaries. This however may conflict with the corporate objective of maximizing stockholder wealth. The paper provides an overview of various academic theories and corporate attitudes on this issue and discusses the merits and disadvantages of the two main governance modes: the stockholder mode and the stakeholder mode.
IT-based networking trends such as the rise of social media, crowd sourcing, open innovation, and cloud computing enable a profoundly different way of working and collaborating that challenges significantly traditional approaches of companies towards governance, i.e. the mechanisms a company employs to achieving business results and safeguarding information. Standard practices developed with a hierarchical model of the company in mind, are inadequate for providing sufficient correlation between governance mechanisms deployed and results achieved. Popular literature on the subject states that dealing effectively with such new technologies in a business environment requires relinquishing control and subverting to trust. This paper makes the case that deploying successfully new IT-based networking tools rather involves shifting one’s trust from a well-established and well-known governance system based on hierarchy and control towards another governance system, termed in the literature as network governance. This paper assesses when network governance is the better suited governance system. The presented theoretical model helps to understand how companies should use arising new technologies and which tasks are suited for network-driven IT-applications. Furthermore, the model enables to understand how network governance works to achieve business results and to safeguard information exchanges.
Project rondom NEXT Governance. 80 bewoners van het nationaal landschap Middag-Humsterland stelden in 2017 een visie op, die ze vervolgens in vijf werkgroepen (onder begeleiding van het Lectoraat Duurzaam Coöperatief Ondernemen) zelf tot realisatie brengen. gebiedsontwikkeling, coöperatief, next governance, Project rondom NEXT Governance. 80 bewoners van het nationaal landschap Middag-Humsterland stelden in 2017 een visie op, die ze vervolgens in vijf werkgroepen (onder begeleiding van het Lectoraat Duurzaam Coöperatief Ondernemen) zelf, coöperatief, tot realisatie brengen. Tegelijkertijd werkt de regio zo zelf aan onderwerpen als 'energietransitie binnen het landschap', 'regiomarketing', 'leefbaarheid', 'nieuwe verdienmodellen voor boeren'. In totaliteit zijn er momenteel meer dan 100 mensen in het gebied betrokken bij de ontwikkelingen.
