Business Ethics and Corporate Governance in Latin America

Sustainability, accountability and corporate governance: exploring multinationals' reporting practices

“…In line with the more general literature on corporate governance, this has involved comparative analyses on regulatory and systems developments in different regions (Bedicks and Arruda, 2005;Demise, 2005;Kimber and Lipton, 2005;Rossouw, 2005b;Ryan, 2005;Wieland, 2005). However, as already indicated in the introduction, it is not only the "ethics of corporate governance" but also the governance of ethics broadly defined (including sustainability) to which attention is being paid (Rossouw, 2005a).…”

“…This builds on a view of corporate governance as being "geared toward ensuring that companies take responsibility for directing and controlling their affairs in a manner that is fair to their stakeholders" (Rossouw, 2005a, p. 32). It should be noted that the view of what 'stakeholders' are varies between institutional contexts, with some having a broad view of constituents while others focus more exclusively on shareholders (see also Bedicks and Arruda, 2005;Demise, 2005;Kimber and Lipton, 2005;Ryan, 2005;Wieland, 2005). This is to some extent different from the stakeholder literature, where shareholders are generally seen as one (but certainly not the only) stakeholder group (e.g.…”

Corporate Social Responsibility in Colombia: Making Sense of Social Strategies

“…Emerging CSR research in Latin America mostly features studies conducted by international organizations (Haslam, 2004;Vives, 2006) or academics who are interested in how different actors can promote CSR and/in the context of development (Gutierrez and Jones, 2004;Peinado-Vara, 2006;Prieto-Carron et al, 2006). These examples highlight the importance of codes of conduct, networks, alliances, and partnerships in developing and improving CSR initiatives and programs (Bedicks and Arruda, 2005;Haslam, 2004). In addition, the sustainability of CSR initiatives has become a more pertinent issue (de Oliveira, 2006), partly because of globalization (Schmidheiny, 2006).…”

“…We particularly focus on how organizations develop strategies that fit their social context and find meaningful ways to work with local communities by combining various elements of CSR practices identified in prior literature (Bedicks and Arruda, 2005;de Oliveira, 2006;Peinado-Vara, 2006;Schmidheiny, 2006). To integrate such elements, we analyze organizations' social strategies and suggest some ways forward for developments of CSR in the region that might adopt a more international-that is, U.S. or European-form while still tackling relevant local or national issues.…”

Professionalism in accounting

“…In terms of business themselves, while the majority of the 100 largest companies in Brazil have adopted some kind of formal or informal ethical policies, Bedicks and Arruda (2005) found that more than 50% of total Brazilian companies still did not have a formal code of ethical conduct. Therefore, the business environment appears to be more flexible and not as developed in terms of specific company guidance on conduct.…”