Abstract
Business & Society (BAS), published from September 1960, appears quarterly in March, June, September, and December for Volume 52. BAS is sponsored by the International Association for Business and Society (IABS), founded in 1990. IABS holds annual conferences and publishes conference proceedings. Conference information is posted at http://iabs.net. As of December 2009, BAS was added to the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)®. A large and globally representative editorial board supports the journal. About a dozen associate editors are presently at work, specializing by key areas of business and society scholarship.
All new regular manuscript submissions to BAS should go directly to its online website at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/bas. Proposals and other communications concerning this journal should go to the editor, Professor Duane Windsor, at
From the Editor
September 2013 is (with one regular article added by the editor to the end of the issue) a special issue concerning “The Governance Challenges of Corporate Political Activity” guest edited by Nicolas M. Dahan (Temple University), Michael Hadani (St. Mary’s College of California), and Douglas A. Schuler (Rice University). The guest editors’ introductory essay for the special issue explains the contribution of and process for developing the four research articles they selected for publication. In order of appearance following the introductory essay, the articles are: (a) Miguel Alzola, “Corporate Dystopia: The Ethics of Corporate Political Spending”; (b) Glenn R. Parker, Suzanne L. Parker, and Matthew S. Dabros, “The Labor Market for Politicians: Why Ex-Legislators Gravitate to Lobbying”; (c) Mine Ozer and Ekin Alakent, “The Influence of Ownership Structure on How Firms Make Corporate Political Strategy Choices”; and (d) Andreas Georg Scherer, Dorothée Baumann-Pauly, and Anselm Schneider, “Democratizing Corporate Governance: Compensating for the Democratic Deficit of Corporate Political Activity and Corporate Citizenship.” BAS has helped support development of the field studying corporate political activity through publication of a series of special issues developed through sponsored colloquia. The editor expresses appreciation to the guest editors, the authors appearing in this special issue, the other submitters, and the reviewers who helped bring this special issue to fruition—together with the donors who helped support the 2010 conference for this special issue hosted at Long Island University’s C.W. Post campus.
There was space available at the end of the special issue to publish a regular research article. The editor has thereafter added to September 2013 an article by Yadong Luo (University of Miami) and Hongxin Zhao (Saint Louis University) on “Doing Business in a Transitional Society: Economic Environment and Relational Political Strategy for Multinationals.” This article has a content connection to a special issue on corporate political activity, although not reviewed through that process and thus not a part of the special issue as such. This article addresses how foreign subsidiaries formulate their host-country relational political strategy by responding to unique parameters of the economic and institutional environment in China. Luo and Zhao developed a model that assesses economic environment antecedents characterizing an emerging market such as China and the performance consequence of subsidiaries’ relational political strategy. A possible moderating effect is the firm’s reputation in the host country and length of operations there. The authors report support for the model using data for 358 foreign subsidiaries in China.