Business & Society

Organizations are increasingly adopting “Emotional AI” to monitor and influence employee emotions, aiming to create more empathetic workplaces. However, we argue that automating empathy risks fostering empathy skepticism, alienating employees, exacerbating mental health issues, and eroding trust. We call on organizations to address the root causes of negative workplace emotions and leverage AI as a tool to complement—rather than replace—empathy, fostering workplaces that genuinely prioritize care and trust.

This commentary presents an epistemological perspective on grand challenges (GCs) suggesting that the distinction between Umwelt (what social systems observe) and environment (the surrounding but unobserved world) can help us provide deeper analyses of GCs. I argue that indifference to the environment outside the observed Umwelt is a root cause of GCs and suggest that organizations must compensate for society’s inability to address GCs by developing forms of intelligent self-limitation.

Concerns about GenAI’s energy use and physical pollution are well known. This commentary highlights another threat: epistemic pollution—the degradation of our knowledge ecosystem through low-quality, misleading, or fabricated information. Drawing on a recent pseudo-scientific article co-authored by Grok 3, we discuss the rise of academic deepfakes and their contribution to epistemic pollution. We show how GenAI makes academic deepfakes cheaper, more accessible, and harder to detect. The resulting epistemic pollution poses acute risks in fields like Business & Society, which draw on multidisciplinary knowledge and engage with politically sensitive topics. Yet, by extending the analogy between epistemic and physical pollution, we suggest that Business & Society scholars are also well placed to study the problem and respond.

We posit and find evidence consistent with a new mechanism of intra-firm enforcement spillovers: the leakage of scarce compliance resources across facilities within a firm. Using a facility-level panel data set of Clean Air Act (CAA) enforcement actions from 2005 to 2017, we find a facility is more likely to violate the CAA following penalties on its same-industry-same-state siblings. In contrast, there is no significant spillover across firms. We show that the intra-firm spillover is not due to changes in regulatory attention or production shifting. Instead, our results suggest it may result from the redeployment of scarce compliance resources across siblings. Consistent with this mechanism, we find compliance leakage only occurs at privately held firms and facilities that lack the resources to invest in pollution prevention. The findings contribute to understanding the efficacy of environmental enforcement and have important implications for intra-firm management of environmental performance and regulatory enforcement approaches.

Hybrid organizing scholarship has considered various effects of organizational configurations, including evaluations from external audience members. Due to the particular focus of hybrid scholarship on organizations that are subject to market logic, however, it is difficult to determine whether hybrid form or market logic is most relevant to evaluators. We therefore conduct two online vignette experiments, one of which is preregistered. We confirm our hypothesis that the presence of market logic decreases evaluators intent to transact with the organization, mediated through moral legitimacy. We do not confirm our hypothesis, however, that hybrid form decreases intent to transact, mediated through cognitive legitimacy. We further find that the negative market logic effect does not vary by organizational field. Our explicit focus on market logic, and its moral legitimacy evaluations, forms our core contribution to hybrid organizing scholarship, which tends to heavily lean upon the categories scholarship to explain negative audience evaluations.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is often criticized for being undertheorized, contested, and largely redundant in the field of business and society. Yet limited attention has been paid to diverse ways of theorizing CSR. Driven by the identified weaknesses in the theoretical development of CSR, this research aims to explore the potential of theory elaboration implemented via grounded theory (GT) in strengthening CSR theorization. In doing so, the study offers a unique contribution by being the first study to offer actionable steps and guidelines for implementing theory elaboration via GT in CSR research. The study also offers a typology that can serve as a decision-making tool for researchers seeking to implement theory elaboration through GT in their CSR studies. Lastly, as a result of conducting two sets of literature reviews, the study outlines a number of CSR topics that can benefit from the proposed research pathway, and the particular theoretical CSR benefits theory elaboration via GT can offer. Hence, the study aspires to serve as a “stepping stone” for offering enhanced CSR theory.

Green human resource management (HRM) leverages the workforce to advance environmental sustainability. While prior research predominantly examined green HRM’s impact on employees’ environmental dedication, this study takes a more comprehensive approach by investigating employees’ broader commitment to the organization and examining a potential boundary condition. We posit that employees’ perceptions of green HRM, along with their beliefs in its authenticity, interact and relate to both pro-environmental behavior and affective organizational commitment. Results from a vignette experiment indicate that these effects are stronger when green HRM is perceived as authentic rather than inauthentic. A subsequent time-lagged field survey study extends these findings, suggesting that green HRM fosters pro-environmental behavior, which in turn spills over into affective organizational commitment. This indirect relationship is more pronounced among employees with stronger authenticity beliefs. These results offer novel insights into green HRM’s role in promoting commitment to both the environment and the organization, highlighting the importance of adopting this role authentically.

Human pressure continues to deteriorate social-ecological systems at alarming rates, risking destabilization and collapse. This provokes questions on the efficacy of corporate approaches to sustainability management and how business schools are preparing managers. A systems approach to sustainability management is gaining attention for its potential to resolve the disconnect between corporate sustainability practices and social-ecological system needs. Business school education can play an important role in fostering its adoption, yet educators may lack experience with teaching a systems approach and how to effectively integrate it within courses. We contribute to sustainability management and business education by offering a learning framework with a systems perspective. This framework consists of five conceptual moves leveraging systems thinking concepts that establish a strong theoretical foundation for learning. We further illustrate these moves through practical teaching examples and provide recommendations for the integration of a systems approach into sustainability management education.