The firm is irresponsible, so what?

Hericher, Corentin [UCL] Bridoux, Flore

We know little about stakeholders’ reactions to corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR). Yet, CSiR is not simply the other side of the much-studied CSR: stakeholders are unlikely to respond to irresponsibility as they do to low CSR because CSiR involves the intentional violation of a moral standard while low CSR does not. Building on the literature about people’s reactions to moral transgressions, we plan to research other-condemning and other-suffering moral emotions as mechanisms explaining stakeholders’ reactions and to study not only the punitive reactions one expects based on recent work in stakeholder theory, but also compensating the victim, which is new to stakeholder theory. We also introduce moderators specific to the firm context to help explain why stakeholders so often fail to respond to CSiR.