Word from the editor

This back-to-school issue of Management international is comprised of seven articles with themes and methodologies underscoring our journal’s rich editorial-line. In the first article - entitled “The impact of cultural differences and moral intensity on ethical decision-making: Evidence from France and China” - Jocelyn Husser, Anne Goujon-Belghit, Lingfang Song and Anaïs Rouanet develop six scenarios meant to embody typical purchasing situations in these two countries. Mobilising a sample of 366 professional buyers (203 French and 163 Chinese), the study is structured around the six characteristics of a decision-making process that Jones delineated in 1991. It reveals that Chinese buyers possess greater general awareness of ethical issues than their French counterparts and intend to act more ethically in one given dimension, namely localism – but that there are three other dimensions where French buyers intend to act more ethically than their Chinese counterparts, namely temporal immediacy, probability of effect and concentration of effect. The second article’s five co-authors - Jie Xiong, Lu Xu, Qian Li, Zhe Yuan, Shubho Chakraborty - have evocatively entitled their piece “Doing good and/or avoiding bad: The ambidextrous view of managing corporate social activities”. The goal here is to examine the various orientations by means of which organisations manage corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, whether this involves pro-CSR and/or anti-CSR (so-called corporate social irresponsibility) actions. Analysis is based on a panel of 5,292 companies drawn from KLD and COMPUSTAT databases and studied over a period of seven years. Julien Lachuer and Sébastien Jost’s paper - “Financial and extra-financial determinants of CEOs’ sustainable discourse: A longitudinal analysis on the U.S. market” - uses the prism of alignment theory and instrumental CSR theory to analyse CEOs’ moderating role based on the causal links that exist between the introductory discourses in which they engage as part of their accountability relationships, on one hand, and their financial and extra-financial performance, on the other. Applying a Logit model and text analysis, this is a 2014–2019 longitudinal study of S&P500-listed companies operating in three sectors. It finds that CEOs’ discourses do in fact correlate with financial and non-financial performance, making this a key element in ascertaining whether CEOs’ CSR strategies are relevant to addressing the strategic challenges that their sectors are facing. Hèla Yousf asks a serious question in the fourth article, entitled “Culture and management in the Global South: Can we break away from modernisation theory?”. The lack of consensus regarding the definition of concepts such as “culture” and “development” – together with the dominance of modernisation theory - largely explains why it is so difficult today to identify a clear theoretical framework capable of accounting for the way in which culture influences both economic development trajectories and organisational practices. The author starts with a review of the main controversies marking current studies of the connections between culture, economic development and management. She then goes on to emphasize the importance of transcending the tradition/modernity dichotomy that is generally associated with modernisation theory, with a view towards further renewing thinking about how culture affects the construction and implementation of effective organisational practices in the Global South. In their article “Social license to operate: An integrative framework”, Sofiane Baba and Jacqueline Dahan note that whereas literature tends to treat controversies about projects’ social inacceptability in a generic manner, each of these trajectories is in fact unique and deserves to be treated as such. This demonstration is made using a qualitative analysis of three controversial projects: the Matoush uranium mine (2006‑2020); Facebook’s cryptocurrency experience (2017–2021); and Covid-19 vaccinations (2020‑2021). The analytical framework proposed here conceptualises social acceptability as a dynamic trajectory of legitimation and justification …