Leveraging the relaxation of fertility policies as a natural experiment, we examine the motherhood-related constraints faced by female directors and their effects on corporate risk-taking. Using a difference-in-differences design with director-level data, we find that firms with a higher proportion of childbearing-age female directors exhibit significant increases in corporate risk-taking following the policy reform. Consistent with an anticipatory discrimination channel, the increase is more pronounced when female directors hold less power, suggesting that fertility-related expectations may weaken their effective influence in board decision-making. Director-level analyses also document lower in-person board meeting attendance among potentially exposed female directors, providing behavioral evidence consistent with caregiving-related constraints on direct board participation. Cross-sectional analyses indicate that the effect is stronger in firms with weaker ESG performance and in regions where Confucian and clan-based cultural norms are less influential. Higher-exposure firms also increase both capital expenditure intensity and R D intensity, are more likely to initiate M A activity, and reduce cash holdings. We further find suggestive evidence of lower subsequent firm value, particularly when post-policy increases in risk-taking are greater. Overall, our findings highlight how fertility policy reform can interact with gendered expectations surrounding motherhood and constrain female directors’ professional participation and influence, with consequences for corporate risk-taking and shareholder value. This study contributes to business ethics by showing how fertility policies can perpetuate inequities in corporate governance and shape organizational outcomes.
This paper introduces a novel theoretical framework for business ethics by developing a structural analogy between the Wasserstein barycenter—a mathematical tool from optimal transport theory that achieves algorithmic fairness by finding a consensus among diverse groups—and Sophiology, a Russian theological concept of divine wisdom that unifies creation. We argue this pairing directly addresses the pervasive problem of economism: the reductive focus on material value that underpins critiques of shareholder primacy and algorithmic bias. The framework yields two core contributions. First, it provides a metaphysical interpretation of fairness, framing it not as a constraint but as a harmonizing process that actively respects and incorporates diversity. Second, it proposes a “sophiological political economy,” a normative model where business activity preserves local particularity and aligns with a transcendent common good through integrated ethical, liturgical, and esthetic practices. By formalizing this analogy, we offer business ethics a new lexicon and a constructive vision to design organizations and algorithms that actively foster unity-in-diversity, moving beyond critique toward a holistic theory of value and integration.
Religion, as a critical component in both personal value system and institutional order, is relatively under-investigated in strategic management. Drawing from the perspective of institutional logic, we propose that the minority identity of religious CEOs in China reconfigures the interface between religious logic and other salient logics, which shapes CEO’s distinctive perception of external institutional pressures and subsequent decision in practicing corporate philanthropy. Based on a survey of firms across multiple industries and regions in China, we find that religious CEOs perceive lower normative pressure from industry peers but higher regulative pressure from the government, which mediate the effect of CEO religiosity on corporate philanthropy. Furthermore, we find that when firms are positioned in the hub of a business ecosystem, the negative effect of religiosity on normative pressure becomes weaker; when firms are located in an environment with high financial constraints, the positive effect of religiosity on regulative pressure becomes stronger. We contribute by identifying a new explanatory pathway through which CEO religiosity affects corporate philanthropy and revealing the double-edged nature of identification with religious groups.
Across societies and over time, the social control of objects deemed “dangerous”—i.e., as threats to public order, morality, or physical and psychological well-being—varies, from regulation to prohibition, with implications for responsibility, potential harm, and affected communities. Drawing on U.S. Congressional hearings on the issue of cannabis regulation and prohibition (1906–1951), we examine how shifts in social control track changing configurations of discursive institutional work. Our work demonstrates how configurations of rationalization, moralization, and syncretization shaped the meaning of cannabis as a dangerous object: rationalization calculates the risk, supporting calibrated regulation; moralization absolutizes the danger, promoting prohibition; and syncretization balances these two. We refer to this reciprocal dynamic as an epistemic ratchet, whereby rationalization and moralization each weaken the epistemic foundations of the alternative regime, making movement between regulation and prohibition difficult in either direction. Our study makes three contributions: (a) it extends the organizing-of-risk account of how danger is rendered governable to the form and reversibility of control; (b) it adds to research on discursive institutional work by identifying epistemology, complexity, and responsibility as the object-level qualities through which discourse becomes consequential for governance; and (c) it contributes to debates on responsibility, ethics, and harm by showing how the discursive redistribution of responsibility shapes the scope and coerciveness of control.
Mandatory sustainability reporting is reshaping how organizations measure and communicate their impact, and its influence is no longer limited to large corporations. Emerging regulatory frameworks and standardized metrics are expected to trickle down into the world of social entrepreneurship, a field historically grounded in impact-driven values, context-specific outcomes, and normative commitments to inclusion, justice, and systemic change. In this commentary, we argue that the rise of mandatory sustainability reporting generates ethical dilemmas for social entrepreneurs as they navigate tensions between external reporting requirements and their normative commitments. We identify five interrelated ethical dilemmas related to ideology, identity, mission, resourcing, and collaboration, and examine how they unfold across four stages of ethical decision-making: moral awareness, moral judgment, moral intent, and moral behavior. In doing so, we offer a “thick conceptualization” of mandatory sustainability reporting as a moral issue that renders accountability decisions ethically consequential for social entrepreneurs and outline the resulting avenues for future research.
