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ABSTRACTManuscript Type: EmpiricalResearch Question/Issue: The goal of the present exploratory cognitive study is to uncover how opinion leaders – CEOs and other authorities in the domain of social issues in management – understand and differentiate the various concepts pertaining to corporate governance, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and business ethics. The present study with the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT) extends the analysis to the whole spectrum of social issues in management. For this research 41 RGT interviews were conducted in Belgium with top experts and CEOs of the Belgian economy and civil society.Research Findings/Results: Both authorities and CEOs pragmatically and rather clearly differentiate the various concepts related to corporate governance, CSR, and business ethics. Our findings partially reject the confusion in terminology noticed in recent academic literature and in corporate communication, emphasizing increased vagueness and overlapping of the concepts around corporate governance, CSR, and business ethics.Theoretical Implications: While CSR is seen as the best candidate for an umbrella term, no unified paradigm has yet to be achieved in the business and social field. Three basic concepts of corporate responsibility, corporate governance, and business ethics emerge as being complementary. Corporate governance has acquired an important place in the hierarchy of business and society concepts.Practical Implications: Corporations cannot restrict their actions and communication regarding social issues in management to one single domain. Several complementary issues have to be addressed simultaneously. This combined multi‐dimensional approach will result in mutual reinforcements of the message.

This article analyzes how stakeholder management is applied in the case of special youth guidance homes in Belgium. It describes a specific situation in which a major stakeholder—adolescents in the homes—is part of the process. Our research illustrates the different organizational roles and the complementarities between stakeholder management and participative management. Although stakeholder management is important for strategic decision making, participation is more important on an operational management level. Our cases illustrate that important stakeholders, for example, the customers—the adolescents and their parents—as well as employees in the homes evaluate participation on an operational level as being more important than participation in the board or in strategic management decision making in the organization. By disentangling the distinction between the operational level and the policy level of stakeholder management, our research links participative management and stakeholder management while clarifying the application of stakeholder management in the nonprofit sector.

Prior evidence suggests that board independence may enhance financial performance, but this relationship has been tested almost exclusively for Anglo-American countries. To explore the boundary conditions of this prominent governance mechanism, we examine the impact of the formal and information institutions of 18 national business systems on the board independence-financial performance relationship. Our results show that while the direct effect of independence is weak, national-level institutions significantly moderate the independence-performance relationship. Our findings suggest that the efficacy of board structures is likely to be contingent on the specific national context, but the type of legal system is insignificant.