Professional service firms, like law firms, need to comply with multiple demands on how they should operate and what they should deliver. Society demands transparency and accountability. Legal professionals who work in professional service firms ask for autonomy and discretion. The clients of professional service firms request not only cost efficiency but also short delivery …
I recently read an article, that, like many others, argues that we should adopt a laissez-faire approach where only those at risk isolate themselves, and the coronavirus would more or less run its course. Otherwise, if we were to engage in wide-spread confinement and quarantines, the economic costs will be too steep. This argument gets …
I recently read “Creativity – the psychology of discovery and invention”, a fascinating book on creativity written by Professor Csikszentmihaly at Claremont Graduate University. It is based on interviews conducted between 1990 and 1995 with ninety-one individuals who had made a difference to a major domain of culture, the hallmark of creativity. Many of these …
A few weeks ago, I spoke with Lindsay Burgess, from The Gazette, a newspaper in Montreal, Canada. We discussed my research on the gender gap in corporate leadership in Canada; in a recent position paper, available here, the Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations shows that the gender gap in boardrooms across Canada …
On December 6 and 7 2018, we welcomed researchers to our first conference on responsibility (called “Rethinking Responsibility: Agents and Structures”) at Concordia University. The researcher came from Canada, the US, Europe and Africa; they studied business, ethics, geography, labor, law, sociology and philosophy. Why care about responsibility? Responsibility is important as is speaks to …
I recently reviewed published studies that explore dual class firms. Below, I will discuss what can be learned from these studies about dual class firms. I will address a series of questions: What are dual class firms? Why do dual class share structures exist? What firms have dual class structures? What consequences do these structure …
This Friday, the Luc Beauregard Centre of Excellence in Communications Research welcomed Professor François Brochet from Boston University who presented a study on investor relations (IR). IR are important as firms have many different investors (e.g., retail investors, institutional investors including hedge funds, pension funds, ETFs). Firms communicate with these investors by disseminating mandated and …
Today, the Luc Beauregard Centre for Excellence in Communications Research at Concordia University welcomed Professor Debbie Dougherty from the University of Missouri, who gave a fascinating talk about sexual harassment in organizations and about the role of communication in sexual harassment. Communication is about the creation of meaning; in other words, when we talk about …
In the years leading up the last French Presidential election, economic growth, or “la croissance”, became a political buzzword in France. The French president at the time, François Hollande, staked his reelection on growth. He failed to deliver and never put his name forward for a second shot at being le président. His Minister of …
This summer, I spoke with Anais Cherif, who is a journalist for La Tribune, a business news outlet in France. We discussed the possibility that Mark Zuckerberg could be fired from Facebook. I pointed out that for this to happen, Mark Zuckerberg would have to fire himself. He owns such a large stake in Facebook …
I recently did a review of studies published between 2008 and 2018 that explored independent directors who sit on the boards of for-profit corporations. I am going to discuss what I learned from these studies and highlight three key takeaways on director independence. What is an independent director? An independent director is “free from conflicts …
I am discovering the work of Iris Marion Young, a philosopher and political scientist who wrote much about justice. I find her work relevant to think about corporations and their responsibility, because she discusses the notion of personal responsibility, which refers to what each individual is responsible for, and social structures, which designate the opportunity …
