Regional Influences on Responsible Behaviours of Business Organizations

My dissertation explores how regional societies influence the responsible behaviors of business organizations. It is comprised of three essays that come together in the shared theme of investigating the role of regional social connectedness – the structural dimension of regional social capital – in facilitating responsible behaviors. The first essay challenges simplistic views of regional political conservatism and demonstrates that regional political conservatism can have contradictory aspects as regards social responsibility, which are elicited by two different types of regional social connectedness (interfirm and cooperative). The second essay examines how regional social connectedness compensates for the decline of local newspapers. It finds that while local newspaper scarcity has led to an increase in corporate wrongdoing, regional social connectedness mitigated that effect. The third essay applies social capital theory to a disaster context by observing the impact of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis on unemployment rates. It finds that the spread of COVID-19 cases results in a higher unemployment rate as local organizations rely more on layoffs. However, this relationship is affected by two different types of regional social connectedness (cooperative and instrumental) in contradictory ways. In addition to each essay's individual contributions to a distinctive set of literature, three essays all together offer two key insights into the research that integrates social capital theory and organization studies: first, that regional social connectedness has complementary relationships with other regional determinants for responsible behaviors; and second, that different types of regional social connectedness coexist in regional society and generate heterogeneous effects on responsible behaviors.