By Beth Gormley, Communications and PR Manager, UCD College of Business

UCD College of Business Professor Donna Marshall’s co-authored paper, “Reporting Controversial Issues in Controversial Industries", has won the Bankinter Consumer Finance Award for Research in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Governance, and Sustainability.

The Awards were set up in November 2017 in a collaboration between the Economic and Business Ethics Chair at Pontificia Comillas University and Bankinter Consumer Finance to promote and foster corporate ethics in the business world.

As recently reported by the Irish Times, Bankinter is a leading Spanish banking group that announced plans to establish Avant Money as its Irish banking branch.

About the Award-Winning Paper

For the first time, the author team, which included Jakob Rehme, Aideen O’Dochartaigh, Steven Kelly, Roshan Boojihawon and Daniel Chicksand, in addition to Professor Marshall, use a new conceptualization of controversial industries focusing on the harm their products cause. These industries include agricultural chemicals, alcohol, armaments, coal, gambling, oil and tobacco. The team investigated how 28 companies reported their controversial issues. They identified seven reporting strategies: Ignore, Deny, Decoy, Dazzle, Distort, Deflect and Adapt.

The hope is that investors, consumers, managers, activists and other stakeholders of these companies can use this typology to identify the strategies they use to report controversial issues and assess if reports admit to the issue, the harm caused by a company's products and services, and if they provide solutions to that harm. Read full abstract here.

About Professor Donna Marshall

Professor Donna Marshall is a multi-award-winning Sustainable Supply Chain scholar, an Executive Director of the UCD Earth Institute: People, Work, Society initiative and former President of the International Purchasing and Supply Education and Research Association (IPSERA). She is passionate about helping to bring systemic change to broken supply chains and how we overcome the world's biggest crises of climate chaos and the relentless exploitation of people and the planet.

She is ranked among the top supply chain researchers, with over one hundred research outputs including journal articles published in MIT Sloan Management Review, Journal of Business Ethics, Production and Operations Management, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management, Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management and Supply Chain Management International Journal, as well as multiple conference papers, book chapters and industry reports.

She has won research funding with multiple national and international teams amounting to over €30 million and is currently leading teams focusing on sustainable supply chains in fashion with Fashion's Responsible Supply Chain Hub (FReSCH); just transition and the sustainable bio-circular economy; and transparency in complex supply chains including controversial industries.