Witold Henisz

Witold Henisz
  • Vice Dean and Faculty Director, Impact, Value, and Sustainable Business Initiative
  • Deloitte & Touche Professor of Management in Honor of Russell E. Palmer, former Managing Partner

Contact Information

  • office Address:

    3107 SH-DH
    3620 Locust Walk
    Philadelphia, PA 19104

Research Interests: political and social risk identification and management, materiality of corporate and investor impacts on natural, social and human capitals, stakeholder engagement, business & socio-political conflict, project management, rise and fall of neoliberalism

Links: CV, Corporate Diplomacy LinkedIn Group, Corporate Diplomacy Portal, Wharton Political Risk Lab

Overview

Witold J. Henisz is the Vice Dean and Faculty Director of the Impact, Value, and Sustainable Business Initiative, and the Deloitte & Touche Professor of Management in Honor of Russell E. Palmer, former Managing Partner at The Wharton School, The University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in Business and Public Policy from the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley and previously received a M.A. in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

His research examines the materiality of political hazards as well as corporate and investors’ impacts on natural, social and human capitals. This work analyzes best practices in corporate diplomacy to win the hearts and minds of external stakeholders as well as the measurement and valuation thereof. It has been published in top-ranked journals in international business, management, international studies and sociology. He served as a Departmental Editor at The Journal of International Business Studies and as an Associate Editor at Strategic Management Journal. He is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business.

Witold has won multiple teaching awards at the graduate and undergraduate levels including being named Iron Prof, 2019 and an Aspen Institute Ideas Worth Teaching Award Winner, 2020 for his elective courses that highlight the importance of integrating a deep understanding of political and social risk factors into the design and valuation of an organization’s global strategy. These courses incorporate multiple cases that he has authored as well as capstone KEROVKA crisis management simulation for which he served as the academic co-Director. He led the redesign of the required global management content in the Wharton core curriculum. He teaches extensively on the topic of ‘Corporate Diplomacy: Building Reputations and Relationships with External Stakeholders’ as well as impact, value and the materiality of sustainability in open enrollment and custom executive education programs.

He is currently a principal in the consultancy PRIMA LLC whose clients span multinational firms, asset managers, intergovernmental organizations and non-governmental organizations including Anglo Gold Ashanti, Dundee Precious Metals, EastWestRail, Eaton Vance, Engine No 1, Gabriel Resources, Lockheed Martin, Rio Tinto, Shell Corporation, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Finance Corporation and the World Wildlife Fund. He previously worked for The International Monetary Fund.

Summary of Research Papers and Downloads

Download POLCON Database (2022 release (with data to 2021) now available)

Consider using the CHECKS index of the Database of Political Institutions of the World Bank as a robustness check.
For more information on the relative strength and weaknesses of these and other datasets see the following external overviews: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTLAWJUSTINST/Resources/IndicatorsGovernanceandInstitutionalQuality.pdf
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTMOVOUTPOV/Resources/2104215-1148063363276/071503_Munck.pdf
http://www.nsd.uib.no/macrodataguide/topic.html
http://www.isadiscussion.com/view/0/datasets.html

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Research

  • Anne Spencer Jamison and Witold Henisz (2025), Competing demand-side explanations and populism: Cross-national variation in a recursive ideational system, Democratization, 32 (3), pp. 759-787.

    Abstract: This article models the rise of populism in a country as a sequential recursive system driven by the interaction of voters’ contextual demands and the supply of populist political responses. We introduce to this literature high-frequency media event data extracted from a corpus of two terabytes of articles drawn from 72 countries over six years using natural language processing. Further, we introduce vector autoregression to the study of populism, which allows us to model the way voters’ grievances and politicians’ rhetoric and policy responses influence each other bidirectionally over time. Our analysis reveals that voter demands and political responses are best modelled as a recursive system. Given the positive feedback loop, efforts to curb the growth of populism and limit democratic backsliding will require both addressing underlying grievances (i.e. demand) and weakening or substituting for the efficacy of existing populist rhetoric (i.e. supply).

  • Anne Spencer Jamison, Witold Henisz, Doron Tadmor (2025), Indigenous Land Claims and Foreign Direct Investment: Evidence of Conflict Impacts from Geo-Spatial Media Event Data, Journal of International Business Studies, 56 (6), pp. 720-738.

    Abstract: A growing body of literature highlights that large-scale investments in sensitive contexts can undermine both firm financial performance and peace-positive development. We investigate whether and under what conditions foreign direct investment (FDI) proximate to Indigenous land claims increases or decreases conflict. Drawing on social movement theory’s identification of powerful frames and political opportunity structures as drivers of mobilization, we predict that FDI proximate to Indigenous land claims will promote conflict. We leverage novel data on the global location of Indigenous land claims and a global corpus of more than 4 billion news articles. We find that when locations with Indigenous land claims are treated with FDI, we observe an increase in media-reported armed conflict events. We further argue and find this effect to be driven by rebels acting on behalf of Indigenous people who target (multinational) corporations and the governments who offer them the formal license to operate. These negative effects are found across a wide range of industries. Our results underscore that for investments in sensitive socio-political contexts, such as Indigenous lands, firm performance and the livelihoods of community members are heavily influenced by conflict risk mitigation efforts.

  • Lauren Ferry, Anne Spencer Jamison, Witold Henisz (2025), Sustainability, Political Risk and Sovereign Credit Risk: Pricing High Frequency Environmental, Social and Governance News, Economics & Politics, Forthcoming ().

    Abstract: Environmental, social and governance (ESG) components are critical inputs of long-term growth and affect sovereigns' ability and willingness to repay their debts. In this paper, we argue that the media provides information on extra-financial factors and ESG-related news coverage allows investors to update their expectations about the likelihood of repayment. Drawing on a global corpus of more than four billion news articles to identify the frequency and tone with which ESG factors are discussed daily, we show that reporting on ESG factors affects creditors' assessment of sovereign creditworthiness, even after accounting for political and macroeconomic conditions. By revisiting previous work with a broader scope and fine-grained data, we advance our understanding of how and based on what information creditors form expectations of sovereign creditworthiness.

  • Christopher Bruno and Witold Henisz (2024), Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Outcomes and Municipal Credit Risk, Business & Society, 63 (8), pp. 1709-1756.

    Abstract: We investigate the association between a wide range of community-level environmental, social, and governance (ESG) outcomes and the credit risk of U.S. municipal finance fixed-income securities. We develop a novel dataset of multiple ESG outcomes for U.S. counties and connect it to a 2001-2020 panel of municipal bonds issued within those counties. Overall, we find supportive evidence that collective increases in community-level ESG factors (i.e., ESG outcomes) are associated with reductions in credit risk for U.S. municipal finance instruments over time. We theorize that these associations arise from variations in investor perceptions and manifested changes in fiscal health over time as a function of changing ESG outcomes. Post hoc analyses leveraging quasi-exogenous shocks to uncertainty, as well as connecting ESG outcomes to various measures of fiscal health at the county-year level, and credit ratings at the bond-year level, help validate this theory. Our research suggests that even socially agnostic investors should investigate the environmental and social performance of a municipality as part of their credit due diligence.

  • Sinziana Dorobantu, Witold Henisz, Lite Nartey (2024), Firm-Stakeholder Dialogue and the Media: The Evolution of Stakeholder Evaluations in Different Informational Environments, Academy of Management Journal, 67 (1), pp. 92-125.

    Abstract: We propose that the informational environment in which firm–stakeholder interactions are embedded shapes the effect of firm–stakeholder dialogue on a stakeholder’s evaluation of a firm. How much stakeholders know about a firm (information availability), what stakeholders know about a firm (information content), and how much they trust the media that informs them (information reliability) vary across countries, firms, and time. We theorize and assess how these three dimensions of the informational environment shape the effects of firm–stakeholder dialogue on the evolution of a stakeholder’s evaluation of a firm. We illustrate our arguments with insights from field interviews conducted to understand stakeholders’ evaluations of the Rosia Montana gold mine in Romania, and we analyze them using original, manually coded stakeholder-level data that capture 2,454 stakeholders’ evaluations of 26 gold-mining operations around the world.

  • Kevin Chuah, Mark DesJardine, Maria Goronova, Witold Henisz (2024), Shareholder Activism Research: A System’s Level View, Academy of Management Annals, 18 (1), pp. 82-120.

    Abstract: Shareholder activism is an important driver of corporate change. Yet, the phenomenon has primarily been studied within disciplinary silos, providing only a partial understanding of the overarching process, the actors involved, the engagement approaches used, and the tangible outcomes of activism. Noting these limitations, the purpose of this review is threefold. First, we present an integrated account of the current state of cross-disciplinary knowledge on shareholder activism to identify what we know about different aspects of activist–firm engagements. Second, we use that account to develop a detailed map of the shareholder activism process, including how activists identify target firms, the engagement approaches used, the role of stakeholders’ varied reactions, and outcomes of activism campaigns. Third, after mapping this process, we propose that the cumulative interdependencies identified by shareholder activism researchers can be more fully understood as a complex, dynamic, and adaptive system. This system accounts for activists’ interdependence on other stakeholders, dynamic feedback loops whereby current campaigns affect future engagements, and strategic adaptive behaviors by firms and stakeholders over time. We use our system-level view of activism to identify a roadmap for future research that can more fully unpack the implications of shareholder activism on organizational and societal outcomes.

  • Courtney Rickert McCaffrey, Witold Henisz, Oliver Jones, Geostrategy by Design: How to Identify, Assess and Manage Geopolitical Risk to Inform Corporate Strategy in the Next Era of Globalization (New York, NY: Disruption Books, 2024)

    Description: From leading geostrategy experts comes an indispensable guide for executives seeking to thrive and create long-term value in the next era of global competition. How do executives position a company for growth when the geopolitical future is uncertain? Recent events in Ukraine and the Middle East and tightening restrictions on international trade and investment are reshaping the global business environment. History shows that any such era of change presents both challenges and opportunities. The C-suite’s ability to implement a geostrategy will determine which executives lead their companies into successful futures—and which get left behind. Learn from the ultimate authorities on geostrategic management. The authors behind Geostrategy by Design represent the best of real-world experience and respected academic research. From professional services firm EY, Oliver Jones and Courtney Rickert McCaffrey provide insight and analysis on how geopolitics is affecting companies around the world and how they are managing it. From the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Witold J. Henisz’s research examines the impact of political hazards as well as environmental, social, and governance factors more broadly on the strategy and valuation of global corporations. Together, the authors use examples, from historical global turning points to recent political disruptions, to illustrate how geostrategy is essential to surviving and succeeding in the next era of globalization. A proven framework to embed geopolitical strategy into a company’s DNA. Learn how to implement four distinct activities required for a proactive geostrategy—and how to create a governance structure that weaves them together for long-term effectiveness. Scan: identify and dynamically monitor geopolitical, country, regulatory, and societal risks Focus: assess how these risks could affect the company Manage: integrate the political risks that are most material to the company into connected risk approaches Strategize: incorporate geopolitical considerations and other political risks into strategic decisions Govern: execute via a cross-functional geostrategic team and create a culture that embraces geostrategy Tomorrow’s companies need a geostrategy today. With the right geostrategy in place, executives will be better equipped to navigate geopolitical volatility and uncertainty—no matter what lies ahead.  

  • Lite Nartey, Witold Henisz, Sinziana Dorobantu (2023), Reciprocity in Firm Stakeholder Dialogue: Timeliness, Valence, Richness, And Topicality, Journal of Business Ethics, 183 (2), pp. 429-451.

    Abstract: Scholars of stakeholder management have long grappled with the question of how to communicate with stakeholders to enhance cooperation and reduce conflict. We build on insights from the literature on stakeholder dialog to highlight the importance of four elements of firm–stakeholder dialog processes: timing, valence, richness, and topicality of firms’ responses to stakeholder engagements. We demonstrate a link between these elements of the firm–stakeholder dialog process and changes in stakeholder cooperation or conflict with the firm, as well as contingent tradeoffs among them. Specifically, we show that the relative importance of these elements is contingent upon stakeholder type and status. Government actors prioritize richness and topicality over timeliness and valence. Economic actors, by contrast, prioritize timeliness and valence. Civil society stakeholders prioritize timeliness, valence, and topicality over richness. Low-status actors across sectors deprioritize topicality and richness while high-status actors demand attentiveness to all four elements.

  • Witold Henisz (2023), The Value of Organizational Purpose, Strategy Science, 8 (2), pp. 159-169.

    Abstract: Broadening the organizational purpose of a firm beyond narrow short-term profit maximization may enhance long-term shareholder value. This result obtains when firms generate unpriced externalities and face difficulties in achieving ex ante incentive alignment with stakeholders through contract or have the ex post possibility of altering stakeholders’ perceptions through virtue signaling (i.e., cheap talk or greenwash). As each of these conditions is ubiquitous in practice, discussion of organizational purpose (beyond narrow short-term profit maximization to encompass stakeholder’s harmonious pursuit of a common higher goal or meaning) should shift from why management might pursue it to how managers obtain and maintain it as well as the value creation and distribution implications of doing so. Drawing on a value-based stakeholder theory of strategic management, I argue that attentiveness to the most salient issues of a firm’s most powerful stakeholders related to the attainment of this higher goal more closely aligns stakeholder and shareholder value in the long term, thereby building and sustaining relational contracts with stakeholders. A firm with strong relational contracts across its nexus of stakeholder relationships increases the likelihood of harmony among its stakeholders, including shareholders. An important challenge to realizing this outcome is that of measurement. As a result, research on organizational purpose should turn its attention from legal and moral foundations to empirical research on externalities, stakeholder opinions, and managers’ self-representations of their organization’s purpose. The availability of such data lowers the transaction costs associated with a nexus of relational contracts and enhances societal welfare.

  • Brian Ganson, Tony He, Witold Henisz (2022), ’Us’ and ‘Them’: Firm Strategy, Horizontal Inequalities, and Society’s Capacity to Address Its Grand Challenges, Global Strategy Journal, 12 (3), pp. 520-542.

    Abstract: Divisions into an “us” and a “them” across racial, ethnic, economic, geographic, and other demographic divides impede society's capacity to address grand challenges. Firms have an impact on such divisions—whether positively or negatively, intentionally or not—through the dual mechanisms of rents and relationships. Firms may contribute to horizontal inequalities that underlie intergroup conflict through the distribution of the benefits, costs, and risks of firm activities. Through their relational strategies, firms also shape the willingness and ability of different groups to work together for positive change. Firm behaviors emerging from their daily operations can thus change society's capacity to address its grand challenges, necessitating corporate activism that encompasses market and nonmarket strategies, as well as a broader understanding of the strategy-setting process itself.

Teaching

All Courses

  • INTS7210 - Gbl Bus through Humanities

    Drawing on theories within the fields of international relations, international law, and international political economy, plus history, this course equips students with insight into the legal, economic, and historical legacies that are important to understanding the nature of global business today.

  • MGMT2090 - Pol & Soc Environ of Mm

    The share of executives, board members, and investment managers who consider climate risk, racial justice and other ESG issues as well as stakeholder�s opinions of the firm to be material to their business decisions has risen dramatically. If this business case for engagement with stakeholders on ESG issues can be demonstrated to mainstream investors, pools of capital can be mobilized to harness grand societal challenges. However, executives, board members, and investment managers are actually growing less confident in the ESG data available to guide capital allocations and strategic decisions. ESG scores have been demonstrated to be unreliable, incomplete and biased and often lean on outdated and/or incomplete information obtained through voluntary unaudited disclosure. This course provides students the latest tools to assess and map stakeholder opinions as well as integrate them into financial valuation. It also offers behavioral skills critical for stakeholder engagement including trust building, strategic communications and shaping organizational culture. In short, it prepares students to engage in Corporate Diplomacy (i.e., to influence external stakeholders� opinions of the acceptability of a company�s operations at a moment in time and to convince internal stakeholders to adapt their behaviors, systems and outputs` when necessary to support an organizational mission).

  • MGMT6110 - Managing Est Enterprise

    This course is about managing large enterprises that face the strategic challenge of being the incumbent in the market and the organizational challenge of needing to balance the forces of inertia and change. The firms of interest in this course tend to operate in a wide range of markets and segments, frequently on a global basis, and need to constantly deploy their resources to fend off challenges from new entrants and technologies that threaten their established positions. The class is organized around three distinct but related topics that managers of established firms must consider: strategy, human and social capital, and global strategy.

  • MGMT7150 - Pol & Soc Environ of Mm

    All successful firms go global. This course provides a broad introduction to international business. You will learn about who loses and who gains from trade, what are the effects of tariffs and non-tariff barriers, the World Trade Organization (WTO), regional trading blocs, and NAFTA. The course then turns to the international financial architecture, focusing on exchange rate risk. We then move to multinational firm strategies, including a discussion of the reasons for why firms choose to do business globally through trade or FDI, international tax strategy, joint ventures, technology transfer, different ways to be a multinational firm, and ethical dilemmas. The class is a mix of lectures and cases that allow students to synthesize the extensive materials on multinational management, international institutions, economic policies, and politics with a goal towards formulating multinational firm strategy.

  • MGMT7200 - Corporate Diplomacy

    The share of executives, board members, and investment managers who consider climate risk, racial justice and other ESG issues as well as stakeholder�s opinions of the firm to be material to their business decisions has risen dramatically. If this business case for engagement with stakeholders on ESG issues can be demonstrated to mainstream investors, pools of capital can be mobilized to harness grand societal challenges. However, executives, board members, and investment managers are actually growing less confident in the ESG data available to guide capital allocations and strategic decisions. ESG scores have been demonstrated to be unreliable, incomplete and biased and often lean on outdated and/or incomplete information obtained through voluntary unaudited disclosure. This course provides students the latest tools to assess and map stakeholder opinions as well as integrate them into financial valuation. It also offers behavioral skills critical for stakeholder engagement including trust building, strategic communications and shaping organizational culture. In short, it prepares students to engage in Corporate Diplomacy (i.e., to influence external stakeholders� opinions of the acceptability of a company�s operations at a moment in time and to convince internal stakeholders to adapt their behaviors, systems and outputs` when necessary to support an organizational mission).

  • MGMT9550 - Foundations Mult Mgmt.

    The goal of the course is to provide you with a foundation in some of the major research areas that underpin the study of Multinational Management. International Business (and the study of MNCs) is an interdisciplinary field. As such, our survey of the seminal articles in the field will span a number of different theoretical and empirical approaches (i.e., economic, managerial, organizational and institutional). Much of our seminar discussions will focus on identifying and developing interesting research questions raised by this interdisciplinary literature, which offers many opportunities for systematic empirical study.

  • MGMT9600 - Non-Market Strategy

    This course builds on the foundational material presented in MGMT 955 with a deeper focus on current research examining institutional influences on multinational management. These include regulative supports (e.g., laws, regulations, contracts and their enforcement through litigation, arbitration of incentive compatible self-regulation) but also normative (e.g., socially shared expectations of appropriate behavior, and social exchange processes) and cognitive (e.g., creating shared identity to bridge differences in values, beliefs and framing) elements of the institutional environment. We will examine not only strategic responses in the market environment but also influence strategies of multinational and domestic firms that seek to alter the institutional environment in which they operate. We will draw not only upon the international business literature but also related literatures including political economy, sociology, law, finance, communications, institutional theory, strategic corporate social responsibility, social movements, network theory and the management of extractive industries.

  • MGMT9700 - Research Methods in Mgmt

    Students taking the course will be introduced to the seminal readings on a given method, have a hands-on discussion regarding their application often using a paper and dataset of the faculty member leading the discussion. The goal of the course is to make participants more informed users and reviewers of a wide variety of methodological approaches to Management research including Ordinary Least Squares, Discrete Choice, Count Models, Panel Data, Dealing with Endogeneity, Survival/failure/event history and event studies, experiments, factor analysis and structural equation modeling, hierarchical linear modeling, networks, comparative qualitative methods, coding of non-quantitative data, unstructured text and big data simulations.

Awards and Honors

  • Excellence in Teaching Award, 2020-2021
  • Excellence in Teaching Award, 2019-2020
  • Aspen Institute Ideas Worth Teaching Award, 2019-2020
  • Excellence in Teaching Award, 2018-2019
  • Industry Studies Association Ralph Gomory Best Industry Studies Paper Award, 2019
  • Iron Prof, 2019
  • Excellence in Teaching Award (Electives), Wharton MBA Program, 2015
  • Fellow of Academy of International Business, 2014-Present
  • Teaching Commitment and Curricular Innovation Award, Wharton MBA Program, 2015
  • Best Conference Paper Prize at Strategic Management Society Annual Meeting, 2013
  • Helen Kardon Moss Anvil Award Nomination, 2013
  • Helen Kardon Moss Anvil Award Nomination, 2012
  • Excellence in teaching award, MBA Division (elective), 2012
  • Nominated for Best Paper for Practical Implications at the 2011 Strategic Management meeting, 2011
  • Teaching Commitment and Curricular Innovation Award, 2011
  • Helen Kardon Moss Anvil Award Nomination, 2011
  • Finalist, Best Applied Paper in International Management (The Robert H. Schaffer Award) at the 2011 Academy of Management meeting, San Antonio TX, 2011
  • Best Paper 2010 Engineering Project Organization Conference, South Lake Tahoe, CA, 2010
  • Excellence in teaching award, Wharton Undergraduate Division, May, 2008
  • Excellence in teaching award, Wharton Undergraduate Division, May, 2007
  • Finalist, Aspen Institute’s 2006 Faculty Pioneer Award (one of eight finalists out of 100 nominees), 2006
  • Faculty teaching award (electives), MBA for Executives Program, Class 31East, 2006-2007
  • Bronze Prize ($10,000) in International Finance Corporation / Financial Times 2006 Essay Competition on Topic of “Business and Development: The Private Path to Prosperity” (one of six prize winning essays out of over 500 submissions in total), 2006
  • First Runner Up, Haynes Prize for Outstanding Scholar in International Business under the age of 40 at 2005 Academy of International Business Annual Conference, 2005
  • Outstanding Reviewer Award, International Management Division, Academy of Management (one of 38 out of 656 reviewers so recognized), 2005
  • Faculty teaching award (electives), MBA for Executives Program, Class 28East, 2004-2005
  • Finalist, Haynes Prize for Best Paper by a scholar under the age of 40 at 2002 Academy of International Business Annual Conference, 2002
  • Finalist, Best Paper at 2002 Academy of International Business Annual Conference, 2002
  • Outstanding Reviewer Award, International Management Division, Academy of Management, 2000 (one of 8 out of 250 reviewers so recognized), 2000
  • Richard N. Farmer Award for best dissertation in International Business, Academy of International Business, 1999
  • Finalist, The Free Press Doctoral Dissertation Award, Business Policy and Strategy Division, Academy of Management, 1999
  • Best Doctoral Student Paper, Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, 1998

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Anne Spencer Jamison and Witold Henisz (2025), Competing demand-side explanations and populism: Cross-national variation in a recursive ideational system, Democratization, 32 (3), pp. 759-787.
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Where Does ESG Stand Today?

Wharton’s Witold Henisz talks about the challenges facing ESG amid global political and economic uncertainty.…Read More

Knowledge at Wharton - 4/18/2025
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