Empowerment of SME websites—Development of a web-empowerment scale and preliminary evidence

The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web has been argued to fundamentally reshape economic conditions and business practices of firms. It is seen as a promoter of rapid internationalisation of companies, particularly small and medium enterprises. In the aftermath of the burst of the electronic-bubble business practitioners and academics look with scrutiny on successful web-strategies, relevant dimensions of online-success and try to identify viable website practices which enable long-term rewards. The literature offers a rather patchy pattern for successful web-strategies and consumer perspectives on what is expected from websites is hardly available. Within this paper, we introduce the dimension “web-empowerment”. This is a multidimensional construct comprising of consumer views on various dimensions of relevant and successful websites. The web-empowerment scale is based on a large sample from Austria, and developed according to scale development procedures. The relevance of this construct and practical issues in the context of a cross-country sample of SME’s is empirically examined. The paper concludes by offering implications for SME practitioners and for research.     

Google in China: A Manager-Friendly Heuristic Model for Resolving Cross-Cultural Ethical Conflicts

Management practitioners and scholars have worked diligently to identify methods for ethical decision making in international contexts. Theoretical frameworks such as Integrative Social Contracts Theory (Donaldson and Dunfee, 1994, Academy of Management Review 19, 252–284) and more recently the Global Business Citizenship Approach [Wood et al., 2006, Global Business Citizenship: A Transformative Framework for Ethics and Sustainable Capitalism. (M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY)] have produced innovations in practice. Despite these advances, many managers have difficulty implementing these theoretical concepts in daily practice. Using the example of recent decisions by internet service providers Google, Yahoo, and MSN regarding censorship requirements in China, we offer six heuristic questions to help managers to resolve cross-cultural ethical conflicts in which the firm’s way of doing business differs from the practice in the host country. Recognizing that companies can take different approaches to law and ethics (Paine, 1994, Harvard Business Review 72(2), 107–117), our aim is to provide a management decision process to deal with demands or opportunities for engaging in questionable business practices in a host country.     

Sustaining Employee Owned Companies: Seven Recommendations

The employee owned company (EOC) might be the ideal blend of capitalism and communitarianism that vitalizes the global economy. EOCs – based on the concepts of employee participation and control – have sprung up in the United Kingdom, some parts of the European Union, the United States, Japan, and the former Eastern Bloc countries. Research has shown that they are able to compete effectively with more traditional companies. However, in addition to the pressures of business competition, EOCs face two other key problems as they strive to survive: (1) degeneration and (2) human nature and the abuse of power. After introducing the idea of the EOC and describing briefly these two key problems, this article presents seven recommendations for sustaining employee owned companies. These recommendations – grounded in sound organizational theory and the writings of experts in the field of employee ownership – are offered as hypotheses to be examined empirically by future researchers.     

The Moral of the Story: Re-framing Ethical Codes of Conduct as Narrative Processes

This paper re-frames business ethical codes (BCEs) as narrative processes by reflecting critically on key ontological assumptions underpinning the existing research, and introducing new and relevant concepts based on alternative assumptions. The first section draws on recent decision-making research to develop a theoretical account of BCEs as complex, socially embedded sensemaking processes. The second section addresses the content of codes, and differentiates between narrative and logico-scientific modes of reasoning. The third section focuses on the quality of code communication and identifies several distinct types of narrative process. We provide research directions for how this new understanding of BCEs may be further developed, as well as implications for practitioners. In response to the call for new conceptual models (O’Fallon and Butterfield, in J Bus Ethics 59:375–413, 2005), the paper provides organizational researchers with a more nuanced understanding of how BCEs enable or constrain ethical behavior in organizations.     

The Influence of Christian Identity on SME Owner–Managers’ Conceptualisations of Business Practice

This paper reports on the findings of a qualitative study to understand how active adherence to the Christian faith influences the way SME owner–managers conceptualise their business practices. The study was based on in-depth interviews with 21 Christian SME owner–managers in Germany and the UK. Using a socio-psychological approach, the data analysis yielded a range of linguistic and conceptual resources that are peculiar to Christian discourse and that have the potential to influence business activity in rather distinctive ways. This paper particularly focuses on those Christian concepts that could be regarded as distinct ‹frames’ for action. It outlines what effect these concepts had on the respondents and how they were related to business practices. The paper also discusses how this study could inform further research into the influence of other socio-cultural forms of identity on economic actors’ conceptualisations of their own practice.     

The Role of Academic Research in Supply Chain Practice: How Much Are We Contributing?

Supply chain academics and practitioners enjoy a unique bond. The applied heritage of logistics and supply chain scholarship motivates researchers to identify problems residing in current and future practice, address them in a conscientious manner, and to provide findings that yield meaningful insights. Yet, this bond is sometimes strained when scholarship loses touch with “real problems” found in industry. Strains in the bond then limit the contribution potential and impact of resultant work. This editorial calls for supply chain researchers to embrace the discipline's applied heritage in the identification of problems and delivery of results, while employing the requisite rigor for valid conclusions. Fortunately, there has never been a better time to work with practitioners in light of the disruptive forces at work in industry and the thirst for meaningful insights.     

Researcher Interaction Biases and Business Ethics Research: Respondent Reactions to Researcher Characteristics

The potential for biased responses that occur when researchers interact with their study participants has long been of interest to both academicians and practitioners. Given the sensitive nature of the field, researcher interaction biases are of particular concern for business ethics researchers regardless of their preference for survey, experimental, or qualitative methodology. Whereas some ethics researchers may inadvertently bias data by misrecording or misinterpreting responses, other biases may occur when study participants’ responses are systematically influenced by the mere introduction of researchers into the participants’ environment. Although substantial empirical research has been conducted on the general topic of researcher interaction biases, none has focused specifically on business ethics research. In order to remedy this lack of empirical substantiation in the field, we review the related literature on researcher interaction biases, present an empirical example of how such biases can influence research results in an experiment assessing reactions to insurance fraud, and discuss the implications for business ethics research.     

Contextualizing international business research: Enhancing rigor and relevance

Context differentiates international business (IB) from traditional Business research. Along with many IB scholars, we argue that context should be much more adequately emphasized in IB research. Location differences are commonly ignored; complexity and polycomplexity--and other levels of analysis issues--are rarely acknowledged; and the relevance of models and theory developed in Western contexts is not adequately questioned or explored. This paper suggests contextualization guidelines for scholars to enhance the rigor of their research and to make their IB research more relevant for practitioners. In conclusion we suggest solutions for closing rigor and relevance gaps in IB research by enhancing contextualization.     

Assessing contribution of research in business to practice

This editorial offers some thoughts on wider criteria of evaluation than journal and article impact metrics. The editorial suggests that the measurement of journal and article impact metrics simply confirms the status quo rather than the promotion of resonance between practice, research and theory. The editorial proposes a more holistic recognition of impact, influence and usefulness that elevates the importance of three further dimensions of application, context and involvement. The editorial considers the value of scientific research to business practitioners and students concluding that an ingenuous and on-going scheme of exchange between scholars and practitioners would lead to cross-fertilization of ideas and experience and enhance empathy, learning and understanding. The alternative pursuit of scientific “respectability” by scholars in the most myopic academic sense has become less and less useful to students as well as the business community leaving the suspicion of business schools obsessed with making money whilst pretending to pursue knowledge and produce future citizens to make the world a better place.     

Consortium benchmarking: Collaborative academic-practitioner case study research

Consortium benchmarking is a scholar-practitioner collaborative case study approach joining rigor and relevance in management research. In consortium benchmarking practitioners and academic researchers form a consortium and together benchmark best-practices. Consortium benchmarking includes practitioners as co-researchers, facilitating research relevant for both academics and practitioners. Rigorous research informs the entire process since consortium benchmarking collects evidence from multiple sources and uses various comparison techniques. This paper introduces the concept of consortium benchmarking and then illustrates its application with a case study that identifies the nature of innovative suppliers. The study shows how consortium benchmarking supports the production of relevant knowledge for both academics and practitioners in a rigorous way. In order to evaluate these contributions, the study develops criteria for assessing rigor as well as theoretical and practical relevance. Finally, the study compares consortium benchmarking with multi-case research and presents five aspects either not accounted for or neglected in “traditional” multi-case research.     

Businesspeople: Academics need your help to make business research relevant

In the last two decades, industry-university collaborations (IUCs) in research and development in the hard sciences have become increasingly more successful and common. In contrast, successful IUCs in softer social sciences, such as business, remain relatively uncommon. But business research requires an even higher degree of collaboration than research in the hard sciences if its results are to be relevant to businesspeople. Fortunately, business academics are becoming more and more interested in collaborating with businesspeople. The purpose of this article is to motivate businesspeople to collaborate as well. We do this by showing the businessperson the historical origins of business research’s irrelevance, by describing the benefits the business world could receive from collaborative research, by showing why collaboration is especially needed in social sciences such as business, and by showing why academics cannot do relevant business research without practitioners’ help. Specifically, we will show that the businessperson’s help is needed to ensure that their priorities are met, to formulate the right research questions, to provide relevant data, and to contribute their problem-solving inventiveness.     

Are Organisation Researchers too Obsessed with the Economic Responsibility of the Firm?

The original intent of business education in America focused on the development of professional managers who would look after the interests of society. As economic and shareholder theories influenced business education, firm performance became the manager’s top – if not only – priority. The economic responsibility of the firm also appears to be dominating scholarly interest in organisations as well. However, business firms constitute part of the fabric of society and closer attention should be paid by organisation researchers to the social responsibilities of the firm. In doing so, a more balanced research approach can be achieved. In this article, we give evidence that research within the study of the organisation, specifically in the field of management, has predominately turned its attention to the economic responsibility of the firm. We close by demonstrating that other fields within organisation research also appear to be favouring the study of performance and we offer suggestions as to how scholars might better address the firm’s role in society beyond its economic responsibility. Jeremy Galbreath is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Curtin University of Technology where he is studying corporate social responsibility (CSR). He has published extensively, with over 50 articles in print and 3 book chapters. Dr. Galbreath's research and teaching focuses on strategic management, the resource-based view of the firm, corporate social responsibility, stakeholder management, the ethicality of profit making strategies, intellectual capital and information technology.     

Coffee as a Medium for Ethical,Social, and Political Messages: Organizational Legitimacy and Communication

This research examines how an organization, Thanksgiving Coffee, establishes and maintains its legitimacy with its constituent publics. In line with Boyd’s (2000, Journal of Public Relations Research 12(4), 341–353.) concept of actional legitimacy, Thanksgiving Coffee demonstrates a legitimation strategy addressing social issues and by responding to ethical and political questions. Applying Fisher’s (1984, Communication Monographs 51, 1–18) concepts of narrative fidelity and probability, Thanksgiving Coffee’s policies and communication activities were found to alleviate the social issues to which they were addressed and therefore reinforce perceptions of legitimacy among publics. Viewing the influence of organizations from a different perspective, this study provides an example of how the policies of an organization can have a positive impact on the broader society in which it operates. Gregory G. De Blasio teaches courses related to business communication, public relations writing, and marketing communication campaigns. His research interests include the study of communication campaigns as they relate to social issues and organizational legitimacy. Dr. De Blasio joined the Communication Department at Northern Kentucky University in 2004. His Ph.D. in communication is from Wayne State University. He received his M.A. from the Pennsylvania State University and his B.A. from William Paterson University. A past International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) board member and chapter president in Detroit, Greg has provided public relations and marketing communication counsel to clients based in Detroit and elsewhere.     

Logit模型在市场营销定量研究中的应用——消费者对家电品牌选择的实证分析

市场营销的定量研究以及如何开启消费者的行为黑箱,一直以来都是国外市场营销研究者们长期并将继续深入探讨的核心主题。在此过程当中,Logit模型是他们比较青睐和广泛采用的一类研究工具。通过对Logit模型的原理的介绍,以及将这一模型用于国内消费者对某一家电品牌选择的实证研究,从而表明Logit模型能够用于分析市场营销研究中的诸多问题,并且能够揭示出更多有用的量化信息,而这对于市场营销的学术研究和市场营销管理的实践都无疑是大有裨益的。     

Preserving Knowledge on IS Business Value

The economic relevance of information systems has been studied for many years and has attracted an abundance of research papers. However, the “productivity paradoxon” of the 1990s, Carr’s widely recognized paper “IT doesn’t matter”, and several studies that do not find a positive correlation between IS investments and economic performance reveal long-lasting difficulties for IS researchers to explain “IS business value”. Business executives and researchers also continue to question the value of IS investments. This raises the question of whether literature reviews have tapped their potential to address the concerns by covering key research areas of IS business value and preserving their key findings. In order to address this question, this paper identifies and describes 12 key research areas, and synthesizes what literature reviews published in pertinent academic outlets have done to preserve knowledge. The analysis of 22 literature reviews shows that some crucial areas have not been (sufficiently) covered. They provide fertile areas for future literature reviews. As this work is based on the results of more than 200 research papers, it is capable of drawing a comprehensive picture of the current state-of-the-art in IS business value research.     

Where does business research go from here? Food-for-thought on academic papers in business research

This essay focuses on some of the adverse practices in business research publications. First, business researchers seem to have lost touch with business practice and to narrow the target group to fellow academics only, reducing the production of useful knowledge. Second, the objectives of business research publications narrow to impact and citations. This view leads to a strict focus on path-breaking theories and a denigration of replication and qualitative studies. Third, an obsession with the .05 significance level and corroborating findings leaves researchers with full file drawers of unpublished papers and could leave journals with a high rate of type I error papers. Fourth, complex, lengthy articles, the importance of carefully crafting a story around the research and a variety of style guidelines make business researchers less productive than they could be. Finally, a blind reliance on ISI's impact and citation scores may not do justice to a researcher's real contribution.     

Introducing Practical Wisdom in Business Schools

This article echoes those voices that demand new approaches and ‹senses’ for management education and business programs. Much of the article is focused on showing that the polemic about the educative model of business schools has moral and epistemological foundations and opens up the debate over the type of knowledge that practitioners need to possess in order to manage organizations, and how this knowledge can be taught in management programs. The article attempts to highlight the moral dimension of management through a reinterpretation of the Aristotelian concept of practical wisdom. I defend the ideas that management is never morally neutral and that Aristotelian practical wisdom allows the recovery of moral considerations in management practice. I analyze the impact and implications that the introduction of practical wisdom in business schools entails for the conception and objectives of management education. This view reconfigures management education in terms of attention to values, virtues and context. Therefore, management programmes should prepare students to critically evaluate what they hear and to make decisions coherent with their values and virtues. In the final section, I reflect on the pedagogical implications of this approach. I point out that an integrated model of ethics and practical wisdom promotes education of cognition and education of affect as well. I provide an example to illustrate my perspective and to support my conclusions.     

Constructing Good Decisions in Ethically Charged Situations: The Role of Dramatic Rehearsal

This paper develops a pragmatist approach to ethical business decision-making. It draws primarily on the work of John Dewey and applies his deliberative approach to ethics to the challenges of business practitioners. In particular the paper proposes the value of Dewey’s concept of dramatic rehearsal in emphasizing the task of “constructing the good” in ethical decision-making. The contribution of the paper is, first, to build on recent foundational work to bring American pragmatism into the mainstream business ethics literature; second, to offer a perspective that is accessible to practitioners and integrates ethics into their daily tasks; and third, to identify a number of related research imperatives – in particular the importance of focusing efforts on gaining a deeper understanding of the deliberative process itself.     

Ad avoidance in the digital context: A systematic literature review and research agenda

The recent growth in digital marketing investments and revenues has attracted the attention of both marketing practitioners and scholars. However, this growth has dramatically increased users' exposure to ad messages, encouraging consumers to avoid them. Therefore, ad avoidance has become a major problem for marketing practitioners. Although researchers have become much more interested in this subject over the past two decades, the body of knowledge on ad avoidance in the digital environment remains fragmented due to the lack of a comprehensive review. Therefore, a holistic overview study is needed that focuses on the big picture and can help researchers to understand the literature comprehensively. This study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the topic using a systematic literature review approach on digital ad avoidance. To this end, we provide an in-depth content analysis of 56 relevant articles published in 31 peer-reviewed scientific journals up to December 31, 2021. Based on a theories, contexts, characteristics, and methods (TCCM) framework, the study results shed light on ‘what do we know, how do we know, and where should research about digital ad avoidance research be heading?’ Additionally, drawing on the content analysis, we have presented an integrative framework that considers antecedents, outcomes, mediators, and moderators, which can help develop the field systematically and guide future research. By doing so, we think this review meets the need to give an overview of the state-of-the-art scientific body of knowledge on digital ad avoidance and makes important and solid contributions to the literature, practical implications, and future research directions based on the findings.