A Framework for the Examination of Relational Ethics: An Interactionist Perspective

Despite the widespread agreement that the ontology of the marketing discipline is exchange, marketing ethics researchers have largely adopted a monadic viewpoint of ethical decision making. In this research, an interactionist approach is adopted in order to introduce a dyadic perspective of un/ethical decision making. The dyadic model includes each channel member's individual, situational and decision process factors linked by relationalism, an emerging paradigm in marketing channels. Relationalism is represented as a discriminating variable between perceived ethical dilemma and decision behaviour. Finally, a number of theoretical propositions are presented and future research directions are discussed.     

Do citizenship behaviors matter more for managers than for salespeople?

This research was designed to investigate the effects of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) and objective sales productivity on sales managers’ evaluations of their sales personnel’s performance and to examine whether the impact of OCBs on performance evaluations is greater at higher levels of the sales organization hierarchy. Two samples were obtained from the same organization: a sample of 987 multiline insurance agents and a sample of 161 agency managers. Objective measures of sales productivity were obtained for both samples along with evaluations of three dimensions of OCBs and an assessment of overall performance. The results indicate that managers’ evaluations are determined at least as much by OCBs as they are by objective measures of performance. After partialing out common method variance, the results also indicate that OCBs account for a greater proportion of a sales manager’s evaluation than of a sales representative’s evaluation. The implications of these findings are discussed. Scott B. MacKenzie (Ph.D., UCLA, 1983) is a professor of marketing and the Edgar G. Williams Faculty Fellow at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. His research on advertising effectiveness, organizational citizenship behavior, and leadership issues can be found in theJournal of marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Personnel Psychology, Journal of Management, andThe Leadership Quarterly. Currently, he serves on the editorial boards of theJournal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, andJournal of Consumer Psychology. Philip M. Podsakoff (D.B.A., Indiana University, 1980) is the John F. Mee Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. He is the author or coauthor of more than 60 articles and/or scholarly book chapters that have appeared in such journals as theJournal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Academy of Management Journal, Psychological Bulletin, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Applied Psychology, The Leadership Quarterly, Organizational Dynamics, Research in Organizational Behavior, Journal of International Business Studies, andJournal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. He serves on the Board of Editors of theJournal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, andThe Leadership Quarterly. Julie Beth Paine is a doctoral student in management at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Her research interests include competence in performance, performance evaluation processes, and reward systems.     

Agricultural efficiency and welfare in South Africa

Agricultural and food commodity price declines associated with domestic and international agricultural efficiency gains can have important welfare effects for a country. While food price reductions benefit low-income consumers in particular, they may also cause declines in agricultural employment, leading to some resistance to technological change as a policy goal. The simulations reported here use a South African Computable General Equilibrium model with highly disaggregated food and agricultural sectors to illustrate the various effects of such agricultural efficiency gains. The results suggest that technological advances in agriculture should not be resisted because of their negative impact on agricultural employment; the welfare gains from declining prices are too important, while employment gains in other (growing) sectors are likely to outweigh the loss of agricultural employment. In the face of increasing international efficiency South African agriculture should be encouraged to respond by also increasing its efficiency, despite the negative consequences for employment in the industry, as a failure to do so may be even more detrimental to the poor in terms of overall employment.     

Property Regimes as Information Regimes: Efficiency and Economies of Joint Production

The paper argues that it is useful to view property regimes asinformation regimes. A conceptual model and numerical example are usedto show that, under some reasonable assumptions, a common propertyregime is preferable to a private property regime when property regimesare viewed as information regimes. The paper considers a case ofidiosyncratic risk in a dynamic grazing context where the marginality ofthe resource is such that insurance markets are thin or non-existent.Agents are thought to be risk averse and exogenous enforcement of a risksharing scheme is not feasible. The policy implication is that theestablishment and maintenance of a common property regime is shown to bea (possibly) reasonable institutional response in the face of difficultand particular circumstances when property regimes are viewed asinformation regimes.     

Can genetic factors influence the likelihood of engaging in entrepreneurial activity?

This article offers an argument for how genetic factors may influence the tendency of people to engage in entrepreneurial activity, and describes four mechanisms through which genetic factors could operate. It also explores ways that researchers can use quantitative and molecular genetics to examine entrepreneurship, and discusses the potential implications of a genetic perspective for management research on entrepreneurship.     

On de-seasonalising adjusted-average formulae

The techniques of Borgan (1979) are extended to cover data with seasonal variations. Examples are given, and it is suggested that the formulae presented here give smoother results than those traditionally employed to deal with economic time series subject to seasonal variations.