Poverty, Justice and Social Justice

Is Christianity essentially collectivist? The philosopher Antony Flew, examines some recent statements from the church.     

Alcohol consumption in the UK, 1955–85: a system-wide analysis

As a consequence of economic reforms in China, firms have ben affected by three essential changes. First, instead of surrendering all profits to the Government, firms now pay tax on their profits according to a contract between them and the Government and retain the balance as their own controllable surplus. Second, the central economic plan determines only part of firms' production. After fulfilling the command plan, firms are allowed to adjust their production scale by the availability of inputs and the profitability of production. Third, most consumer and investment goods have two prices, a plan price and a market price. As most of the plan prices are always lower than the market prices, the latter play a basic role in determining firms' profits. After a decade of economic reforms, the important question is: can Chinese state enterprises perform like market entities? The analysis shows that Chinese firms in transition domimic the production behaviour of market-based, efficiency-oriented firms.     

Levels of strategic purchasing: Impact on supply integration and performance

The growing importance of supply chain management has led to an increasing recognition of the strategic role of purchasing, which has recently evolved and expanded from “buying” to “procurement” and “supply management”. In this study, we chart our sample firms’ advance in strategic purchasing, characterized by the strategic focus, strategic involvement of the purchasing function and the status and visibility of the purchasing professionals, into three stages.This study provides strong empirical support for the importance of strategic purchasing by showing that, by moving towards the more advanced stages, firms at the nascent stage of strategic purchasing can achieve better supply integration, a second-order construct composed of four facets of relational, process, information, and cross-organizational team integration. Our analyses further reveal that strategic purchasing can have a profound impact on supply chain performance for both buyer and supplier firms.     

A class of changing elasticity of substitution production functions

This paper presents a new class of production functions with a changing elasticity of substitution between two input factors. Over a freely chosen number of intervals for the input factor intensity freely chosen elasticities of substitution can be imposed. The resulting production function can thus account for changing elasticities of substitution during the development of the factor intensity. The production function is applied in a calibration exercise and a novel normalization procedure is proposed. The theory behind this production technology builds on the functional normalization of CES production functions.     

The Political Roots of Corporate Social Responsibility

This article argues that whether and how a firm chooses to adopt Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives is conditional in part upon the domestic political institutional structures present in its home market. It demonstrates that economic globalization has increased the pressure applied to companies to develop CSR policies that might help overcome specific governance gaps associated with the globalization phenomenon. Drawing upon an examination of domestic institutions and overall political structure, it argues that the political conditions and expectations present in a company’s home market will condition whether a firm might pursue CSR activity. For home markets, it is posited that perceived electoral salience will be filtered through government type and ideology, and state/societal structures will influence if and how firms will use CSR. Specific arguments are developed from these categorizations. The article concludes with a discussion of how researchers might further explore links between CSR, domestic political structures, and corporate political activity.