Collegial Entrepreneurialism

Abstract

In recent decades, Australian universities have corporatized. Encouraged by government policies, universities adopted modernization practices that have been widely questioned. ‘Collegial entrepreneurialism’ is an approach that builds on collegial processes to protect academic values from the excesses of modernization. This paper examines the perceptions of business academics about the impacts of modernization in autonomous graduate schools of business. The research was undertaken prior to the most recent wave of higher education reform under which most of these schools disappeared. Their experience of three consequences of modernization, ‘hard’ managerialism, academic consumerism and fragmentation of work, provides insight into whether collegiality and academic values can exist within an entrepreneurial academic unit. Results indicate that overt manifestations of modernization are not threatening to ‘collegial entrepreneurialism’. However, in the absence of academic leadership, the more covert influences of consumerism and fragmentation pose a threat to the survival of ‘collegial entrepreneurialism’.     

Enterprise Risk Management Program Quality: Determinants,Value Relevance,and the Financial Crisis

This paper investigates factors associated with high‐quality Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) programs in financial services firms, and whether ERM quality enhances performance and signals credibility to the financial markets. ERM, developed with the assistance of the accounting profession, provides a framework and plan to integrate management of all sources of risk. Challenged by measurement difficulties common to research on management control systems, prior ERM studies present mixed findings. Using ERM quality ratings of financial companies by Standard & Poor's, we find that higher ERM quality is associated with greater complexity, less resource constraint, and better corporate governance. Controlling for such characteristics, we find that higher ERM quality is associated with improved accounting performance. Results show a market reaction to signals of enhanced management control from initial ERM quality ratings and rating revisions, and a stronger response to earnings surprises for firms with higher ERM quality. Focusing on the recent global financial crisis, our analysis suggests that there is no relation between ERM quality and market performance prior to and during the market collapse. However, returns of higher ERM quality companies are higher during the market rebound. Overall, results reveal that firm performance and value are enhanced by high‐quality controls that integrate risk management efforts across the firm, enabling better oversight of managers' risk‐taking behavior and aligning that behavior with the strategic direction of the company.     

We Used to Get and Give a Lot of Help: Networking,Cooperation and Knowledge Flow in the Hunter Valley Wine Cluster

The Hunter Valley, New South Wales, is both Australia's oldest continually producing wine region and a highly functioning wine business cluster. New generation cluster actors perceive that the region's concentration of historic family‐based firms has contributed to its strength. We have used rarely consulted and newly accessioned evidence from the 1820s to the 1920s to qualitatively test the extent to which early networking created pathways for knowledge flow in the region. Our cross‐disciplinary research into the historic depth of embedded cooperation reveals a little known feature of early Australian business history and complements the more commonplace breadth approach in cluster studies.     

The destination image gap – visitors' and residents' perceptions of place: evidence from Waiheke Island,New Zealand

This paper reports results derived from a survey of 2229 residents of, and 2151 visitors to the island of Waiheke, New Zealand. The study finds there was a close similarity of place image held by both visitors and residents. The paper examines the proposal that where congruency exists between visitor and resident image of place, there may be less negative perceptions of visitor impact on the part of residents. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected and analysed, the former involving the use of CatPac?, a neural network program for analysing textual data. Little support was found for the contention that place images shared by residents and tourists would increase tolerance of tourists on the part of residents.     

Experiments on strategic choices and markets

Much of experimental research in marketing has focused on individual choices. Yet in many contexts, the outcomes of one’s choices depend on the choices of others. Furthermore, the results obtained in individual decision making context may not be applicable to these strategic choices. In this paper, we discuss three avenues for further advancing our understanding of strategic choices. First, there is a need to develop theories about how people learn to play strategic games. Second, there is an opportunity to enrich standard economic models of strategic behavior by allowing for different types of bounded rationality and by relaxing assumptions about utility formulation. These new models can help us to more accurately predict strategic choices. Finally, future research can improve marketing practice by designing better mechanisms and validating them using experiments.     

Discretionary and Non-Discretionary Revisions of Loss Reserves by Property-Casualty Insurers: Differential Implications for Future Profitability, Risk and Market Value

We develop and estimate a PC-industry specific model in which proxies for both discretion and non-discretion are used to partition loss reserve revisions into discretionary and non-discretionary components. The use of such proxies enables us to test directional hypotheses about the relations between the revision components and future profitability, risk and market value. We predict and find that discretionary revisions are negatively associated with future profitability, positively associated with firm risk, and negatively associated with market-to-book ratios. We predict and find that non-discretionary revisions are positively associated with future profitability and risk but are not associated with market-to-book ratios.