Astroturfing Global Warming: It Isn’t Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence

Astroturf organizations are fake grassroots organizations usually sponsored by large corporations to support any arguments or claims in their favor, or to challenge and deny those against them. They constitute the corporate version of grassroots social movements. Serious ethical and societal concerns underline this astroturfing practice, especially if corporations are successful in influencing public opinion by undertaking a social movement approach. This study is motivated by this particular issue and examines the effectiveness of astroturf organizations in the global warming context, wherein large corporate polluters have an incentive to set up astroturf organizations to undermine the importance of human activities in climate change. We conduct an experiment to determine whether astroturf organizations have an impact on the level of user certainty about the causes of global warming. Results show that people who used astroturf websites became more uncertain about the causes of global warming and humans’ role in the phenomenon than people who used grassroots websites. Astroturf organizations are hence successful in promoting business interests over environmental protection. In addition to the multiple business ethics issues it raises, astroturfing poses a significant threat to the legitimacy of the grassroots movement.     

Merit pay preferences among public sector employees

Organisations have choices about methods of pay, and employee pay adjustment preferences are an important consideration in this decision‐making process. Of particular organisational interest currently are pay systems that seek to link increases with individual performance, usually referred to as merit pay. Researchers have shown that pay adjustment systems that are incompatible with employee preferences can be costly for organisations, and have identified a range of demographic factors that predict support for merit adjustments. This article extends this line of research by investigating the impact of a performance appraisal system and a range of situational factors on the level of support for merit pay in a large public sector research organisation in Australia. The study finds that higher levels of perceived job security are associated with support for merit pay, while good promotional opportunities are associated with lower levels of support. Those who saw the outcomes of the current performance appraisal system as fair were unlikely to support merit pay.     

Growth accounting with investment-specific technological progress: A discussion of two approaches

Two approaches taken to the embodiment question are compared and discussed: quantitative theory and traditional growth accounting. The two approaches give very different estimates for the contribution of investment-specific technological advance to economic growth. Therefore, the approach taken matters. It is argued that the measures used in traditional growth accounting to gauge the importance of investment-specific technological progress have little economic content, unlike the measure obtained from quantitative theory.     

Executive stock options and IPO underpricing

In about one-third of US IPOs between 1996 and 2000, executives received stock options with an exercise price equal to the IPO offer price rather than a market-determined price. Among firms with such “IPO options”, 58% of top executives realize a net benefit from underpricing: the gain from the options exceeds the loss from the dilution of their pre-IPO shareholdings. If executives can influence either the IPO offer price or the timing and terms of their stock option grants, there should be a positive relation between IPO option grants and underpricing. We find no evidence of such a relation. Our results contrast sharply with the emerging literature on managerial self-dealing at shareholder expense.     

Agency Costs,Mispricing, and Ownership Structure

Standard theories of ownership assume insiders ultimately bear all agency costs and therefore act to minimize conflicts of interest. However, overvalued equity can offset these costs and induce listings associated with higher agency costs. We explore this possibility by examining a sample of public listings of Japanese subsidiaries. Subsidiaries in which the parent sells a larger stake and subsidiaries with greater scope for expropriation by the parent firm are more overpriced at listing, and minority shareholders fare poorly after listing as mispricing corrects. Parent firms often repurchase subsidiaries at large discounts to valuations at the time of listing and experience positive abnormal returns when repurchases are announced.     

Employee voice: does union membership matter?

Industrial relations research has traditionally viewed trade unions as the primary mechanism for employee voice. With the decline in unionism in many advanced industrial economies over the past two decades, new direct non-union voice mechanisms have been introduced by employers. This focus on the mechanisms for employee voice, however, fails to take account of employees' perceptions of voice. We suggested that employee perceptions of voice vary between the different levels of an organisation and proposed that trade union membership will be more likely to enhance individual employee perceptions of voice at the wider organisational level. Contrary to our expectations, our analysis of 2,949 employees of a public sector scientific research organisation found that union membership had a significant negative impact on employee voice at the organisational level. The article concluded by offering possible explanations for this unexpected finding and the implications for theory, management and future research.     

Diversity in organizations: Where are we now and where are we going?

A great deal of research has focused on workforce diversity. Despite an increasing number of studies, few consistent conclusions have yet to be reached about the antecedents and outcomes of diversity. Likewise, research on different dimensions of diversity (e.g., age, race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and culture) has mostly evolved independently. Therefore, the purpose of this review is to examine each of these dimensions of diversity to describe common themes across dimensions and to develop an integrative model of diversity.