Managers as Moral Leaders: Moral Identity Processes in the Context of Work

Journal of Business Ethics - This qualitative study explores how business leaders narrate their personal ways of recognizing, reasoning, and resolving moral conflicts and what these stories reveal...     

Durable Domestic Dreams: Exploring Homes in Estonian Socialist‐era Summerhouse Settlements

‘Home’ and the connotations of this term are little understood in the context of post‐socialist Central and Eastern Europe. While modern suburban living was rather unusual in this region under socialism, more and more people live in suburbia today. This article concerns itself with the homes of residents in the former socialist‐era summerhouse settlements in Estonia. Its aim is to further an understanding of the origins and (dis)continuities of the notion of home for individuals living in a post‐socialist environment. This study is based on ethnographic fieldwork. In this article, we present socialist and post‐socialist housing in context and describe how it has been shaped by changes in society. Our findings show that the homes of informants appear to strengthen their sense of freedom, autonomy and stability, while simultaneously inspiring their dreams and imaginations of home.     

FIFTY YEARS OF TRADE POLICY IN INDONESIA: NEW WORLD TRADE,OLD TREATMENTS

Indonesia's trade policy has evolved over the last 50 years. It has been influenced by the country's level of development and the conflict between openness and protectionism; external developments, such as commodity booms and busts and increased competition; and international commitments, whether multilateral or regional. As a result, trade policy has often been ambivalent and ineffective. Given that Indonesia has undergone various transformations and that the world is a different place from what it was in 1965, the country needs to take a more pragmatic and forward-looking stance. Trade policy needs to be part of a comprehensive strategy to improve competitiveness and diversify exports. If Indonesia is to be part of the new paradigm, where the production of goods and services is based on production networks and global value chains, its policy focus will need to shift from protecting and favouring sectors to promoting trade and industrial policies that encourage the flow of goods, services, and people.     

Misery loves company: Social regret and social interaction effects in choices under risk and uncertainty

Extensive field evidence shows individuals? decisions in settings involving uncertainty depend on their peers? decisions. One hypothesized cause of peer group effects is social interaction effects: an individual?s utility from an action is enhanced by others taking the same action. We employ a series of controlled laboratory experiments to study the causes of peer effects in choice under uncertainty. We find strong peer group effects in the laboratory. Our design allows us to rule out social learning, social norms, group affiliation, and complementarities as possible causes for the observed peer group effects, leaving social interaction effects as the likely cause. We use a combination of theory and empirical analysis to show that preferences including “social regret” are more consistent with the data than preferences including a taste for conformity. We observe spillover effects, as observing another?s choice of one risky gamble makes all risky gambles more likely to be chosen.     

The Corporate Ethical Virtues Scale: Factorial Invariance Across Organizational Samples

This study investigated the factorial validity of the 58-item Corporate Ethical Virtues scale (CEV; Kaptein, J Organ Behav 29(7):923–947, 2008). The major aim was to test the invariance of the factor structure across different organizational samples. The CEV scale was designed to measure eight corporate virtues: clarity, congruency of supervisors, congruency of senior management, feasibility, supportability, transparency, discussability, and sanctionability. The data (total N = 3,702) consisted of four organizational samples that are operated in the private and public sector. The results of confirmatory factor analyses supported the hypothesized eight-factor structure, as well as its alternative second-order factor structure, where high correlations between the first-order factors (virtues) were explained by a general CEV factor. These factor structures (including factor loadings) remained the same across samples, lending strong support for the group invariance assumption of the scale. Thus, the 58-item CEV scale was found to be a valid tool for measuring the aspect of ethical organizational culture in different organizations, and its use can be recommended for future research.     

Entrepreneurial marketing: a comparative study

This paper uses a comparative study to explore entrepreneurial marketing orientation in small software technology firms, in relation to firm growth. Entrepreneurial Marketing (EM) acknowledges the interface between entrepreneurship, marketing and innovation and, pursuance of customer value. Researchers acknowledge that firms adopting other strategic orientations combined with a market orientation are more likely to outperform their competitors. Currently, there are few comparative studies of knowledge-intensive technology firms and no comparative cross-country studies, which consider firm growth and orientation from the EM perspective. This paper addresses these issues by using an entrepreneurial marketing orientation qualitative framework that consists of 15 dimensions, which allow investigation of entrepreneur and employee activities, attitudes and behaviors in such firms. Using a UK and US sample of firms, this research enables assessment of how and why entrepreneurial marketing orientation may lead to sustainable growth for firms in challenging markets and provides a comparison in two different country contexts.     

Ethical Life Cycle of an Innovation

Product safety has always been one of the main problems in engineering ethics. At times it has been discussed as primarily a problem of engineering ethics. However the right to safety is one of the four fundamental consumer rights and so it is an important theme also in business ethics. At the same time the problem of product safety is inseparably connected with business effectiveness: how much can we spend on product safety without making our production unprofitable? Below we will present a possible treatment of the safety problem in teaching business ethics to post-graduate industrial engineering students – as we deal with the problem in Tallinn Technical University.     

Internationalisation: A co-evolutionary perspective

Earlier research has identified several organisational and contextual factors relating to the internationalisation of the firm. However, the relations between these factors and their interaction over time have not been clearly understood. This paper seeks to bridge this gap and to provide a contribution to the internationalisation literature by presenting a co-evolutionary approach whereby the internationalisation path of the firm is seen as a product emerging from the co-evolution of internationalisation activities, organisational resources and industry influences. A longitudinal case study of the internationalisation of Orion Diagnostica illustrates the explanatory potential of the co-evolutionary model and captures the complex and interactive nature of the firm's internationalisation over time. The findings of the study also clarify the constraints that enable or compel a firm to internationalise rapidly and show how and why the status of “born globals” may change radically in the further internationalisation development.