The Role of 'Good Conversation' In Strategic Control

Most current writers on strategic control, whether from the rational planning or processual schools, agree on the importance of dialogue and debate between the interested parties to the control process. This is particularly so when strategic control is regarded in a ‘warning bell’ sense, responding to a signal that all is not going according to plan, rather than as a behavioural constraint or as an element of agency theory practice. This paper advances a normative framework for ensuring the effectiveness of such discussions based on Bird's notion of a ‘good conversation’. Bird argued that the discussion of business ethical problems should be vocal, reciprocating, issues-oriented, rational, imaginative, and honest. It is argued here that these characteristics should also apply to the discussions within the strategic control process if the process is not to be dysfunctional.     

Personal Ethics and Business Ethics: The Ethical Attitudes of Owner/ Managers of Small Business

To date, the study of business ethics has been largely the study of the ethics of large companies. This paper is concerned with owner/managers of small firms and the link between the personal ethics of the owner/manager and his or her attitude to ethical problems in business. By using active membership of an organisation with an overt ethical dimension (for example, a church) as a surrogate for personal ethics the research provides some, though not unequivocal, support for the models of Trevino and others that suggest a link between personal ethics and business ethics.     

Book review

Forecasting and Management of Technology; A.L.Porter, A.T.Roper, T.W.Mason, F.A.Rossini & J.Banks New York, Wiley, 1991, £51.30 (hbk), ISBN 0-471-51223-0.     

Concentrated Housing Code Enforcement in St. Louis

This research employs probit analysis to examine the selection criteria governing nonuniform application of concentrated housing code enforcement in the city of St. Louis. The study has three specific objectives: (1) to identify the goals and geographic selection criteria characteristic of St. Louis' concentrated code enforcement program during the twenty years that it was in effect; (2) to establish whether program goals and selection criteria changed over time and, if so, why; and (3) to provide some judgment on the value of code enforcement as a policy tool to either reverse or slow neighborhood decline. Although fundamentally a case study, the conclusions should be of interest to those concerned with conservation of the housing stock in older cities throughout the country.     

A farm-scale biodiversity and ecosystem services assessment tool: the healthy farm index

Farm management focused on maximizing biomass production results in biological simplification and ultimately a degraded production potential for the future. Despite the large and growing body of evidence pointing to the need to restore biodiversity to farm systems, incorporation of biodiversity and ecosystem services into local agricultural land-use decision-making remains limited. The lack of planned and associated biodiversity may reduce resiliency of local managed ecosystems and add management costs; however, the tradeoff for individual landowners of greater diversity is increased management complexity and uncertainty. To assist farmers in managing biodiversity and to encourage ecological thinking, we developed the Healthy Farm Index, a farm-scale tool that complements existing farm assessment tools by integrating multiple metrics and outputs suitable for applied decision-making and annual evaluation. In this article, we describe the impetus for the index development and the structure of the index and through a case study apply the index and discuss its varied outputs and applications.     

The Temporal Context of UK Retailers’ Motives for International Expansion

This article re-examines the motives for retailer internationalisation with the aid of a survey of UK retailers with international retailing operations. The survey results are grouped according to the number of years companies have been operating in international markets. This facilitates a comparison of their views on internationalisation according to the different points in time that internationalisation is initiated and within the context of contrasting economic conditions. Overall, the survey results indicated that UK retailers remained strongly influenced by growth-oriented or proactive factors in their decision to internationalise. However, those retailers moving overseas for the first time, within the context of the rather severe operating conditions of the early 1990s, were in fact more likely to cite reactive factors as important influences. The article identifies a number of key issues for further research into the motives for retailer internationalisation and outlines the methodological implications.     

Information Sharing and Cooperative Search in Fisheries

We present a dynamic game of search and learning about the productivity of competing fishing locations. Perfect Bayesian Nash equilibrium search patterns for non-cooperating fishermen and members of an information sharing cooperative are compared with first-best outcomes. Independent fishermen do not internalize the full value of information, and do not replicate first-best search. A fishing cooperative faces a free-riding problem, as each coop member prefers that other members undertake costly search for information. Pooling contracts among coop members may mitigate, but are not likely to eliminate free-riding. Our results explain the paucity of information sharing in fisheries and suggest regulators use caution in advocating cooperatives as a solution to common pool inefficiencies in fisheries.     

The harvest strategy: how to implement a disaster for the environment and the stockholders

This paper examines the harvest strategy – an often recommended approach for dealing with a weak business unit. It is shown to be a strategy that intertwines the distinct levels of strategy making with the ultimate goal of increasing corporate value. However, in order to be successful it must be carried out inconspicuously. Inconspicuousness is a euphemism for deception in the case of the harvest strategy. Such behavior, when an industrial accident occurs, exposes shareholders to the risk of substantial losses if the accident happens in high-risk technology industries. The authors illustrate their contention by analysing the financial consequences of the Union Carbide tragedy at Bhopal and the Exxon disaster at Valdez. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.