Moral Repair in the Workplace: A Qualitative Investigation and Inductive Model

The topic of moral repair in the aftermath of breaches of trust and harmdoing has grown in importance within the past few years. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study that offers insight into a series of key issues related to offender efforts to repair interpersonal harm in the workplace: (1) What factors motivate offenders to make amends with those they have harmed? (2) In what ways do offenders attempt to make amends? (3) What outcomes emerge from attempts to make amends? Drawing from the findings, we build an inductive model intended to guide future business ethics and management inquiry and research in this area.     

A Falling of the Veils: Turning Points and Momentous Turning Points in Leadership and the Creation of CSR

Contemporary organizations often reciprocate to society for using resources and for affecting stakeholders by engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR). It has been shown that CSR has a positive impact on employee attitudes. However, not all employees may react equally strongly to CSR practices. Based on socio-emotional selectivity theory (Carstensen in Science 312:1913–1915, 2006), we contend that the effect of CSR on employee satisfaction will be more pronounced for older than for younger employees, because CSR practices address those emotional needs and goals that are prioritized when people’s future time perspective decreases. In one multi-source field study (N = 143) and one experimental study (N = 500), we demonstrate that CSR indeed has a stronger positive effect on employee satisfaction for older relative to younger employees. Accordingly, engaging in CSR can be an attractive tool for organizations that aim to keep their aging workforce satisfied with their job.     

Professionals inside the board room: accounting expertise of directors and dividend policy

Directors’ personal attributes have significant impacts on governance effectiveness. We study whether directors’ accounting expertise affects corporate financial policy and investigate dividend in specific. We construct a dataset of audit committee directors’ accounting expertise for Standard & Poor 500 firms from 2005 to 2012. We first verify directors’ monitoring roles by showing that firms with accounting expert sitting on their audit committees demonstrate stronger accounting conservatism. In our main tests, we find that these firms maintain lower dividend payment level, which are less sensitive to earnings volatility. This suggests directors’ advisory roles in financial policy. We further show that our accounting expertise cannot be subsumed by management ability. In additional test, we further examine the baseline results conditional on analyst forecast error. Our findings highlight the importance of directors’ professional expertise in fulfilling their governance roles.     

Student teachers of technology and design into industry: a Northern Ireland case study

This paper, based in Northern Ireland, is a case study of an innovative programme which places year 3 B.Ed. post-primary student teachers of Technology and Design into industry for a five-day period. The industrial placement programme is set in an international context of evolving pre-service field placements and in a local context defined by the Northern Ireland Curriculum (CCEA 2007); a rationale for the inclusion of Technology and Design within that curriculum; and the promotion of a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) agenda. Undertaken in collaboration with a range of industrial partners, the placements aim to give the student teachers an opportunity to spend time in industry. All the students concerned started their teacher education degree straight from school and therefore are without industrial experience. As a result of the placements the students gained valuable industrial experience and thereby further enhanced their working knowledge and understanding in their main subject area of Technology and Design, in particular, and other curricular areas, in general. The students report many benefits, both personally and professionally, to be gained from the placements typically the opportunity to see a range of industrial processes, many of which they are required to teach, and to gain a better understanding of the link between content of Technology and Design education and the activities of industry. This case study is based on feedback from the 2010 to 2011 cohort of students whose comments confirm the inherent value of exposing student teachers to industrial environments.     

Value creation from the innovation environment: partnership strategies in university spin‐outs

University spin‐out (USO) companies play an increasingly important role in generating value from radical, generic technologies, but this translation requires significant resources from other players to reach the market. Seven case studies illuminate how relationships with each type of partner can be leveraged to help the firm create value. We find that most firms in the sample are aware of the importance of corporate partners and actively seek to cultivate these relationships, but may not be taking full advantage of the resources available through nonparent academic institutions and other USOs with similar or complementary technologies.     

Hospitality Staff Attitudes to Guests with Impaired Mobility: The Potential of Education as an Agent of Attitudinal Change

This study aims to determine whether the attitudes of students (and therefore future employers) towards people with physical disabilities can be modified by exposing them to the needs of disabled people, or whether perceptions of the needs of the disabled are too entrenched for education to effect any change. It also evaluates whether attitudinal changes are enduring and therefore continue to influence students' responses to the disabled after a period of time has elapsed.     

Is the Risk Comparison Made by the Public Between EMF and Smoking or Asbestos a Valid One?

The possibility of adverse health effects from exposure to extremely low frequency (ELF) electric and magnetic fields (EMF) has caused considerable controversy in the scientific community and has received great attention in the media and among the general public with many comparing ELF EMF with tobacco smoking and asbestos. Although both smoking and asbestos are now classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as Group 1 or “established” carcinogens, this was not always the case. In this paper the evidence for the carcinogenicity of ELF EMF is compared with that for smoking and asbestos using the Bradford Hill model for establishing causality between exposure and disease. Application of the model shows that present data are insufficient to demonstrate that exposure to ELF EMF poses a definite human health hazard. However, while the bulk of the evidence is weak, there are several epidemiological studies which have reported an association between prolonged exposure to magnetic fields at levels above what is normally encountered and an increased risk in childhood leukaemia. On this basis IARC has classified ELF magnetic fields as a Group 2B or “possible” carcinogen.