企业社会责任主体范畴新探析

长期以来,人们对企业社会责任的标准和内容予以关注,但是却忽略了企业社会责任的主体问题。我们可以基于企业社会责任带来的道德满足和人类进步而进一步展望,企业社会责任是每一个从事经营活动的实体乃至于个人都应当对社会承担的义务。从财富实力、经营规模、社会影响力、公众认知度等方面看,跨国公司和个体工商户恰居＂大＂＂小＂两端,它们在承担企业社会责任的意愿以及法律规制上并不一致。但作为企业社会责任主体的地位是相同的。     

跨国公司在华R&D中心效应与我国技术创新策略

在跨国公司研发国际化过程中,我国的区位优势使其成为跨国公司海外R&D中心的重要基地,这为我国推进技术创新提供了一个良好的契机。跨国公司在华设立的R&D中心对我国技术创新带来了正负两方面的双重效应,我国应通过"学习、引进、合作、自立"提升我国技术创新能力。     

中国跨国公司海外经营的母国支持分析

成长于经济转型期的中国跨国公司不仅具有一般跨国公司的特征,而且表现出自身独特的个性,其母国属性尤为明显,在实施“走出去”战略中受到了中国政府的有力支持。文章首先分析母国支持中国跨国公司海外经营的原因：全球化背景的迫切要求、传统文化影响下的民族情结、提高国家竞争力的现实需要等,并在此基础上提出了中国跨国公司利用母国支持化解海外经营政治风险、提升竞争力等对策和方法。     

Globally networked: Intraorganizational boundary spanning in the global organization

Multinational corporations (MNCs) need to sense, source, and mobilize knowledge when and where it arises, whether at home, or elsewhere in the world. For this reason, MNCs benefit from employee networks of relationships that span across intraorganizational barriers, allowing for the efficient mobilization of knowledge across boundaries. Yet, which organizational members are more likely to be able to develop these boundary spanning networks? We leverage a unique data set from a large multinational corporation to empirically test a comprehensive model that captures the effect of an employee’s mandate, expertise, and behavioral orientations on her likelihood to span intraorganizational boundaries that manifest themselves in the form of hierarchies, intra-functional domains, and geographic territories. We find that the employees that are more likely to be boundary spanners are those having mandates with a global impact, high levels of expertise, and a collaborative orientation in their networking behaviors. In addition, we find that these effects are stronger for those employees that have large formal workflow networks.     

Financial constraints on export market exit of domestic firms versus foreign multinational corporation subsidiaries in South Korea

Using a Korean manufacturing firm-level data set covering a range of years from 2006 to 2013, this study investigates how the financial condition of firms, such as liquidity, leverage, and cash flow ratio, affects exit from export markets. It also analyses whether the financial status of foreign multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiaries differs from that of domestic firms with respect to the hazard of export market exit, especially during a global financial crisis. The empirical results confirm that, for domestic firms, the hazard of export market exit is affected by the firms’ financial condition only during a financial crisis. In other words, the financial vulnerability of domestic firms increases during the crisis, resulting in the hazard of export market exit. However, financial situations for foreign MNC subsidiaries do not affect exits from export markets, indicating a ‘finance-factor comparative advantage’.     

Models of static and dynamic technical efficiency of municipal libraries in the Czech Republic

This article deals with the modelling of the static and dynamic technical efficiency under conditions of municipal libraries of municipalities with 1000–5000 inhabitants. The aim of this article is to determine the level of the technical efficiency and the factors that influence the results of modelling of the static and dynamic technical efficiency of 34 selected municipal libraries for the years of 2011 and 2015. The first model tests the technical efficiency of conventional services of public libraries. The second model tests the technical efficiency of municipal libraries’ operation. The third model tests the technical efficiency of the key revenues and expenditures. The results in the static models estimate the average technical efficiency of municipal libraries in the interval (0.691–0.759) for the input-oriented models, and in the interval (1.413–2.005) for the output-oriented models. In the dynamic models, the majority of municipal libraries in 2015 showed lower technical efficiency and productivity in comparison with the year of 2011. The factors influencing the level of efficiency and its course include the inputs and the outputs, and their combinations within individual models.     

Safety risk and international investment decisions

We identify and demonstrate the merit of a novel institutional factor, safety risk, which likely affects multinational corporations’ (MNCs’) international investment decisions. Safety risk refers to the extent to which security and physical well-being are endangered due to normalized aggression and criminality in society. Despite concerns from executives and policymakers, safety risk has attracted little research attention. We validate a safety risk measure and evaluate the construct’s effect on MNCs’ investments. The findings indicate that countries’ safety risk deters MNCs from investing. Further, in post hoc analyses, firms’ prior experiences with safety risk and countries’ private security investments moderated this relationship.     

State‐Led Financial Regulation and Representations of Spatial Fixity: The Example of the Spanish Real Estate Sector

This article offers a bottom‐up contribution to the fixity–motion literature. It aims to unravel the apparent contradiction of real estate spatial fixity in Spain, which is portrayed both as a barrier to accumulation and as a unique source of investment by different capitalist actors. Empirically, it describes the shifts in real estate ownership and changes in profit‐making strategies that have taken place across the real estate sector during the crisis years, and the role of the state in these shifts. The article asserts that the idea of spatial fixity representing a spatial barrier for accumulation does not necessarily apply in the Spanish case. It further claims that the tensions in capital circulation through real estate are not only to be found in the action of time, but in different state strategies pursued by various actors. The opposing representations of fixity are the result of state regulation of interest rates, taxation and risk weighting. The state also increasingly promotes land rents as a source of liquidity creation.     

Municipal solid waste management and greenhouse gas emissions at international airports: A case study of Astana International Airport

The steady expansion of the city of Astana and the increase of airport capacity is leading to an increase in municipal solid waste generation. The purpose of this study was to perform compositional analysis of the municipal solid waste produced at the Astana International Airport and evaluate different waste management scenarios in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Recyclable and combustible fractions were found to be the major fractions (over 50%) of the total municipal solid waste generated in the Astana International Airport. Four base greenhouse gas emissions scenarios were proposed in this study, namely scenario-1 describing the current municipal solid waste management case, scenario-2 with integration of 29% recycling and 71% of municipal solid waste landfilling, scenario-3 for 100% of airport municipal solid waste being incinerated and scenario-4 for recycling 29% and the remaining waste being processed for energy recovery purposes. The proposed scenario 2 demonstrated significantly reduced net greenhouse gas emissions (t CO₂ eq/year) over the existing scenario 1, while scenarios 3 and 4 showed negative net greenhouse gas emissions. The experimental data provided and the scenarios discussed in this work are useful tools for decision makers for environmental waste management at airports.     

Multinational activity of European firms and heterogeneity

This paper offers an empirical assessment of the multinational activity of European firms. It takes the predictions of models of firm heterogeneity and FDI activity as a reference to explore the characteristics of multinational firms from 30 European countries. We use a data set, based on ORBIS, which links information of parent–affiliate pairs of firms. Our results show that more productive firms have greater multinational activity in terms of both scope, the number of foreign markets where they invest, and scale, the volume of local sales by subsidiaries active in foreign markets. The estimation of gravity equations shows that country characteristics that encourage multinational activity successively induce the entry of less productive parent firms. We confirm this asymmetry for the GDPs of the home and host countries, distance, contiguity and other standard gravity equation variables.