A Confucian perspective on conflict resolution

Chinese business managers, in general, have been portrayed as valuing harmony and peace and having a tendency to avoid confrontation for fear of disturbing relationships involving mutual dependence. This is held to be a reflection of traditional Confucian cultural values.

This paper is an exploratory study which attempts to establish the relationship between the traditional, Confucian cultural values and the modes of conflict resolution preferred by Chinese business managers. The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument was employed in this study to describe the preferred conflict resolution modes of Chinese business managers. The results show that compromising tend to be the most preferred conflict resolution mode of Chinese business managers because of the latter's predominantly humanistic, Confucian self-concept.

However, other modes, that is, collaborating, competing, avoiding and accommodating, are also being employed by Chinese business managers as a strategic and political variation of that Confucian self-concept.     

An analysis of members' perspectives of service quality in Hong Kong tourist association membership system

The objectives of the study were (1) to evaluate members' satisfaction and expectation towards the quality of services provided by the HKTA membership system; (2) to identify the performance “gap” between members' satisfaction and expectation in the HKTA membership system; and, (3) to explore the impact of members' satisfaction level in participating in the HKTA membership system. A comprehensive survey was conducted and a Simple Random Sampling plan was used to survey 600 members. It was found that 28 out of 32 attributes had negative performance “gaps.” The likelihood of participating in HKTA activities was dependant on the members' satisfaction in “Increase social awareness,” “Opportunities to liaise with business associates” and “Upgrading staff through training courses.” The implications of the findings were discussed and recommendations were proposed.     

Bank Interest Rate Adjustments: Are They Asymmetric?

This paper is concerned with the asymmetric adjustments between three Australian bank interest rates: a bank bill rate, a loan rate and a deposit rate. A multivariate asymmetric error-correction model is applied to capture the interplay of long-run relationships between the levels of the rates and short-run relationships between the changes in the rates. The empirical analysis, for the sample period 1990:01–2000:04, shows that interest rate adjustments, in response to positive and negative shocks, are asymmetric in the short run, but not in the long run. In particular, the results suggest that banks adjust their loan and deposit rates, in response to a change in the bank-bill rate, at a faster rate during periods of monetary easings (negative changes) than during periods of monetary tightenings (positive changes).     

The theory of planned behavior in e‐commerce: Making a case for interdependencies between salient beliefs

To provide more specific explanation of consumers' purchase intention on the Internet, this study expanded the original theory of planned behavior (TPB) by decomposing belief constructs and by including interdependency terms between salient beliefs. The findings of this study supported the existence of interdependencies between salient beliefs in TPB. Also, the decomposition of attitude components is expected to provide on‐line retailers with more clear‐cut information about customers' evaluative criteria for e‐tailers when they make a purchase decision on the Internet. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Implications of Singapore's CPF Scheme on Consumption Choices and Retirement Incomes

Singapore has a unique policy of allowing the use of mandatory social security contributions to finance homeownership. An intertemporal model of housing demand is employed to demonstrate analytically that the CPF scheme can distort an individual's intertemporal and intratemporal consumption choices, and induce Singaporeans to demand more housing than they would otherwise. The withdrawals for housing have also affected the adequacy of CPF balances for financing retirement. Pegging the rate of return on CPF balances to a long‐term rate is the long‐term solution to curbing excessive withdrawals for housing, and ensuring the adequacy of CPF savings for financing retirement.     

Individualism-Collectivism Cultural Differences Affecting Perceptions of Unethical Practices: Some Evidence from Australian and Indonesian Accounting Students

This paper examines the impact of the individualism-collectivism dimension of culture on ethical perceptions in a sample of Australian and Indonesian Final Year accounting students. The study uses the Triandis instrument to establish that Australian students tended to be more individualistically- and Indonesian students more collectivistically-oriented. The study then proceeds to test the hypothesis of no difference in perceptions between these two country samples in their evaluations of questionable actions portrayed in five vignette situations. The findings reject the no difference cultural hypothesis, indicating that there are perceptual differences between the collectivistic Indonesian students and the individualistic Australian students. In general Indonesian students tend to perceive a lesser degree of risk for the questionable acts depicted by these cases where such acts would have beneficial impacts on close or moderately close in-groups. Consistent with this observation, they also tend to perceive a greater amount of gain if this gain impacts more on close or moderately close in-groups.These results suggest that ethics teaching, either as separate or integrated into other courses, is a delicate subject that is even more critical in a multicultural environment such as Australia where universities have growing numbers of culturally-distinct Asian students. Australian-based teachers of accounting students, in particular, should exercise extreme sensitivity when addressing issues of ethical conduct in the classroom to avoid offending those from different cultural backgrounds. More research into experiences of teaching business ethics to a group of culturally diverse students, as well as publications of suitable teaching materials that highlight and address these problems would be a significant step forward.     

Intermodal containerized shipping in foreign trade and regional accessibility advantages

Intermodalism has become one of the most significant transformations of freight transportation in the United States over the past two decades. The coupling of shipping modes has enabled shippers to more fully realize the respective time and costs advantages of respective modes. The opportunity to take advantage of intermodalism when shipping manufactured goods overseas may provide an essential competitive edge to a company or to an entire region engaged in world commerce. The change in the freight accessibility map of the United States to foreign markets that can be ascribed to intermodal infrastructures and operations has so far not been studied. With the help of a geographic information system, this paper analyzes this transformation in the United States by mapping integral place accessibility measures of five-digit zip code areas with respect to gateways for export of manufactured goods, especially containerized freight. The performance of the intermodal freight network is evaluated by comparing accessibility measures based on the highway network and on the intermodal network, respectively, for all North American container ports, as well as for subgroups of container ports on the Eastern Seaboard, the Western Seaboard, and the Gulf Coast of North America. The paper discusses regional winners and losers in the new national freight transportation system.     

Are corporate governance attributes associated with accounting conservatism?

This article investigates the association between the board of directors, the audit committee and the external auditor (as well as an aggregate governance index) and the extent of conservatism evident in Australian firms’ financial reporting. Overall, the results provide only weak evidence that firms with certain governance characteristics report more conservatively. Evidence of any such link is restricted to measures of board composition and leadership, and even then the results are sensitive to the method used to measure the extent of conservatism in financial reporting.     

Earnings Management of Firms Subjected to Product Price Controls

This study documents Australian firms' earnings management activities in response to product price controls established by the Australian government in the early 1970s. We predict that firms subject to price controls will adjust their discretionary accounting accruals downward to reduce reported net income and to increase the likelihood of approval of the requested price increase. To control for the confounding effect of performance, we analyse the performance of two groups of firms subject to price scrutiny prior to the event window and estimate the earnings management of these firms and a control group of firms during the period of scrutiny. Our results based on both longitudinal and a cross sectional experimental designs confirm that firms that were subject to the greatest scrutiny engaged in significant negative earnings management during the period of scrutiny, but not outside that period. Further, firms that were not subject to price controls did not engage in any significant earnings management during the same periods.
JEL classification: M41; M43