Indigenous Peoples,Resource Extraction and Sustainable Development: An Ethical Approach

Resource extraction companies worldwide are involved with Indigenous peoples. Historically these interactions have been antagonistic, yet there is a growing public expectation for improved ethical performance of resource industries to engage with Indigenous peoples. (Crawley and Sinclair, Journal of Business Ethics 45, 361–373 (2003)) proposed an ethical model for human resource practices with Indigenous peoples in Australian mining companies. This paper expands on this work by re-framing the discussion within the context of sustainable development, extending it to Canada, and generalizing to other resource industries. We argue that it is unethical to sacrifice the viability of Indigenous cultures for industrial resource extraction; it is ethical to engage with indigenous peoples in a manner consistent with their wishes and needs as they perceive them. We apply these ideas to a case study in the coastal temperate rainforest of Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia, Canada. In this case a scientific panel comprised of Nuu-Chah-Nulth elders, forest scientists and management professionals, achieved full consensus on developing sustainable forest practice standards by drawing equally on Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge and Western science in the context of one of the most heated and protracted environmental conflicts in Canadian history. The resulting sustainable forest practice standards were later adopted by leading forestry firms operating on the coast. Our analysis of this scientific panels success provides the basis for advancing an ethical approach to sustainable development with Indigenous peoples. This ethical approach is applicable to companies working in natural resource industries where the territories of Indigenous peoples are involved.David Lertzman Ph.D. is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Environmental Management and Sustainable Development and Senior Associate with the TransCanada International Institute for Resource Industries and Sustainability Studies at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. He teaches courses on Sustainable Development With Indigenous Peoples at the Graduate and Undergraduate levels, and in the MSc Program in Sustainable Energy Development for Latin America and the Caribbean. Dr. Lertzman also teaches a Wilderness Retreat on Leadership for Sustainable Development in the MBA program. He is a private consultant and has worked in many Indigenous communities, mostly in Western Canada.Harrie Vredenburg Ph.D. is Professor and Suncor Energy Chair in Competitive Strategy and Sustainable Development at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary where he is also Director of the TransCanada International Institute for Resource Industries and Sustainability Studies. He teaches in Haskaynes MBA and PhD programs. He is also Academic Chair of the MSc program in Sustainable Energy Development for Latin America and the Caribbean offered by the Haskayne School of Business at the Quito Ecuador campus of regional partner, the Latin American Energy Organization (OLADE). He regularly teaches in the Latin American program.     

Strategic Manipulation of Preference Information in Multi-Criteria Group Decision Methods

When group decisions involve the allocation of resources to group members, the members might have an incentive to strategically distort any information they provide in order to increase their share of resources. The paper compares several multi-criteria group decision methods with respect to this problem. We show, using a computational model, that strategic manipulation of preference information is possible in all of the methods considered, although to a different extent. Furthermore, when the solution a method generates under correct information is not Pareto-optimal, manipulation attempts might even improve the efficiency of outcomes.     

Shaping Ethical Perceptions: An Empirical Assessment of the Influence of Business Education,Culture, and Demographic Factors

Recent events at Enron, K-Mart, Adelphia, and Tyson would seem to suggest that managers are still experiencing ethical lapses. These lapses are somewhat surprising and disappointing given the heightened focus on ethical considerations within business contexts during the past decade. This study is designed, therefore, to increase our understanding of the forces that shape ethical perceptions by considering the effects of business school education as well as a number of other individual-level factors (such as intra-national culture, area of specialization within business, and gender) that may exert an influence on ethical perceptions. We found significant effects for business education, self-reported intra-national culture, area of specialization within business, and gender for some and/or all areas of ethics examined (i.e., deceit, fraud, self-interest, influence dealing, and coercion). One of our most encouraging findings is that tolerance for unethical behavior appears to decrease with formal business education. Despite the prevalent stereotype that business students are only interested in the bottom line or that business schools transform idealistic freshman into self-serving business graduates, our results suggest otherwise. Given the heightened criticism of the ethicality of contemporary managerial behavior, it is heartening to note that, even as adults, individuals can be positively affected by integration of ethics training.     

How Business Opportunities Constrain Young Technology-Based Firms from Growing into Medium-Sized Firms

This paper analyses how the novelty of business opportunities at start-up constrains young technology-based firms from attaining substantial growth and becoming medium-sized. Data from 262 young Swedish technologybased firms are used to estimate a logit regression model relating different types of opportunities to the probability of becoming medium-sized. The results show that firms which seek to exploit opportunities based on new market knowledge are less likely to attain substantial growth than firms that seek to exploit opportunities based on existing market knowledge. The former class of firms can nevertheless increase the probability of such growth by actively seeking external financing.     

Understanding Insurance Customer Dishonesty: Outline of a Situational Approach

The paper takes a look at insurance customer dishonesty as a special case of consumer ethics, understood as a way of situation handling, as a moral choice between right and wrong, such as between self-interest vs. common-interest, in other words, a “moral temptation”. After briefly raising the question if different schools, of moral philosophy would conceptualize such moral temptations differently, the paper presents ‘moral psychology’ as a frame of reference, with a focus on cognitive moral development, moral attitude and moral neutralization. Conceptualization questions can’t be answered finally without thinking at the same time of empirical research design and instrument design decisions, e.g. choosing between experiment vs. questionnaire studies, designing suitable moral temptation situations as an experiment vs. questionnaires with scenario vignettes. The paper discusses then experiences from a 2004 pilot survey, with a main focus on a few insurance dishonesty scenarios with follow-up questions. The paper has an open end, i.e. outlines desirable future theoretical, empirical and practical work with insurance customer dishonesty.     

The European Union’s Constitutional Crisis—Causes and Consequences

The rejection of the treaty establishing a European constitution by French and Dutch voters has thrown the EU into a deep crisis. What developments in the EU contributed to these referenda results? What consequences are to be drawn for the continuation of integration and the integration goal, the governance of the EU-25 and the further planned enlargements? What flaws are there in the present draft constitution and how can these be dealt with?     

Sticks and Stones may Break Your Bones, but Words can Break Your Spirit: Bullying in the Workplace

Workplace bullying has a well-established body of research internationally, but the United States has lagged behind the rest of the world in the identification and investigation of this phenomenon. This paper presents a managerial perspective on bullying in organizations. The lack of attention to the concept of workplace dignity in American organizational structures has supported and even encouraged both casual and more severe forms of harassment that our workplace laws do not currently cover. The demoralization victims suffer can create toxic working environments and impair organizational productivity. Some methods of protecting your organization from this blight of bullying are proposed. Bullying has always been part of the human condition; history is rife with references to abuse of power and unnecessary or excessive force. The classic bully story is of Joseph and his brothers, a tale of envy and hostility. The refinement of bullying to include various forms of legally defined social harassment is a relatively late phenomenon, however, dating to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the United States, bullying is not illegal, whereas it is illegal in many other countries. Bullying is not about benign teasing, nor does it include the off-color jokes, racial slurs, or unwelcome advances that are the hallmarks of legally defined harassment. Workplace bullying is the pattern of destructive and generally deliberate demeaning of co-workers or subordinates that reminds us of the activities of the schoolyard bully. Unlike the schoolyard bully, however, the workplace bully is an adult, usually (but not always) aware of the impact of his or her behavior on others. Bullying in the workplace, often tacitly accepted by the organizational leadership, can create an environment of psychological threat that diminishes corporate productivity and inhibits individual and group commitment. The two examples that follow will help to clarify the difference between harassment and bullying.     

Professional Ethics in a Virtual World: The Impact of the Internet on Traditional Notions of Professionalism

Numerous articles in the popular press together with an examination of websites associated with the medical, legal, engineering, financial, and other professions leave no doubt that the role of professions has been impacted by the Internet. While offering the promise of the democratization of expertise – expertise made available to the public at convenient times and locations and at an affordable cost – the Internet is also driving a reexamination of the concept of professional identity and related claims of expertise and standards of integrity.This paper begins with a presentation of case studies illustrating the ease by which impostors infiltrate the ranks of professionals. Reports of individuals masquerading as professionals via the Internet often reveal that these imposters cause harm to the unwary victims who rely on assertions of professional expertise. Such reports motivated the authors to examine the origins and evolution of the traditional roles of professions and professionals in today’s society, as well as question how, or whether, the standards for professional practice have been adapted to the challenges posed by technology, i.e., do statements of professional ethics provide a ‘guiding light’ for practitioners and their clients in the cyber age? The authors challenge the professions to consider the notion that technology forces a confrontation between the guild-like aspects of a profession that have served, on the one hand, to protect a profession from encroachment and, on the other hand, have purportedly protected the public.The authors conclude by presenting an examination of websites that show recognition of the challenges that the Internet poses to professionalism, as we have known it. Detailed discussion of the websites of two professions illustrates different approaches to responding to these challenges.     

Customer-centric pricing: The surprising secret for profitability

Companies spend enormous amounts of energy and capital in creating value for customers, but less regard is given to actually capturing the value they have created. Segmentation based on buying behavior uncovers a tremendous differential in willingness to pay for subjective product attributes such as convenience, status, and quality. Purchase decisions are made through an assessment of a myriad of factors balancing perceptions of value components against price in a subtle, complex, and often sub-conscious decision matrix. Customer-centric pricing requires the simultaneous and continuous assessment of product attributes, customer perceptions, and the circumstances of time and place by listening to customers' actions. It is a means of assuring that companies assess the value they create for customers and extract that value from the marketplace.     

R&;D,International Trade and Creative Destruction—Empirical Findings from Finnish Manufacturing Industries*

The determinants of productivity-enhancing micro-level restructuring are examined empirically with a panel of the twelve Finnish manufacturing industries. It is hypothesized that R&D leads to productivity diversity among plants, which in turn leads to the gradual reshuffling of input shares in the presence of dynamic competitive pressure. The effect of the creative destruction on industry productivity growth is measured with the between-component of productivity decomposition. Econometric results indicate with reasonable robustness that R&D generates creative destruction with a lag of several years. Some evidence is found that imports stimulate productivity-enhancing restructuring, especially when domestic R&D is low.JEL classification: O12, 014, 019, O31, O47*This paper is based on the chapter 8 of my PhD thesis which has been accepted by the Helsinki School of Economics (2003). The research has received financial support from Tekes (the National Technology Agency), and from the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation. This paper has benefited from comments by Petri Böckerman, Pekka Ilmakunnas, Kabor Kezdi, and Petri Rouvinen, to whom I am grateful. I am also thankful to the referees for helpful comments. Lisa Roponen has checked my English. An earlier version of this paper has been presented at the EARIE 2002 conference in Madrid and at the Summer at CEU Workshop in Budapest in 2003. Data work and computations have been carried out at Statistics Finland, in accordance with the terms and conditions of confidentiality. I also wish to thank many individuals at Statistics Finland for their guidance regarding the properties of the data. Please contact the Research Laboratory of the Business Structures Unit, Statistics Finland, FIN-00022, Finland, for access to these data. The usual disclaimer applies.