Social enterprise push or corporate social responsibility pull? The mainstreaming of fair trade

Social enterprise organizations and activities combine market-oriented approaches with social aspirations, whereas corporate social responsibility strategies seek to integrate social aspects into core business strategies. The rise in social enterprise activity at the business end of the spectrum raises questions about how, where, and why social enterprise and corporate social responsibility might overlap. Through a review of literature, we demonstrate how the mainstreaming or corporatization of fair trade activity provides an example of this overlap. The tensions between the push of social aspirations within fair trade and the pull of commercial imperatives are highlighted. From a marketing viewpoint, a social enterprise push strategy is shown as typically undertaken from an organization perspective, whereas pull strategies in marketing are typically customer driven. We demonstrate that influences from both social enterprise and corporate social responsibility are evident in fair trade mainstreaming processes, although the extent to which each “pushes” or “pulls” varies across circumstances and interpretations.     

Part–Time Work During Post–Compulsory Education And Examination Performance: Help Or Hindrance?

This paper examines the effects on examination performance of having a part–time job whilst in full–time post–sixteen education, using new data on young people in Northern Ireland. Around 35% engaged in part time employment during their education spell, compared to over 60% found by recent GB studies. This may be related to Northern Ireland's comparatively slack youth labour market and might reflect part–time employment levels in other peripheral regions. Our estimations suggest working part–time per se is not detrimental to examination performance, although working long hours is. Policy makers might improve educational performance by reducing incentives to work long hours.     

Adding Value to Agricultural Data: A Golden Opportunity

Agricultural decision makers rely on information provided by public and private entities. Data is a valuable asset and represents a tremendous investment of resources. However, difficulty locating sources and/or interpreting values may compromise its usefulness. The Florida citrus industry serves as an example of the data problem faced by many users; over 50 publications produced by 13 agencies are identified as official sources of citrus data. An indication of the potential for lost value and the dilemma facing modern agriculture is provided. This paper draws on corporate information management techniques as a framework for adding value to agricultural data.     

Self-Ratings and Expectations of the U.S. President, Ideal Physicians, and Ideal Automechanic

Relationships between self-ratings and expectations of an ideal U.S. president, were studied in 43 men drawn from a university setting in the eastern coast of the U.S.A. The men first rated themselves on personality variables, life choices (agentic and communal), peacefulness, spirituality, and morality. Then they were presented with a vignette requesting that they describe an ideal U.S. president on inventories measuring personality variables, life choices, peacefulness, spirituality, and morality. For the rating of the ideal U.S. president, they also were asked to respond to a 20 item questionnaire that was a composite of several factors on organization and leadership, morality, spirituality, and peacefulness. The respondents belonged to one of seven different political persuasions, similar in some ways to different cultures. Self-ratings of the men and expectations of the president were highly correlated for extraversion, openness, trait morality, agentic and communal life choices. However, no significant correlations were found between the self-ratings and expectations of the president for neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, peacefulness, nor state morality. The men were also presented with vignettes for the ideal physician and ideal automechanic and asked to rate each of them on the inventory items. Overall, the U.S. President was rated as more neurotic and immoral in terms of ingrained ideas of right and wrong, but also as more caring for others, transcendent, seeking goodness and truth, forgiving, cooperative, and most concerned with matters of justice and mercy, and more concerned with both agentic (power-seeking) and communal (community-minded) life choices than were either the ideal physician or ideal automechanic. The ideal physician was rated as highest in extra-version, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and overall peacefulness, and lowest in neuroticism. The ideal automechanic was rated as highest in state or situational immorality, and lowest in both agentic (power-seeking, business-mindedness) and communal (community-mindedness) life choices, and also lowest in caring for others well-being, transcendence, seeking goodness and truth, forgiveness and cooperation, being concerned with justice and mercy, overall expectations, overall spirituality, and overall organization and leadership. In general, the self-ratings were significantly related to ratings/expectations, of the U.S. President, ideal physician, and ideal automechanic. The men seemed to identify more with the automechanic than with the present or physician.     

Annuity Values in Defined Contribution Retirement Systems: Australia and Singapore Compared

Annuities promise to play an increasingly important role in countries with national defined contribution retirement systems. In this article we examine life annuities in two countries, Singapore and Australia, each of which has a national mandatory pension program. Exploiting data on annuity pricing and purchase behaviour, we compare the money's worth of life annuity products across these two nations. Our results indicate that, after controlling on administrative loadings, there are important differences in measured adverse selection. Part of the explanation may be due to the different structures of the two countries’retirement systems.     

Behavioural Microsimulation with Labour Supply Responses

This paper provides a technical survey of recent developments in behavioural microsimulation. We discuss the criteria by which models of labour supply may be chosen for application to behavioural microsimulation, and consider how such models may be augmented to control for fixed costs, child–related work costs, preference heterogeneity and endogeneity in wages. We describe methods by which non–linear budget constraints may be accommodated in estimation, policy simulations and welfare analysis, and discuss how stochastic terms may be factored into the simulation of behavioural responses to a policy shock.     

Life histories in housing research: the case of Pakistanis in Glasgow

The discussion centers on three key criticisms of life history techniques, which are reviewed and evaluated with reference to data from research on Pakistani housing histories in Glasgow. Firstly, the problem of bias is reframed as an issue of reflexivity, which enhances research findings. Secondly, awareness of the cultural construction of life histories allows greater depth of analysis. And thirdly the problem of the relationship between the life history and wider social forces is argued to increase awareness and understanding of social actor agency. In conclusion, we argue that life history techniques can develop research on housing careers, particularly of Pakistanis, provided certain of their properties are recognised in the process of analysis.     

The effect of management incentives and cross-listing status on the accounting treatment of R&D spending

This paper investigates the effect of management incentives and cross-listing status on the accounting treatment of research and development (R&D) spending for a sample of Canadian hi-tech and biopharmaceutical firms. U.S. GAAP adopts an immediate expensing rule for all R&D spending except for software development costs for which technological feasibility has been established. Contrary to the U.S., Canadian and international standard setters recommend capitalization if development costs meet certain criteria. Because those criteria are largely based on management judgment, capitalization of R&D spending is an accounting choice that can be used for income manipulation or signaling.Using a logit model, we examine how the decision to capitalize R&D spending is influenced by the cross-listing status and several other key firm characteristics that are well documented in the accounting literature. We find that the probability of capitalizing R&D spending increases for cross-listed and non-cross-listed firms in the software industry. The probability of capitalizing R&D spending also increases for firms that are more leveraged, more mature, and have higher level of cash flows from operations. However, the probability of capitalizing R&D spending decreases for larger corporations, firms with more concentrated ownership and highly profitable firms. Overall our results indicate a preference for Canadian firms in the software industry to emulate U.S. accounting practices for R&D spending. They also suggest that firms use the decision to capitalize or expense R&D spending as an earning management tool to either meet debt covenants or to smooth income.