Workplace Injury and the Failing Academic Body: A Testimony of Pain

Journal of Business Ethics - In its three decades of development, many constructs of cause-related marketing have been tested from different perspectives and in varied contexts. However, there has...     

Matrix Representation of Solution Concepts in the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution with Probabilistic Preferences and Multiple Decision Makers

Group Decision and Negotiation - In this paper, matrix methods are developed to determine stable states in the graph model for conflict resolution (GMCR) with probabilistic preferences with n...     

Changes in food provision in Russian households experiencing perestroika

The purpose of this article is to describe how households in Novgorod the Great, Russia, deal with food provision in everyday life. The study focuses on changes experienced in food provision and consumption in Russian society, in order to illustrate how households respond to the transformation towards a market economy. The study reflects women's perspective on food provision. Students from Novgorod the Great visited 105 households and asked the women in the household to answer a questionnaire. Results from the study show that in order to cope with changes in society related to economic reforms, Russian households had changed both their food consumption and food production patterns. There was no big difference between urban and rural households. Nearly all of the households were self‐sufficient in the provision of vegetables and potatoes. Many households had a ‘dacha’ (plot), where they produced most of what they needed. Among the changes experienced during recent years (i.e. during the end of the 1990s), a decade after perestroika was initiated, households mentioned the rise in food prices and the decrease of income. Households reported that they consumed less fruit and/or meat. Some households also mentioned that the quality of nourishment had decreased, thereby indicating lower general quality, lower nutrition value, or less healthy foodstuffs.     

Approaches to child labour in the supply chain

This paper examines the difficulties of dealing with child labour in the supply chain. It begins by identifying a number of the factors which make global supply chains so difficult to manage. It goes on to outline a framework of different approaches that can be taken to managing the supply chain with relation to child labour, moving from national and international regulation, through to the role of NGOs and the companies themselves. Focusing on an 'engagement' strategy for dealing with child labour, the paper traces a case study of Adidas-Salomon and its attempts to implement their 'standards of engagement' in this area with relation to one of their supplier factories in Vietnam. The research draws on the direct involvement of one of the authors who visited the site and was able to interview staff and observe the operation in practice. Her findings are supported by wider work on the implementation of corporate approaches to human rights at a range of companies interviewed by another of the authors. The paper aims to highlight the issues needing to be addressed for companies considering the 'involvement' approach to child labour. It also aims to develop theory on our understanding of different approaches to corporate rights.     

The risk-return trade-off in human capital investment

In this paper, we analyze investments in human capital in a way which is standard for financial assets, but not (yet) for human capital assets. We study mean-variance plots of human capital assets. We compare the properties of human capital returns using a performance measure and by using tests for mean-variance spanning. Fields differ strongly not only in common rates of return, but also in return per unit of risk. We identify a range of educations that are efficient in terms of investment goods, and a range of educations that may be chosen for consumption purposes.     

Using clustering ensemble to identify banking business models

The business models of banks are often seen as the result of a variety of simultaneously determined managerial choices, such as those regarding the types of activities, funding sources, level of diversification, and size. Moreover, owing to the fuzziness of data and the possibility that some banks may combine features of different business models, the use of hard clustering methods has often led to poorly identified business models. In this paper we propose a framework to deal with these challenges based on an ensemble of three unsupervised clustering methods to identify banking business models: fuzzy c‐means (which allows us to handle fuzzy clustering), self‐organizing maps (which yield intuitive visual representations of the clusters), and partitioning around medoids (which circumvents the presence of data outliers). We set up our analysis in the context of the European banking sector, which has seen its regulators increasingly focused on examining the business models of supervised entities in the aftermath of the twin financial crises. In our empirical application, we find evidence of four distinct banking business models and further distinguish between banks with a clearly defined business model (core banks) and others (non‐core banks), as well as banks with a stable business model over time (persistent banks) and others (non‐persistent banks). Our proposed framework performs well under several robustness checks related with the sample, clustering methods, and variables used.     

Does Managerial Behavior Determine Farm Technical Efficiency? A Case of Grape Production in an Economy in Transition

This study explores how farmers' managerial behavior in their production planning processes influences the economic performance of their farms, measured through input‐oriented and output‐oriented technical efficiency. A conceptual framework in which differences in managerial behavior were assumed to be due to bounded rationality was developed. The 3‐year means (2006–2008) from a panel data set on grape‐producing family farms in FYR Macedonia were analyzed. Technical efficiency was estimated with the nonparametric data envelopment analysis approach. The impact of farmers' managerial behavior was assessed in a second‐stage regression. The results suggest that bounded rationality in farmers' production planning decisions causes inefficiency. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Analysis of Domestic Factors Affecting Outward Foreign Direct Investment in Brazil

Developing markets have increasingly gained prominence in the world economy, but the domestic factors behind this success are not well established. This uncertainty may interfere with multinational expansion plans. In this article, we examine several macroeconomic and institutional factors affecting Brazilian outward foreign direct investment in 17 destination countries. We applied a pooled ordinary least squares regression over the 2001–2014 period. The findings suggest that macroeconomic factors are still statistically significant to explain investment abroad, but several institutional factors such as corruption have emerged, having a negative effect and political violence having a positive effect on Brazilian outward foreign direct investment.     

Public Sector Organizations and Cocreation With Citizens: A Literature Review on Benefits,Drivers, and Barriers

ABSTRACT

Cocreation has captured the attention of public managers and policymakers and yet the literature focusing in the public sector is still relatively dispersed. In this literature review we present a contextualized analysis of the potential reasons that lead public sector organizations to cocreate with citizens and identify potential barriers that may hamper the adoption of cocreation in public settings. The analysis undertaken allowed us to conclude that the topic is increasingly capturing the interest of researchers, although the state of the literature is characterized by a reduced heterogeneity in research methods. We classified cocreation benefits in the public sector as innovation related, improved decision-making, and symbolic related, and we categorized the drivers for cocreation according to three broad categories: external, relation-specific and internal. Finally, we identified potential barriers of cocreation, including structural, organizational, and behavioral barriers.     

Hybridization: Understanding the microdynamics of a postacquisition integration process

There is no shortage of theoretical or empirical research on mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Knowledge on the subject has grown substantially in recent decades. However, the integration of firms involved in M&A remains a challenging and often unsuccessful process. In addition, there is a scarcity of research on temporal dynamics within integration projects. This article reports on the postacquisition integration of a business school into a university using the concept of organizational hybridization as a theoretical lens. The aim was to identify the microdynamics that occurred during integration. We conducted an inductive case study, interviewing professionals involved in the integration process, analyzing a wide range of documents, and conducting participant observation over 6 years. Field research revealed that different organizational components underwent distinct hybridization processes that were characterized by different degrees of conflict. This study contributes to the understanding of the microdynamics that occur in postmerger or postacquisition integration processes, focusing on the complex adjustments inherent in these developments.