Formal and informal management training programs for women in Canada: Who seems to be doing a good job?

The increasing complexity of Canadian businesses in a changing marketplace indicates that women as well as men managers will have to be well trained to be able to position themselves in this new environment with a certain degree of success and personal happiness. As management educators, we have to accept an important share in this responsibility. This paper examines some of the factors that should be considered by those who want to develop management training programs for the future women managers or entrepreneurs.Dina Lavoie is associate professor of management and organization development at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales at Montreal since 1977. Her main area of interest is entrepreneurship. She has authored the first studies on women entrepreneurs in Canada and has developed some of the first management training programs for women managers in Quebec, New Brunswick and several Asean Countries where she has resided and worked for several years. She is secretary-treasurer general of the new National Entrepreneurship Development Institute of Canada (NEDI) and is advisor to the federal and several provincial governments on issues related to women entrepreneurs and women managers. She is member of the board of trustees of several organisations including NEDI and the Asian Institute of Technology (Bangkok). We find her listed in Who's Who of Canadian Women, The World Who's Who of Women, the International Directory of Distinguished Leadership etc.     

The Relationship of Communication, Ethical Work Climate, and Trust to Commitment and Innovation

Recently, Hosmer (1994a) proposed a model linking right, just, and fair treatment of extended stakeholders with trust and innovation in organizations. The current study tests this model by using Victor and Cullen's (1988) ethical work climate instrument to measure the perceptions of the right, just, and fair treatment of employee stakeholders.In addition, this study extends Hosmer's model to include the effect of right, just, and fair treatment on employee communication, also believed to be an underlying dynamic of trust.More specifically, the current study used a survey of 111 managers to test (1) whether right, just, and fair treatment influences trust, both directly as well as indirectly via communication, and (2) whether trust influences perceptions of commitment and innovation. Strong support for the study's hypotheses and Hosmer's (1994a) model was found. Such findings support those who argue that moral management may be good management.     

International Entrepreneurship Research: What Scope for International Business Theories?

International entrepreneurship (IE) research has commonly neglected significant perspectives applied by international business scholars. Explanations for the emergence and growth of international entrepreneurial firms largely focus on the resource-based view and the network perspective. While these approaches are useful, we suggest that IE would benefit significantly from a greater emphasis on its international nature. Therefore, theories of international business should be employed in conjunction with other approaches in order to appropriately emphasize the international character, holistically study the IE notion, and considerably broaden the scope of IE examination. Suggestions for relevant research directions are discussed.     

The Heffalump Revisited

Professor Peter Kilby is the author of Hunting the Heffalump, a classic in the entrepreneurship literature. In this opening article he returns to the propositions he set forth more than 30 years ago. He refines his earlier notion of the entrepreneurial task and probes more deeply into non-economic factors that can create a deficiency of the supply of requisite entrepreneurial services at the national level. Once again, Professor Kilby provides the reader with a wealth of insights and once again his major argument is sure to stir controversy.     

Student Ethical Perceptions and Ethical Action Propensities: An Analysis of Situation Familiarity

Recently McCuddy and Peery (1996) have suggested that business students may not respond the same way to unfamiliar business ethical dilemmas as they would to more familiar academic ethical dilemmas. The purpose of this study was to present the same students with both unfamiliar business dilemmas as well as possibly more familiar academic dilemmas in order to examine this issue.Findings of the study revealed that students did not exhibit different perceptions of the unethical actions performed in the academic and accounting/business ethical vignettes. However, the students indicated that both they and their peers would be more likely to act unethically to resolve the dilemmas in the accounting/business cases than in the academic cases. This finding is troubling in that it suggests that students either feel less compelled to act ethically in business, or that they perceive that ethical standards in the business world are generally low when compared to their current educational environment. In addition, the students in the study maintained the same halo effect (i.e., the difference between an individual's perception of their likelihood of performing an unethical action compared to their perception of their peers' likelihood to perform the same unethical action) across the two types of ethical dilemma.     

Learning to solve the right problems: The case of nuclear power in America

Three general types of problems entail different strategies. Continuing to seek solutions to tame problems when we face messes, let alone wicked problems, is potentially catastrophic hence fundamentally irresponsible. In our turbulent times, it is therefore becoming a strategic necessity to learn how to solve the right problems.

But then, you may agree that it becomes morally objectionable for the planner to treat a wicked problem as though it were a tame one, or to tame a wicked problem prematurely, or to refuse to recognize the inherent wickedness of social problems. Rittel and Webber (1973).

Jonathan King is Associate Professor of Management at the College of Business at Oregon State University. His primary research interests are in the areas of moral philosophy and modern technology. His most important publications are Confronting Chaos and Common Knowledge of the Second Kind,Journal of Business Ethics (1989).     

No Bosses Here: Management in Worker Co-operatives

No Bosses Here: Management in Worker Co-operatives examines the worker co-op structure as a workplace option for women. The appeal of the model for women is described in terms of the opportunity for skill development and control over workplace conditions. The structure also presents some unique challenges for training since all members participate in management functions. The author describes a six-month course, Co-operative Employment for Women which trained women in co-operative business development.Melanie Conn has worked extensively in the feminist movement since 1971 when she was a founding member of the Vancouver Women's Health Collective. She has also participated in a number of co-op sector activities including a women's contruction co-op. She currently works with WomenFutures, a Vancounver-based group that promotes women's participation in economic development.     

Are physicians a “delinquent community”?: Issues in professional competence,conduct, and self-regulation

This paper examines the moral responsibilities of physicians, toward themselves and their colleagues, their students and patients, and society, in terms of the nature and exercise of professional self-regulation. Some of the author's close encounters with cases involving research misconduct, behavioral impairment or deviance, and medical practice at the moral margin, are described to illustrate why, in Freidson's words, physicians are a delinquent community with respect to the ways they meet their responsibility to govern the competence and conduct of their members. Judith P. Swazey, president of The Acadia Insttute, is co-author of The Courage to Fail: A Social View of Organ Transplants and Hemodialysis and co-editor of several books on medical responsibility. The include Human Aspects of Biomedical Innovation, Social Controls and the Medical Profession and Whistleblowing in Biomedical Research: Policies and Procedures for Responding to Reports of Misconduct. Her Ph.D. in the history of science.     

Tools-Я-us

Our methods of inquiry predetermine most of what we are able to know. While our modes of understanding ought to correspond to the complexities confronting us in our modern technological society, they do not. Soft systems methodology helps us focus on what is problematic and how it can be approached — and offers direction to exert moral control over our tools and technologies.

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On Creating and Claiming Value in Negotiations

This paper presents a negotiation model that includes value creation. It shows that creative negotiation efforts tend to intensify toward the deadline, and that the deadline is determined endogenously by the tension between two motives, creating more value and claiming from existing value. When the parties can present misleading offers in order to claim rather than create value, the outcome in early negotiation rounds may display an impasse where any proposal is rejected without inspection, while negotiation activities such as value creation through sincere offers and inspection of clauses intensify toward the deadline.     

Management development and business ethics: A view from the U.K.

This article is written in the context of current British interest in management training and development, in which an emphasis on competency is viewed critically, as technically oriented, with little attention paid to ethics and moral values. It is suggested that a concern for ethics in management development can be expressed in terms of four requisite management attributes or qualities: theoretical knowledge and understanding; affective qualities; personal and interpersonal skills; and self-knowledge. Following Kohlberg's work on moral development, the cultivation of these attributes is viewed as a life-span process involving three broadly defined forms of management development practice, each appropriate to different circumstances and stages in a learner's career. It is concluded that the conventional teaching of theory, learning from experience and counselling/mentoring, are equally important in the contribution which management development can make to the resolution of ethical dilemmas in business practice.Patrick Maclagan is a lecturer in organisational behaviour and managerial ethics at the School of Management, University of Hull, U.K., where he is also on the Steering Committee of the Social Values Research Centre, His current research concerns the relationship between management development and ethics in organisations.     

Predicting consumers' reactions to product failure: Do responsibility judgments follow from consumers' causal explanations?

Recent research in psychology suggests that people's causal attributions for an occurrence may not reflect the entirety of their beliefs about how the event transpired but rather which subset of this information has explanatory relevance given the context of the causal question. The present research examines the implications of this proposition for causal judgments about product failure and manufacturer responsibility. An experiment is presented which shows that consumers' attributions for product failure — to manufacturer-related vs. consumer-related factors — may vary with the causal background or reference case against which the occurrence is considered. These findings are discussed in light of previous research in marketing which suggests responsibility judgments should be related to the locus of consumers' attributions.     

Technological paradigms,innovative behavior and the formation of dissipative enterprises

Although many studies have assigned a key role to technological paradigms in the development and diffusion of new technologies, which are often pioneered and led by small businesses, the nature of this term has remained somewhat unclear. This paper uses concepts from modern theories of chaos, information theory and dissipative structures, to describe the process through which new technological paradigms form and how the evolve. This analysis shows that the development of a new and innovative product or production methods drive existing as well as new firms to search for innovations. The interaction of all firms that are affected by this explorative behavior generates escalating waves of change and thereby creates chaos, which is the source of the materials from which new technological structures emerge. These new structures are arrangements of production tasks and activities that link an extended, interindustry group of firms into an interdependent system. This structure constitutes a technological paradigm when it serves as a matrix, or template, through which all firms in the system engage in innovative activity.     

Firm size,small business presence and sales of innovative products: A micro-econometric analysis

In our generalized TOBIT analysis we identify a number of variables which have an impact on a firm's innovation output. Among others we find that larger firms generally have a higher probability of selling some innovative products, although this probability increases less than proportionately with firm size. Given that a firm has some sales of innovative products, the share of such products in a firm's total sales tends to be higher in smaller firms. Moreover, a strong small business presence in a sector seems to enhance imitative innovation but has no influence on true innovations, whereas market concentration has no influence on innovation output in whatever definition. We also find evidence of regional knowledge spill-overs. Furthermore, our results are consistent with Schmookler's hypothesis that the growth of demand enhances innovation. The outcomes about the impact of R&D collaboration and technology transfer on innovation remain ambiguous.     

Is capitalism still viable?

This essay is an attempt to clarify the meaning of capitalism and to argue that this form of economic pattern will survive in the U.S. in the twentieth century. Capitalism should not be viewed as an abstraction which implies a religion, an ideology, a form of government, or a moral philosophy, but rather the private ownership of capital. Marx was wrong when he predicted the speedy decay of the capitalistic system in the West and when he claimed that a competitive system will lead to servitude and poverty for the masses; on the contrary, the American economic system is a grand success. Part of this success resulted from natural resources; part from America's being one of the largest free-trade areas; and part from the economic system, so-called capitalism, by which we have governed ourselves. The outcome is a greater measure of freedom, prosperity, leisure, and industrial sophistication. These achievements are hardly paralleled by any of the advanced countries of the world. Russell Kirk is a Distinguished Scholar of The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. He is the author of twenty-three books and of several hundred essays. His books include The Conservative Mind; The Roots of American Order; and, recently, Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning.This article was originally published in The Hillsdale Review. Copyright © 1982 by Hillsdale Review Inc.     

‘I am we’ consciousness and dialog as organizational ethics method

There is a practical five-step method of ethics dialog developed by John Woolman, an 18th c. businessman and ethical activist, that was used by Robert K. Greenleaf, a 20th c. A.T.&T. Corporate Vice-President, that includes: (a) friendly, emotive affect; (b) discussion of mutual commonalities; (c) discussion of issue entanglements; (d) discussion of potential experimental solutions; and, (e) trial and feedback discussion. This method of dialog appears to proceed with a type of consciousness considered by John Woolman and Bernard Lonergan as one where the I is conscious that I and Others are part of a more foundational, larger and prior We. This type of dialog is different than Socratic dialog. The corresponding type of consciousness is different than the more derivative, e.g., two allies being united in their response to a common goal. It is also different than Buber's I and Thou appreciative consciounsess of the interestingness, value, diversity, and uniqueness of others. Woolman dialog as seen in four cases appears to be a concrete method that has some value both as an end in itself and as instrumental means that can: be issue effective, help build ethical organization/community culture, and help facilitate peaceful, evolutionary change and development. Limitations of the method are also considered. The method may also be a several hundred year anticipation of experiment based pragmatist philosophy that is anthropologically sensitive to cultural entanglements.

John Donne (17th c.)

Richard P. Nielsen is a professor in the Department of Organizational Studies, School of Management, Boston College. Related articles of his include: Dialogic Leadership As Organizational Ethics Action (Praxis) Method, Journal of Business Ethics(October 1990); Negotiating As An Ethics Action (Praxis) Strategy, Journal of Business Ethics(May 1989); Changing Unethical Organizational Behavior, Academy of Management Executive(May 1989); Arendt's Action Philosophy and the Manager as Eichmann, Richard III, Faust, or Institution Citizen, California Management Review(Spring 1984); and Cooperative Strategy, Strategic Management Journal(September–October 1988).     

The Effects of Monetary Magnitude and Level of Aggregation on the Temporal Framing of Price

Existing research has shown that the pennies-a-day strategy of reframing a large aggregate expense as a small daily expense helps to reduce the perceived cost of a transaction (Nagle and Holden, 1995; Price, 1995; Gourville, 1998, 1999). This paper builds on this research and explores the robustness of the phenomenon across two dimensions – (1) the level of temporal aggregation and (2) the dollar magnitude of the transaction. First, we show that the effectiveness of a pennies-a-day strategy is not limited to per-day framing. Rather, we find a more general phenomenon in which a less aggregate expense is preferred to a more aggregate expense, such that if a per-day framing is preferred to a per-year framing, than a per-month framing also will be preferred to a per-year framing. Second, we show that this effectiveness reverses with the magnitude of the underlying expense, such that while a framing of $1 per day is preferred to one of $365 per year, a framing of $4200 per year is preferred to one of $11.50 per day.     

Confronting chaos

While it is common to observe that our society and world are becoming increasingly complex and fast paced, most of our theories provide no bases upon which to develop appropriate strategies. The need for developing holistic strategies is becoming urgent in two related areas: major interactive technologies and morality. Jonathan King is Associate Professor of Management at the College of Business at Oregon State University. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Antioch College (1965) and his M.B.A. in Finance (1975) and Ph.D. in Business, Government and Society (1980) from the University of Washington. His primary research interests are in the areas of moral philosophy and General Systems Theory. His most important publications are The Three Faces of Thinking, Journal of Higher Education (1986) and Prisoner's Paradoxes, Journal of Business Ethics (1988).     

Cautious International Entrepreneurs: The Case of the Mittelstand

This paper investigates the international entrepreneurial behaviour of Mittelstand firms (German small and medium sized enterprises). Analysis of a survey of the international marketing strategies of Mittelstand firms revealed three clusters of firms, two that had below and one above average international activities. None of the clusters displayed born global type of internationalisation processes. However, this does not mean that they adopt passive approaches to internationalisation. The results suggest that Mittelstand firms engage in entrepreneurial behaviour that is proactive and innovative but which is cautious, sequential, and risk adverse. The implications of this analysis for future research in the area of international entrepreneurship are considered.     

Board-management relations in small firms: The paradox of simultaneous independence and interdependence

The author introduces constructs based on neo-classical and socio-economic assumptions, and argues that board-management relations should be characterized by both independence and interdependence. Interdependence is especially important in small firms. The article presents a model of directorates from research about directorates based on agency theory assumptions. This model is supplemented with constructs from the theory of contractual relations. Whilst traditional literature tends to focus upon independence from an agency theory perspective, this article argues that it is necessary to use more than one dimension of attributes regarding the board-management relations in order to understand the board's contribution to company performance, and that trust and solidarity is especially important in small firms. Board-management relations described by simultaneous independence and interdependence are proposed to give the highest contribution to company performance. The theoretical propositions are exemplified and supported by results of a field survey of directorates in small firms.