Competitive judgments in a business simulation: A comparison between American and Chinese business students

A complex total business enterprise computer simulation was used as the setting for a study of judgments by Chinese and American business school students. The subjects were asked to make a series of decisions and give judgments about expected levels of competition for a new market opportunity in the simulation world. Decisions were compared across the groups based on the decision structure and content. The results confirm previous research as the American participants generated significantly more responses overall, and especially judgment-consistent responses than the Chinese participants. Analysis of the content of the decision representations found that the relative proportion of singular to distributional information in the responses was similar for both American and Chinese individuals when making decisions about their own teams, but the Chinese participants focused more heavily on distributional information when making judgments about the behavior of others. This implies that American and Chinese individuals focus on different aspects of similar information and this may influence subsequent judgments. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Social entrepreneurship: Creating new business models to serve the poor

The term “social entrepreneurship” (SE) is used to refer to the rapidly growing number of organizations that have created models for efficiently catering to basic human needs that existing markets and institutions have failed to satisfy. Social entrepreneurship combines the resourcefulness of traditional entrepreneurship with a mission to change society. One social entrepreneur, Ibrahim Abouleish, recently received the “Alternative Nobel Prize” for his Sekem initiative; in 2004, e-Bay founder Jeff Skoll donated 4.4 million pounds to set up a social entrepreneurship research center; and many social entrepreneurs have mingled with their business counterparts at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Social entrepreneurship offers insights that may stimulate ideas for more socially acceptable and sustainable business strategies and organizational forms. Because it contributes directly to internationally recognized sustainable development (SD) goals, social entrepreneurship may also encourage established corporations to take on greater social responsibility.     

Teaching business ethics: Is there a gap between rhetoric and reality?

In light of the continued erosion of business ethics in America, the ongoing question is what are the nation's business schools doing to prepare ethically responsible future leaders of industry and government? This paper reports the findings of a survey mailed to every program accredited by the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business. The curriculum treatment of business ethics is identified at the undergraduate and the graduate levels in public as well as in private colleges and universities. In addition, the paper presents the status (required versus elective), credits, and enrollment patterns associated with institutions offering a special course whose primary focus is the ethical or moral component of business decisions. Depending on one's perspective, the results range from “encouraging” to “disappointing” and suggest that more can and should be done within the curriculum of American post-secondary higher education.     

An experimental assessment of alternative teaching approaches for introducing business ethics to undergraduate business students

This study employs a pretest-posttest experimental design to extend recent research pertaining to the effects of teaching business ethics material. Results on a variety of perceptual and attitudinal measures are compared across three groups of students — one which discussed the ethicality of brief business situations (the business scenario discussion approach), one which was given a more philosophically oriented lecture (the philosophical lecture approach), and a third group which received no specific lecture or discussion pertaining to business ethics. Results showed some significant differences across the three groups and demonstrated that for a single lecture, the method used to teach ethics can differentially impact ethical attitudes and perceptions. Various demographic and background variables did not moderate the relationship between the teaching method and the dependent variables, but the sex of the student was strongly associated with the ethical attitude and perception measures. Scot Burton is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Louisiana State University. His research has appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Consumer Research, and the Journal of Marketing, among others. Mark. W. Johnston is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Louisianna State University. His research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Applied Psychology, and the Journal of Business Research. Elizabeth J. Wilson is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Louisiana State University. Her research has been published in the Journal of Advertising Research and Industrial Marketing Management.     

The challenge of preparing ethically responsible managers: Closing the rhetoric-reality gap

This article begins by questioning the commitment of business, government, and education leaders to the goal of ensuring that our public and private sector organizations are directed by ethically responsible individuals. Noting that while there appears to be genuine concern with the most recent outbreak of ethical failings as well as widespread support for the concept of morally and ethically educated current and future managers, there is less agreement on the most efficient and effective means of realizing this goal. For perspective purposes, recent research findings and opinions of leaders in higher education and business on the issue of ethics and the curriculum are highlighted. This paper challenges business, government, and higher education to disengage the “cheap” talk and to engage in a collaborative effort to develop a required, team-taught, interdisciplinary business ethics course based on philosophical inquiry, organizational theory, and actual business situations. Course goals, content, leadership, and benefits to students, managers, and ethicists are identified and discussed. Perhaps the failure of America's higher education institutions in preparing ethically responsible future leaders of business and government reflects the inability to “teach” ethics under any format. Could the problem be, however, that the approaches, to date, have not sufficiently incorporated the talents and experiences of line managers in conjunction with the theoretical frameworks of moral philosophers? This relatively simple conceptual approach, though admittedly difficult to successfully implement, is offered as a means of closing the business ethics rhetoricreality gap.     

Digital innovations,impacts on marketing,value chain and business models: An introduction

Digital innovations are changing business models and industries and, in today's world, effective mastery of digital innovations can be greatly advantageous, yet digital innovation literature suffers from major lacunae. We contribute to this literature by providing definitions and analysing specificities of this emerging research stream. We then discuss the impact of digital innovation on marketing, value chain, and business models, focusing on tensions and marketing challenges, the value chain, and the evolutions of business models. We conclude with suggestions for further research.     

Editorial introduction: Derrida,business, ethics

This special issue contains papers first presented at a conference that was held 14–16 May 2008 at the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy at the University of Leicester. Each of the papers takes up ideas from the works of Jacques Derrida and seeks to apply these to questions of business, ethics and business ethics. The papers take up quite different parts of Derrida's works, from his work on the animal, narrative and story, the violence of codification and the limits of responsibility to the aporias of decision. As a whole, the papers offer a dangerous gift to business ethics, of which the stakes are here laid bare – if business ethics is to shrug off its philosophical immaturity and take seriously the work of major European thinkers such as Derrida, then many of its assumed categories, concepts and practices will be shown to shudder and tremble, as it becomes possible to demonstrate how they, one by one, unhinge themselves.     

Closing the regional equity capital gap: The role of informal venture capital

There is evidence from a number of countries that small firms encounter a shortage of long-term investment finance, particularly at start-up and initial growth. Expansion of the institutional venture capital industry has done little to fill this equity gap on account of its preference for making large investments in established companies and management/leveraged buyouts. Moreover, the supply of venture capital exhibits a high level of spatial concentration. Initiatives by state/provincial and local governments, most notably in economically lagging regions, to increase the supply of risk capital for start-ups and early stage businesses have at best provided a very partial, and often costly, solution. A more appropriate approach to increasing the supply of start-up and early stage finance is to facilitate the more efficient operation of theinformal venture capital market. Informal investors, or business angels, are private investors who provide risk capital directly to new and growing businesses in which they have no family connection. Most business angels are unable to find sufficient investment opportunities and so have substantial uncommitted funds available. There is also considerable scope for expanding the population of business angels. The most cost-effective means of closing the equity gap is therefore for the public sector to underwrite the operating costs of business introduction services whose objective is to overcome the two main sources of inefficiency in the informal venture capital market, namely the invisibility of business angels and the high search costs of angels seeking investment opportunities and entrepreneurs seeking investors, by the provision of a channel of communication between informal investors and entrepreneurs seeking finance.     

An introduction to the special issue

The author provides a short introduction to the special issue, honoring the work of Louis P. Bucklin, including discussion and comments on Bucklin's major contributions to distribution channel theory.     

An introduction to the product liability debate

No other field of consumer law has been subjected to such a heated debate as product liability. Unfortunately, the main feature of the debate is rhetorical overload. A surprisingly great amount of misleading and even false information has been put forward. Such a number of unsubstantiatable “horror stories” has been circulated in such ways that it may be hard not to get the impression that it is done by purpose, not by mistake, the purpose being to alleviate or forestall any product liability caused financial burden on industry through the injection of a false atmosphere of panic into the commercial and political scene. On this background the paper contains a rather general outline of product liability law — the law as it stands today and some proposals for reform — in Europe and in the U.S.A. in connection with a basic comparative analysis of differences and similarities. The paper gives nothing more than an overview. For instance, it does not define, analyze, or discuss the consumer policy aspects of product liability.     

Innovations in service business. An introduction to the special issue from the Global Entrepreneurship and Services Conference, Taiwan, 2011

Services tend to be intangible and not visible (Cherubini 2001), which make them very different from production-oriented industries. Hence, we need different approaches to solving problems in services. This special issue invites five papers from the 2011 Global Entrepreneurship and Services Conference held in Taichung, Taiwan, from August 29 to 31, 2011. These papers cover various industries including finance, manufacturing, and Internet. Meanwhile, these papers cover many CSFs for services including brand equity for financial services, customer satisfaction on an auction website, the effects of social networking, the servitization for manufacturers via R&D, and the comparisons of the internal service quality for three Chinese subcultures including Taiwan, China, and Singapore. All these papers contribute to innovations in service business from different perspectives.     

Tourism coopetition: An introduction to the subject and a research agenda

This paper aims to verify the current status of the research on coopetition applied to Tourism. In order to overcome the lack of tools for analyzing competitive advantage generated by relational components, this paper suggests the use of the coopetition construct as a methodological tool for analyzing the cooperation in networks for the management of tourism destinations. To that end, we performed a bibliometric analysis on ‘tourism coopetition' in scientific research papers published from 1995 to 2015 and indexed in the Web of Science and SciVerse Scopus databases. This helped us to conclude that coopetition is a behavior representing the key organizational methods of tourism destinations, especially when considering the interdependence and complementarity of this sector; thus, it should be a fundamental topic of tourism research. In this sense, the paper presents a research agenda in order to establish coopetition as key to understanding the behavior of all those involved in tourism at a particular destination.     

Inclusive business,human rights and the dignity of the poor: a glance beyond economic impacts of adapted business models

In recent years, a considerable amount of research on adapted business for developing countries focused on the impact such endeavours have on the respective companies as well as on the affected people. However, the main emphasis within management sciences was on the economic outcomes or (even more distinct and often) on the question of how to integrate the poor into business models and value chains. Until now, further aspects of a dignified human existence were merely covered as a side note. The article focuses on the influence of inclusive business approaches on various aspects of human dignity and provides explorative insights as a basis for future theory building. The aim is to uncover how human dignity is affected by different business approaches for the poor including and beyond economic outcomes. After giving an insight into the essence and meaning of human dignity in connection to various human rights, the articles refers to a number of illustrative cases of inclusive business. The analysis culminates in the insight that dignity can be (and sometimes already is) assured and promoted by deliberately including the poor into relevant value‐added business processes. If this is the case, an enhanced dignity is not merely the result of increased incomes but stems from a variety of effects. However, such positive effects are not an inevitable outcome of any inclusive business initiative.     

Ethics of business students: Some marketing perspectives

This study explores the reactions of 412 business students to a range of ethical marketing dilemmas. Reviewing some of the comparable Australian and U.S. research in the field, the study examines the ethical judgements for potential demographic differences. The findings suggest that a majority of students are prepared to act unethically in order to gain some competitive or personal advantage. Yielding the highest ethical response are situations of potential and significant social impact. The results support some previous research that shows the existence of gender and age differences in ethical response and likely behaviour. This (gender) difference was most divergent on the issue of portrayal of women in advertising. In particular, females and older students respond more ethically in a majority of situations. The research concludes a number of opportunities for new directions in education, public policy making and further research.Jim Lane is Senior Lecturer in marketing at the Southern Cross University, Lismore, N.S.W., Australia. He lectures in Marketing at the M.B.A. and undergraduate levels, and has recently introduced Ethics to his Faculty's Marketing curricula. Research interests include ethics, corporate identity and positioning, and he has previously published in the Australian Marketing Institute'sMarketing journal.