The effects of human capital,organizational demography,and interpersonal processes on venture partner perceptions of firm profit and growth

Venture teams, which are comprised of two or more partners, are becoming one of the more popular and important modes of new business development. Traditionally, financial capital has been the primary perspective in assessing venture viability. To expand the venture evaluation horizon, we examined the effects of human capital, organizational demography, and interpersonal processes on partner evaluations of venture performance, defined as the presence of profit and growth. The results support this approach in analyzing venture teams, and we propose that this perspective be included in future venture viability assessment, and used for intervention to enhance venture success. Suggestions are provided for future research.     

The anthropology of the supply chain: Fiefs,clans, witch-doctors and professors

Organizations in the West have learned the importance of organizing their businesses into cross-functional teams, focused on key business processes. In the future, even this will not be enough. Successful businesses will create value by implementing innovations across organizational boundaries: ‘cross-functional’ teams will become ‘cross-organizational’ teams. Supply chain management will need to nurture successful innovation within these cross-organizational teams. The fundamental challenges are social rather than technical, involving issues of trust, co-operation, power and politics. As a result of this, the roles and relationships required for best practice supply management are changing. This paper introduces new models that have been developed in order to understand the cultural context of customer-supplier relationships, and the roles and relationships needed for successful innovation in supply chains.     

Lotus notes (groupware) in context

Reviewing Notes, or any groupware program, highlights the changing nature of software evaluation. Early reviews, for example, Press (1980), emphasized a program's features, efficiency (memory and storage requirements and speed), and user interface. These have all diminished in importance. With multiple revisions, the feature sets and efficiency of commercial programs for a given application have become relatively similar, and direct‐manipulation user interfaces like the Macintosh and Windows have reduced the differences among the user interfaces of programs.

Today, software (especially groupware) must be evaluated in context. It must be compatible with the skills and requirements of the users and the organization, and it must be well integrated with other software and systems. The stability, support, plans, business arrangements, and so on, of the vendor are also important. The program is the tip of an iceberg.

After describing Notes and its applications, I will discuss the question of its suitability in different organizations and integration with other software and vendors.     

Global business partnering among family-owned enterprises

This article focuses on foreign partnering in the family-owned business sector of a developing economy in Latin America. The article presents a report on four selected Brazilian companies. Following an analysis from a grounded theory perspective, the findings are discussed, and directions for future research are provided.     

Deception in Business Networks: Is It Easier to Lie Online?

This article synthesizes research presented in several models of unethical behavior to develop propositions about the factors that facilitate and mitigate deception in online business communications. The work expands the social network perspective to incorporate the medium of communication as a significant influence on deception. We go beyond existing models by developing seven propositions that identify how social network and issue moral intensity characteristics influence the probability of deception in online business communication in comparison to traditional communication channels. Remedies to detect and discourage deception in online business networks are also offered, as well as limitations and future research directions.     

Corporate social responsibility perception in business students as future managers: a multifactorial analysis

This paper examines undergraduate business students' perception of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in cases in which they have not attended any specific course either dealing with CSR or providing training in ethics. A survey was conducted of 535 Spanish business students as future managers. The results show that the stakeholders' perspective deserves a huge attention for those students considering what the keys of business success are. Significant differences in perception were nevertheless identified when a multifactorial analysis was undertaken. Female students are more concerned about CSR issues. The maximization of value for shareholders is less valued by second‐ and third‐year students than by first‐year ones. The findings point to a number of important orientations for the future development of university curriculum.     

The association between venture capitalists’ selection and value adding behavior: evidence from early stage high tech venture capitalists

Building upon self-efficacy and collective effort theories, we study the association between the selection behavior of venture capitalists and their involvement in value adding activities. We argue that investors, who prioritize different characteristics of a business proposal during selection, will be more or less confident of their own abilities and the abilities of entrepreneurial teams to effectively add value to portfolio companies and hence will be more or less involved in providing value adding activities. In order to test this claim, we use a stratified sample comprising 68 European early stage high tech venture capitalists. Results show that venture capitalists, who focus on entrepreneurial team characteristics or financial criteria during selection, are less involved in value adding activities compared to their peers, who focus on technological criteria. We discuss these findings from a theoretical and practical perspective.     

Optimal timing to invest in e‐commerce

The timing of investment in e‐commerce remains hotly debated in both the academic and investment communities. This study develops a framework for analyzing the optimal timing for a company to invest in e‐commerce for conducting its business‐to‐business (B2B) or business‐to‐consumer (B2C) transactions. This study applies a real option theory to assess a new risk–reward dynamic for investing in e‐commerce. The numerical results demonstrate that the optimal timing of investment in e‐commerce depends on uncertainties regarding future cash flows and the opportunity costs associated with e‐commerce. Implications with regard to the behavior of Internet companies from a financial perspective are discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Enlightened Corporate Governance: Specific Investments by Employees as Legitimation for Residual Claims

While much has been written on specificity (e.g., in texts on new institutional economics, agency theory, and team production theory), there are still some insights to be learnt by business ethicists. This article approaches the issue from the perspective of team production, and will propose a new form of corporate governance: enlightened corporate governance, which takes into consideration the specific investments of employees. The article argues that, in addition to shareholders, employees also bear a residual risk which arises due to their specific investments. This residual risk presents a valid and legitimate basis for residual claims. In this way, employees can be seen as residual claimants due to the fact that their income depends upon a hazardous quasi rent. Therefore, this article will call on the fiduciary duty of board members to protect those employees who are exposed to such residual risks and may thus be vulnerable as a result. This leads to a fundamental change of perspective on the “theory of the firm” – a change which will adopt the theories of new institutional economics, agency theory, and team production theory in order to promote business ethics research. Against this background, enlightened corporate governance aims to follow the criterion of specific investments as a legitimate basis for residual claims. Furthermore, it seeks to understand the consequences for board members, and to promote the sharing of control and ownership. The article will close with some discussion of the implications and future prospects for business ethics.     

What: An argumentative groupware approach for organizing and documenting research activities

The topic of this paper is a process‐vs.‐product design method representation called Argumentative Writing (AW). Argumentative writing is a multi‐representation approach for conducting and reporting research projects. AW has at least two representations: one for structuring the problem‐understanding/solving process and one for communicating its product to others. We discuss WHAT, a hypertext‐based tool for AW. In WHAT (Writing with a Hypermedia‐based Argumentative Tool), the design process is captured using Rittel's Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS) method (Conklin, 1988; Hashim, 1990a; Rittel, 1980). The product of the design process is represented in WHAT using a general document‐representation scheme. In the Introduction we raise four major issues that we explore in the rest of the paper. Also in the Introduction, we show the impact the WHAT approach can have on organizational computing applications such as business education and training (Hashim, Rathnam, & Whinston, 1991) and the design of dialectical organizational information systems. The section “A Methodological Basis for AW Tools”; deals with the rationale behind choosing the IBIS method in capturing the design process. The section after that explains WHAT, and the section following it explores its use as a groupware tool. The applicability of WHAT and its pros and cons are discussed in two separate sections. In the Conclusion we outline the potentiality of the approach and present suggestions for its further development. Since our first reporting on WHAT (Hashim, 1990b), the AW approach was found applicable to educational, scientific, and business areas. One such application is for structuring case discussions in business schools (Hashim et al., 1991).     

International business education: What we know and what we have yet to develop

International business education (IBE) scholarship is extensive and is continuously growing. Nevertheless, to date there is no systems perspective overview of the literature dedicated to this topic. Using latest advancements in scientometric analysis, this study structures and visualizes the entire IBE scholarship, which allows to identify gaps in research and propose a number of future research directions. Data extracted from 894 peer-reviewed documents made available through the Scopus database allows to map the scholarship across five identified research directions in IBE – IB, political economy environment, and education; student learning and experience; the lingua franca and communication; interrelationship of IBE and the ecosystem; and business school curricula and internationalization. The scholarship was also compared to the Academy of Management Learning and Education and to the Journal of International Business Studies together with the Journal of World Business journal scholarships to recommend further prospective directions for the future development of IBE.     

On automated e‐business negotiations: Goal,policy, strategy,and plans of decision and action

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in automated e‐business negotiations. The automation of negotiation requires a decision model to capture the negotiation knowledge of policymakers and negotiation experts so that the decision‐making process can be carried out automatically. Current research on automated e‐business negotiations has focused on defining low‐level tactics (or negotiation rules) so that automated negotiation systems can carry out automated negotiation processes. These low‐level tactics are usually defined from a technical perspective, not from a business perspective. There is a gap between high‐level business negotiation goals and low‐level tactics. In this article, we distinguish the concepts of negotiation context, negotiation goals, negotiation strategy, and negotiation tactics and introduce a formal decision model to show the relations among these concepts. We show how high‐level negotiation goals can be formally mapped to low‐level tactics that can be used to affect the behavior of a negotiation system during the negotiation process. In business, a business organization faces different negotiation situations (or contexts) and determines different sets of goals for different negotiation contexts. In our decision model, a business policymaker sets negotiation goals from different perspectives, which are called goal dimensions. A negotiation policy is a functional mapping from a negotiation context to some quantitative measures (or goal values) for the goal dimensions to express how competitive the policymaker wants to reach that set of goals. A negotiation expert who has the experience and expertise to conduct negotiations would define the negotiation strategies needed for reaching the negotiation goals. Formally, a negotiation strategy is a functional mapping from a set of goal values to a set of decision‐action rules that implement negotiation tactics. The selected decision‐action rules can then be used to control the execution of an automated negotiation system, which conducts a negotiation on behalf of a business organization.     

The process of conflict in buyer‐seller relationships at domestic and international levels: A comparative analysis

Despite the fact that conflict is an essential behavioural dimension underlying the buyer‐seller relationship, no empirical work has as yet been conducted on the comparison of conflictual processes between different types of marketing channels. This paper attempts to compare exporter‐importer and exporter‐domestic customer business partnerships, regarding the dimension of conflict throughout its various stages of growth and development. The study was carried out on a sample of 53 indigenous Greek manufacturing firms. Contrary to prior expectations, it was found that the exporter‐importer (E‐I) kind of relationship was not characterized by higher levels of conflictual processes than those in the domestic type of business association. Surprisingly, the study results also showed that in a substantial number of conflict areas, the domestic relationship category was governed by significantly higher levels of conflictual processes compared with those in the E‐I kind of business partnership. The managerial implications of the research findings are discussed and avenues for future research directions are outlined.     

Internationalizing doctoral education in business: A call for action

The changing parameters of business call into question the relevance of the business education our current bachelor's, master's, and doctoral students are receiving. Of particular concern is the content and process of education provided to future professors who will be educating generations to lead the global business community in directions that will mean better lives for ourselves and our world neighbors. Recently, a forum of leading business educators (doctoral program directors, deans, graduate faculty, and representatives of the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business and the Academy of International Business) met for two days in order to exchange experiences and generate ideas regarding the internationalization of doctoral programs in business. Their findings and views are contained in a book just published and a summary report. This article sums up some of the conclusions drawn from these publications and revisits the imperatives for internationalizing-which parallel the imperatives driving business to accept the global challenge. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Using a mobile application to test the impact of giving feedback onteam-level conflict

The authors explored using a mobile application called DevelapMe for 278 business undergraduates in 54 teams to give real-time peer-based feedback during a 5-week group project. Two online surveys, Time 1 (T1) and Time 2 (T2), were administered. Results included finding three promising, new give-feedback scales: positive rating with comments, negative rating with comments, and negative/neutral rating without comments. Relationship conflict and task conflict were the outcomes. Relationship conflict significantly increased from T1 to T2. Only positive rating with comments had a significant relationship to T2 relational conflict and task conflict. Research exposing students to real-time feedback apps will prepare them for future work in teams.     

Reframing the Business Case for Diversity: A Values and Virtues Perspective

We provide an ethical evaluation of the debate on managing diversity within teams and organizations between equality and business case scholars. Our core assertion is that equality and business case perspectives on diversity from an ethical reading appear stuck as they are based on two different moral perspectives that are difficult to reconcile with each other. More specifically, we point out how the arguments of equality scholars correspond with moral reasoning grounded in deontology, whereas the foundations of the business case perspective are crafted by utilitarian arguments. We show that the problems associated with each diversity perspective correspond with the traditional concerns with the two moral perspectives. To resolve this stalemate position, we argue that the equality versus business case debate needs to be approached from a third, less well-known moral perspective (i.e. virtue ethics). We posit that a focus on virtues can enhance equality by reducing prejudice and illustrate this by applying it to the HRM domains of recruitment and selection and of performance management. Subsequently, we argue that values are key to aligning virtues with each other and with corporate strategy, delineate our values and virtues perspective on diversity, and argue why and how it can enhance organizational performance.     

A Conceptual Framework That Identifies Antecedents and Consequences of Building Socially Responsible International Brands

Research on the reputation of international firms using branding philosophies for offering products that are harmful for customers, through business‐to‐business networks, has until now yielded inconsistent results. Although the literature recommends socially responsible behavior of firms offering branded products as one of the determinants of brand reputation, it fails to satisfactorily identify the factors that would particularly enable a brand offering controversial products to be recognized as a socially responsible brand. Authors use the inductive approach to examine existing research and review anecdotes to build a model that will allow brand managers to develop recognition of an ethical and socially responsible brand while offering controversial products such as tobacco or gambling. In addition, the role of business customers of an international brand is also reviewed to understand if they can moderate the causal relationship between the socially responsible image of the brand and brand reputation. Guidelines for future research on the propositions made are provided in this article. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

基于“云计算”的云打印服务模式构建

随着云概念的普及与大众云意识的增强,作为云计算实际应用的云打印逐渐成为未来的一种发展方向。本文通过对传统打印模式及其运行机理进行分析,发现传统打印模式存在一定程度上的不足。所以提出了在云计算的大背景下,基于公有云、私有云、混合云、社区云来构建不同的云打印服务模式。新的云打印服务模式将会弥补传统打印模式的不足,以其高效便捷更好地满足各类用户的打印需求,在给大众带来全新打印体验的同时,也为打印中间商及打印设备制造商提供无限商机。     

An Analysis of 10 years of Business Ethics Research in Strategic Management Journal: 1996–2005

From a corporate governance perspective, one of the most important jobs of a firm’s top management team is to create and maintain a positive moral environment. Business ethics has long been considered a cornerstone in the field of strategic management and a number of scholars have called for more research in this area over the years. In this paper 658 articles that appeared in Strategic Management Journal over the 10-year period between 1996 and 2005 are reviewed for business ethics focus and content. The results reveal that while business ethics research in Strategic Management Journal is on the rise, the overall focus on this research stream has been limited. The most prominent ethics theme during the review period was environmentalism, accounting for 30% of all ethics articles. Author affiliations, future research directions, and implications are also discussed.