Does having women managers lead to increased gender equality practices in corporate social responsibility?

There is increasing interest in determining what impact having women in management positions may have on corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Various authors suggest that gender equality practices should be factored into the broader framework of CSR. This paper examines how the presence of women on corporate boards, in top and middle management and as heads of CSR departments, influences gender equality practices in the field of CSR. Using information collected from companies that have signed up to Women's Empowerment Principles in Spain, we show that the presence of women in the aforesaid posts has a positive impact on CSR activities with gender equality objectives. We thus supplement the justice, business and moral arguments with further arguments in support of the incorporation of women into not only corporate boards but all management positions. Finally, we provide a view of how gender equality can be included in the broader framework of CSR.     

Toward better Japan-Europe economic relations

Present economic relations between Japan and Europe are marred by misunderstanding and ignorance of one another's positions, Mr. Ichikawa stresses here. Neither side has anything to gain from the continuance of this situation: a new phase—one of understanding and cooperation—must be begun. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A02GP021 00002     

Career mentoring for women: New horizons/Expanded methods

Although women make up nearly half of the workforce in the United States, the number of women who hold senior management positions in large U.S. firms continues to be disproportionately low. This fact raises concerns about individual fairness and equality of opportunity. Herein, we demonstrate that the use of strong mentoring programs holds great promise as a way to increase the number of women in senior management roles. An extensive study supports the mentoring program recommendation, as do examples of foreign firms which far more readily employ women in executive positions than do U.S. firms.     

NON‐LINEAR PRICING AND EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY

This paper investigates non‐linear pricing schedules that are based on Roemer's equality of opportunity (EOp) criterion, and compare them with the maximin and the utilitarian non‐linear pricing schedules. The main results suggest that the EOp policy offers a reasonable compromise between the maximin and the utilitarian policies in the sense that: (1) the consumption for each individual is highest under the utilitarian policy and lowest under the maximin policy, and (2) the individuals in the extreme positions rank the EOp policies between the maximin and the utilitarian policy in terms of utility level.     

Are speculators informed?

The positions of hedgers and speculators are correlated with returns in a number of futures markets, but there is much debate as to the interpretation of such a relationship—whether it reflects private information, liquidity, or trend‐chasing behavior. This paper studies the relationship between positioning of hedgers and speculators and returns in equity futures markets. I propose a novel test of the private information hypothesis: analyzing the effect of public announcements about futures positions on prices, using high‐frequency data in short windows around the announcements. I find that the revelation of speculators' positions is informative to investors more broadly, supporting the private information view. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark     

Unlocking the Potential of Greater Female Employment in Europe

This paper investigates the drivers of female labour force participation in Europe, as well as the implications of achieving greater gender diversity in senior corporate positions. Re-examining the drivers of women’s decisions to work is particularly important in the context of Europe. In many European countries, the process of closing gender gaps in labour force participation has stalled, despite greater gender equality in human capital investment, declining birth rates, changing social norms and equal legal access to employment opportunities.     

Women in Management in Thailand: Advancement and Prospects

Thailand has experienced rapid economic growth over the past two decades. Economic expansion has contributed to an increase in demand for managers and professionals. Changes in legislation to promote gender equality in employment and educational opportunities for women have been implemented. These changes have contributed to Thai women's improved status. The aim of the paper is to assess this progress of women in management in Thailand. There is some evidence suggesting that social class, in addition to education, may play an important role in explaining Thai women's advancement to managerial positions. The contribution examines the changes in legislation and the influence of cultural values, education, and gender on women's access to managerial positions. It identifies the barriers to women's progress and pays attention to social class as another key determinant of women's advancement in management.     

The Evolution of Business Groups’ Corporate Social Responsibility

Although establishing gender equality in board and managerial positions has recently become more important for organizations, companies with low levels of gender diversity seem to perceive an ethical dilemma regarding the ways, in which they attempt to attain it. One way that organizations try to move toward gender equality is through the use of their corporate websites to manage potential applicants’ impressions of their current levels of, and actions to improve, gender diversity. The dilemma is whether to truthfully communicate their low level of gender diversity, conceal it, or exaggerate it. On the one hand, organizations that are truthful may find it difficult to achieve equality because women are less attracted to companies that lack diversity. On the other hand, organizations that are untruthful risk their moral legitimacy. The present work investigates gender diversity-related communication on the corporate websites of 99 major German companies. Based on theoretical work on minority attraction, we apply an organizational impression management taxonomy to guide our in-depth content analysis. With this approach, we hope to advance the understanding of how the issue of gender diversity is presented on corporate websites, which is useful for both organizational decision makers as well as diversity researchers. We found that although gender diversity-related communications on corporate websites contain both assertive and defensive organizational impression management tactics, as well as a third type of tactic we refer to as “acknowledgement,” assertive tactics were used more frequently. We argue the existence of a paradox whereby organizations use assertive impression management tactics to maintain pragmatic legitimacy but compromise their moral legitimacy by doing so. Furthermore, we argue that moral legitimacy can be maintained or restored through the sincere use of defensive impression management tactics and acknowledgement.     

Do Welfare-Maximizing Governments Cause Political Business Cycles in Growth and Inequality?

In this paper we study how an elected government maximizes social welfare over its period in office, subject to a growth–equality trade-off. Optimal output and equality paths are derived and their implications are discussed. A central finding is the prediction of political business cycles in both growth and equality. It is also demonstrated that any tightening of the growth–equality trade-off should encourage government to favour growth relative to equality.     

Managerial Selection Decisions in Multinational Corporations: Teaching International Business Using Problem-Based Learning

Companies face many challenges as they staff managerial positions in overseas operations, including decisions on whether to staff using expatriates, host-country nationals, or third-country nationals. We developed an exercise—designed to help students understand the differences between these three groups of employees—that requires students to develop a set of criteria that would form the basis for choosing the candidate they deem to be the best one. In addition, the exercise can serve as a springboard to discussion of the different training and compensation requirements for each of the three different types of employee. The steps involved in the exercise are presented together with suggestions for debriefing the exercise.     

The compensation conundrum: Does the hospitality industry shortchange its employees—and itself?

A comparison of salaries paid for jobs in the hospitality industry versus those in other industries showed that the hospitality positions on average paid less for comparable positions. The only exception was that both the hospitality industry and the comparison group (N = 140) paid about the same amount for low-level jobs—probably due to minimum-wage laws. For upper-level positions, however, the comparison showed a noticeable difference between the two groups. To assess the extent to which jobs are comparable, the author compared the knowledge, skills, and abilities (or human capital) needed for each set of jobs. For jobs in the midpoint of the human-capital scale, hospitality-industry wages averaged about 85 percent of wages paid in other industries. Hospitality-industry wages fell even shorter at the top of the human-capital scale, standing at an average of 78 percent of compensation for top positions found in the sample of other industries. As a practical matter, such pay disparities encourage the best-qualified candidates to choose employment in other industries.     

论股东平等与股份平等的背离与回归

股东平等与股份平等的背离是大小股东闯权益失衡、公司治理效率低下的重要原因。股东有限责任和资本多数决为其提供理论基础和制度支持。从股份平等向股东平等的回归是法律的形式正义和实质正义、民商法公平和效益价值原则间的冲突和妥协的外在表现。寻求股东之间的实质平等是实现正义价值的基本前提。     

Commoditization in Food Retailing: Is Differentiation a Futile Strategy?

This article addresses commoditization in food retailing whereby competition has a tendency to lead to a continuous addition of new but similar products in a category. This often results in products that are more homogeneous and may make it more difficult for firms to gain unique market positions. In light of this development, we ask whether product differentiation is a futile strategy in food products marketing. We also address how consumers perceive and react to the seemingly ever-increasing number of similar products. These questions are explored through insights from relevant literature and a small-scale study of a seemingly highly differentiated category—smoked salmon—sold at the flagship store of an upmarket UK supermarket chain. It was concluded that no product attributes could be described as truly innovative, unique, or difficult to imitate. Implications are highlighted and discussed.     

Consuming desires: Performing gender in Virginia Woolf's Orlando,Neil Jordan's the crying game and sally potter's Orlando

This essays examines how twentieth century queer practices— such as queer literature, queer theory, and queer film— attempt to resist and reconfigure the historical legacy of compulsory homosexuality and the commodification of gender. I begin by tracing the ways in which the eighteenth century discourse on masquerade offered resistance to the limited, culturally sanctioned array of gendered subject positions of the time in order to evaluate the effectiveness of postmodern modes of resisting and reconfiguring gender construction and consumption at the close of the twentieth century. I argue that the postmodern discourse on gender performance improves upon the eighteenth century discourse on masquerade as a strategy for reconceiving resistance to the hegemonic legitimation of compulsory homosexuality, and that by queering our conception of gender construction in this way we may consummate our desire for a wider array of social/ sexual desiring positions without reinscribing them within an unself‐critical consumerism.     

“Equality Theory” as a Counterbalance to Equity Theory in Human Resource Management

This conceptual paper revisits the concept of equality as a base of distributive justice and contends that it is underspecified, both theoretically and in terms of its ethical and pragmatic application to human resource management (HRM) within organizations. Prior organizational literature focuses primarily upon distributive equality of remunerative outcomes within small groups and implicitly employs an equity-based conception of inputs to define equality. In contrast, through exposition of the philosophical roots of equality principles, we reconceptualize inputs as de facto equal and consider the systemic application of distributive equality in the form of status leveling practices. Ethical ramifications of distributive equality so viewed are explored. We conclude by arguing that, to implicitly insert a stronger ethics focus into the study and practice of HRM, perhaps there should be ??equality theory?? competing with equity theory for recognition in managerial and scholarly discourse.     

Managing Impressions in the Face of Rising Stakeholder Pressures: Examining Oil Companies’ Shifting Stances in the Climate Change Debate

In this paper, we examine how organizations’ impression management (IM) evolves in response to rising stakeholder pressures regarding organizations’ corporate responsibility initiatives. We conducted a comparative case study analysis over a period of 13 years (1997–2009) for two organizations—Exxon and BP—that took extreme (but different) initial stances on climate change. We found that as stakeholder pressures rose, their IM tactics unfolded in four phases: (i) advocating the initial stance, (ii) sensegiving to clarify the initial stance, (iii) image repairing, and (iv) adjusting the stance. Taken together, our analysis of IM over these four phases provides three key insights about the evolution of IM in the face of rising pressures. First, when faced with stakeholder pressures, it seems that organizations do not immediately resort to conforming but tend to give in gradually when pressures increase and start to come from relatively powerful stakeholders. Second, evolution of IM seems to be characterized by path dependence, i.e., even as organizations’ positions evolve, they continue to show their conviction in their initial positions and try to convey that their subsequent positions flow logically from the previous ones. Finally, IM involves navigation between symbolism and substance, and companies tend to strive toward harmonizing their symbolic and substantive actions as stakeholder pressure increases.     

International currency exposures,valuation effects and the global financial crisis

We examine the evolution of international currency exposures, with a particular focus on the 2002–12 period. During the run up to the global financial crisis, there was a widespread shift towards positive net foreign currency positions, such that relatively few countries exhibited the archetypal emerging-market “short foreign currency” position on the eve of the global financial crisis. During the crisis, the upheaval in currency markets generated substantial currency-generated valuation effects — much of which were not reversed. There is some evidence that the distribution of valuation effects was stabilizing in the sense of showing a negative covariation pattern with pre-crisis net foreign asset positions.     

“Why Does all the Girls have to Buy Pink Stuff?” The Ethics and Science of the Gendered Toy Marketing Debate

The gendered marketing of children’s toys is under considerable scrutiny, as reflected by numerous consumer-led campaigns and vigorous media debates. This article seeks to assist stakeholders to better understand the ethical and scientific assumptions that underlie the two opposing positions in this debate, and assess their relative strength. There is apparent consensus in the underlying ethical foundations of the debate, with all commentators seeming to endorse the values of corporate social responsibility and gender equality. However, the debate splits over three critical points of empirical disagreement: whether gendered toy marketing influences children’s toy preferences or simply reflects boys’ and girls’ fundamentally different interests; whether the effects of gendered toy marketing are negative, neutral or beneficial; and whether a shift to gender-neutral marketing would be economically viable. We assess the three points of disagreement against the available evidence and shared ethical principles underlying the debate, and conclude that current defences of gendered toy marketing fail.     

Contrasting Two Models of Wealth Redistribution

Philanthropy tries to improve the condition of people. Yet there are different models of philanthropy. American philanthropy tries to improve conditions for different people, without reference to race or language; this evolved from the notion of equality. In contrast, Chinese clans arose in Singapore, as a response to a society segmented along racial and linguistic lines; in a culture that emphasized face, rich entrepreneurs could "buy" prestige and leadership positions, by assisting their poor. This article examines philanthropy as practiced by entrepreneurs in America, and compares this to the Chinese model of wealth redistribution. The latter is centered on clan associations. In the new economy, however, these have been losing importance, as governments take on some roles previously taken care of by such associations; this includes, for instance, education and assistance to start-up entrepreneurs. We conclude that there appears to be a relationship between philanthropy, government and entrepreneurship.     

沃尔泽的复合平等之梦与中国的收入分配改革

人类对物质消费的本能及其本身所具有的差异以及物品的社会意义的多样性与抽象性导致简单平等的美梦难以变成现实。复合平等是优越于简单平等的另一种平等梦想。实现复合平等的关键在于自主分配，而确保自主分配的前提是承认差别和捍卫边界。垄断与支配是两个不同的概念，实现复合平等需要消除支配但不需要消除垄断。沃尔泽的复合平等理论对当前中国推进收入分配制度改革具有重要启示，有助于“中国梦”的早日实现。