Changes in Japanese managers' work values and attitudes: a comparison of 1995 and 2009

The aim of this study is to investigate how the work values and attitudes of Japanese managers changed between 1995 and 2009. In the last 15 years, the economic environment has drastically changed in Japan and resulted in profound changes in companies' structures and HR practices. In response to such changes, Japanese managers' work values and attitudes toward employing organizations have also changed. Traditional Japanese management systems and practices, which once sustained the competitiveness of Japanese firms are no longer suitable. A new management model must be implemented to fit the changing competitive environment and managers' new work values.     

Workplace values and beliefs: an empirical study of ideology,high commitment management and unionisation

This study is unique in that it examines both managers' and workers' values and beliefs about employment relationships. It found that managers consider the employment relationship in their own workplaces unitarist rather than pluralist, but have mixed ideologies when considering society as a whole. Workers are strongly pluralist when considering society as a whole, but their workplace ideology is somewhat unitarist. A modest union impact on workers' perspectives is found, but little evidence to suggest union's effect commitment to the employing organization. Workers' commitment is to personal careers first and the organization second, while managers put the organization ahead of personal careers. Correlations exist between unitary views of the employment relationship, increased High Commitment Management (HCM) practices, and high levels of commitment. The purpose and contribution of this study is that it reports an assessment of the relation between workplace attitudes and beliefs and the efficacy and influence of management and union initiatives designed to impact them.     

Values,gender and attitudes towards environmental policy: A study of future managers

This study explores if the value priorities and their impact on future managers' attitudes towards environmental responsibilities vary with gender. While relevant prior studies mostly focus on gender‐based variations of individuals' personal values in developed economies, we concentrate on both personal values and pro‐environmental attitudes in an emerging economy. This study is built on MBA students (a proxy for future managers) in India since India is characterized as a male‐dominated society and a producer of larger number of MBA graduates. Overall, our results show that personal values and attitude towards environmental responsibilities do not vary significantly with gender. Only two values (among the 21 values) and one value type (out of 10 values) get significantly higher ranking from females compared with males. Further, although ‘universalism’ and ‘benevolence’ are found to have a statistically significant impact on respondents' attitude towards environmental responsibility, the latter is invariant to the respondents' gender. Our findings may indicate India's transformation from a male‐dominated society towards a more gender‐balanced society. These findings can be used to operationalize a pro‐environmental recruitment policy and to formulate strategies to improve female participation in MBA cohorts of business schools.     

Economic Religion and the Worship of Progress

In contemporary thought, the terms “secular” and “religious” are polar opposites. They are held to occupy separate domains. But that view is mistaken. Religious belief organizes society around fundamental ideas about ethics and existence. This article examines the way economic belief systems function as religions. Economic thought in various forms (Marxist, Keynesian, neoclassical) is brimming with implicit religious meaning. Instead of belief in an afterlife and heaven, modern economics promises heaven on earth in the form of continuous material progress. Adherents of competing economic ideologies often promote them with the energy of religious zealots. Thus, modern societies are still organized around religious principles, but they are now hidden from sight. This article shows how the religious dimension of the modern worship of economic progress is rooted in Christian theology: Calvinism in the United States and Lutheranism in the Nordic countries, which are famous for their own brand of social democracy. In recent decades, secular faith in the religion of economic progress has begun to falter. The failures of mainstream economics to warn of impending crisis has reduced its credibility, even among economists. More importantly, the rise of environmentalism as a religion has vastly increased the number of citizens who question the goal of material progress. The attack on economic religion may have also undermined the credibility of mainstream political parties, partially explaining Brexit in England and the election of Donald Trump in the United States.     

Modeling religious involvement: a qualitative integration based on female role visualization consumption

The application of religious symbolism is important in the evolution of medical consumption. Chinese religious belief integrates concepts of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. People personify god and goddess’ characters in religious stories which influence our ideal personality in reality. According to the Match-up Hypothesis in medical product advertising, female role portrayal in patriarchal society involves the blending of beautification ritual, utilizing the marketed product, with idealized female beauty into a package intended to provide the best possible match with the prevailing ideal. Due to the influence of traditional sex stereotypes in eastern or western societies, such female portrayals provide culturally reasonable advertisements of the value of products being displayed for visualization consumption. This ideology is part of the moral fabric of society and reveals a possible social collective consciousness. The authors adopt five dimensions of religious involvement (DRI—Ideology, Ritualistic, Experiential, Consequential, and Intellectual) to explain a process of portrayals visualization and discuss the template image orientation for presenting product information in the marketplace. This study proposes the female role visualization consumption (FRVC) model to identify different elements of female role evolution stemming from religious ideology.     

Evaluating the Penetration of Capitalism in Postsocialist Moscow

A bstract .   This article evaluates critically the meta-narrative that capitalism is becoming totalizing and hegemonic. Recently, an emerging corpus of postdevelopment thought has begun to deconstruct this discourse, but only in relation to Western economies and the majority (third) world. To further contribute to this emerging critique, the aim is to analyze the degree to which capitalist economic practices have permeated postsocialist societies through a case study of Moscow. Based on face-to-face interviews with 313 households during 2005/06 concerning their work practices, a relatively shallow penetration of capitalism in this city is identified, with only a minority of households relying on the capitalist economy in particular, and the formal economy more generally, to secure their livelihood. The vast majority of the population is found to depend heavily on an array of noncapitalist economic practices; and capitalist and noncapitalist practices are identified as operating in tandem with, rather than in opposition to, each other. The outcome is a call to refute the universality of capitalist hegemony and to rethink the nature of economic development from a perspective that recognizes the persistence of economic pluralism.     

Religious identity in the workplace: A systematic review,research agenda,and practical implications

We conducted a systematic review of relevant literature to address how religious and occupational identities relate to each other in the workplace. We identified 53 relevant publications for analysis and synthesis. Studies addressed value differences associated with religion and occupation, identity tensions, unmet expectations, and the connection of religious identity to well-being and work outcomes. Key variables in the connection between religious and occupational identities included personal preferences, the fit between religious identity and job-related concerns, and the organization's policies, practices, and expectations. We highlight the personal and organizational consequences of being able to express religious identity at work and the conditions that promote high congruence between religious identity and its expression in the workplace. From these findings, we develop a research agenda and offer recommendations for management practice that focus on support for expression of religious identity at work while maintaining a broader climate of inclusion.     

Weber and Baqir as‐Sadr: The Paradox of Economic Development in Islamic Societies

This article attempts to reconsider the controversial relationship between Islam and economic development. It does so by deeply engaging the views of Weber and Baqir as‐Sadr. According to Sadr, the development of capitalism in Europe is a consequence of the moral practice of Western societies, which is fundamentally different from that of Islamic societies. This divergence in moral practices translates into a divergence in economic doctrine, resulting in an incompatibility between the capitalist method and the moral practice of Islamic societies.     

Hostile Territory: High-Tension Religion and the Jewish Peddler

A bstract .   Scholars have long explored the role that reputation plays in the facilitation of exchange. Some attention has also been paid to the way in which religions serve as a proxy for reputation or as a mechanism for enforcement of exchange agreements. These reputation and enforcement mechanisms enhance the ability of the members of certain religious groups to perform economic roles where such secular-based mechanisms fail or are absent. In this article, I explore the ways in which hostility toward members of high-tension religions makes them uniquely well suited to the economic role of middlemen. As illustration, I explore the particular case of the 19^th-century German Jewish peddler in the young United States.     

Heterogeneity in social values and capital accumulation in a changing world

In a society characterized by a multitude of heterogeneous agents and a large number of possibly immaterial goods, each one having distinct social and personal values, we study the impact of these relative values on intergenerational capital accumulation, as a function of economic and social parameters such as capital mobility, productivity and personal and social values discrepancies. Each agent is modelled by a one-period production function and a two-period intertemporal utility. Agents live, produce and consume over one period, but optimize over two periods, so providing a remaining stock of goods for the next generation. This creates a dynamics in capital accumulation depending on social and individual values. A threshold appears in capital stock accumulation that depends on personal and social values’ volatilities, and below which the initial stock will be depleted. Whereas volatility in social values increases the threshold, impairing capital accumulation, adverse shocks in goods’ values may reverse the dynamics of the accumulation process. Finally, capital mobility specifically favors forerunners, but capital accumulation in one or several sectors may shift social values in their direction, at the expense of other sectors.

     

Prevention and mitigation of epidemics: Biodiversity conservation and confinement policies

This paper presents a first model integrating the relation between biodiversity loss and zoonotic pandemic risks in a general equilibrium dynamic economic set-up. The occurrence of pandemics is modeled as Poissonian leaps in economic variables. The planner can intervene in the economic and epidemiological dynamics in two ways: first (prevention), by deciding to conserve a greater quantity of biodiversity to decrease the probability of a pandemic occurring, and second (mitigation), by reducing the death toll through a lockdown policy, with the collateral effect of affecting negatively labor productivity. The policy is evaluated using a social welfare function embodying society’s risk aversion, aversion to fluctuations, degree of impatience and altruism towards future generations. The model is explicitly solved and the optimal policy described. The dependence of the optimal policy on natural, productivity and preference parameters is discussed. In particular the optimal lockdown is more severe in societies valuing more human life, and the optimal biodiversity conservation is larger for more “forward looking” societies, with a small discount rate and a high degree of altruism towards future generations. Moreover, societies accepting a large welfare loss to mitigate the pandemics are also societies doing a lot of prevention. After calibrating the model with COVID-19 pandemic data we compare the mitigation efforts predicted by the model with those of the recent literature and we study the optimal prevention–mitigation policy mix.     

Gray Matters on Screen: Intelligence Agencies,Secret Societies,and Hollywood Movies

We normally think of government agencies as acting in a purely rational and instrumental way. In the case of intelligence agencies, we presume they rely on reason and science to protect the national interest. By contrast, the general view of secret societies and occult groups is that they engage in rituals and practices that have little or nothing to do with normal social intercourse, or even with reality. This article shows that these common assumptions are false, and that secret societies and intelligence agencies share many important traits. Our understanding of the CIA's role in supporting the production of Hollywood movies will be enhanced by taking these similarities into account. Intelligence work and the operations of secret societies are shown to overlap in five categories: religious underpinnings, occult practices to control the mind, cryptography, violations of social convention, and cryptic transparency—the ability to carry out secret activities in plain sight. These affinities explain why the CIA can promote movies that are actually quite candid in their revelation of the dark underside of the Agency. In so doing, the CIA projects a subliminal message that whatever questionable actions it takes are justified by a higher good, which can only be known by insiders.     

The role of English as a foreign language classes in tolerance education in relation to school management practices

It is essential for individuals to develop a tolerant outlook towards cultures other than their own to be able to function well in a peaceful society. Teaching fundamental values, principles and attitudes concerning tolerance in early years might help in reaching this goal. Since English as a foreign language (EFL) education traditionally incorporates the teaching of the principles and values of the society, EFL classes might serve as an appropriate option to instill tolerance. This study delves into how primary school principals view EFL classes as venues to provide primary school children with tolerance education. More specifically, this research study seeks to understand and evaluate the role of EFL classes in teaching tolerance with regard to school management practices. To fulfil the aim of the study, twenty-seven school principals were interviewed to find that all of them had positive perceptions of tolerance and tolerance education and that a great majority of them acknowledged the role of EFL classes in tolerance education. This study has a few implications for theory building and school management practices.

     

Executive development in China: is there any in a Western sense?

A recurring theme in the literature on Chinese management has been the impact of culture and, in particular, the influence of values derived from Confucianism on Chinese management practices. The reforms that led to foreign direct investment (FDI), the problems of State-owned enterprises (SOEs), the social, political and economic changes and analyses of Chinese managerial styles and performance have been the major concerns. There has been less attention specifically paid to Chinese managers' characteristics and to managerial career patterns, which may be shaped by national culture and values. In contrast, in the West, there is a vast body of literature covering career theories and managerial growth, dealing variously with personal values and other factors, such as family upbringing, education, social background and employment structure, that have major impacts on managers' career pathways. This paper explores how far executive career development in modern China (PRC) corresponds to Western notions, and also tries to determine whether there are specific factors relating to Chinese executives' personal biographies and career paths. A pilot study was carried out to identify the variables that might shed light on career patterns and, if possible, to profile the Chinese manager. A number of emergent themes are described. They derive from the experience of individual interviewees who took part in the pilot research, which was conducted in Beijing and Shanghai and in which forty-nine managers in forty-two companies were interviewed. These pilot interviews revealed a complex interplay of biographical data and career themes. Of clear importance was the guanxi mechanism (direct or indirect personal relationship to solicit favours) which has no exact comparison in the West and which does not figure in Western career theories. A preliminary tentative Chinese executive career model has been developed.     

Are religious people more caring? Exploring the impact of religiosity on charitable organizations in a developing country

• The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of religiosity on reasons that individuals volunteer. Additionally, this study will investigate the pro‐social attitudes towards helping others and charitable organizations. This study focuses on Indonesia where religion plays an important role in daily life. The data were derived from a convenience sampling at a large private university in Surabaya, Indonesia (N = 258). The results showed that individuals with high intrinsic and extrinsic personal religiosity were more likely to have ‘other‐oriented’ reasons when performing philanthropic activities. Nonetheless, religiosity did not influence attitudes of individuals towards helping others. This study contributes to the debate regarding the effect of religious values on pro‐social attitudes in the context of a developing country. Furthermore, the study provides social implications for researchers, policy makers and practitioners operating in a developing country. This is one of the first few studies exploring the impact of religion on attitude towards charitable organization in Indonesia.

Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

National Values and Economic Growth

A bstract    Using data on economic values and attitudes for various nations from the World Value Study, I show that the strength of values associated with market success does not appear to have a significant impact on the rate of economic growth in a sample of developing and developed market economies. I also show that such values do not seem related to the economic system and have an ambiguous relation to the overall level of economic development. These negative results suggest that, contrary to common belief, knowledge about such values does not seem very useful in helping us understand economic growth or differences in levels of economic development or economic systems in various countries.     

Born Again? The Ethics and Efficacy of the Conversion Experience in Contemporary Management Development

This article notes how a religious tone has seeped into the discourse of contemporary management development. This religious analogy is explored through the evangelical Christian notion of ‘conversion’ and radical personal change. The expansion of such a mind-set into contemporary management thinking is related to the revival of the charismatic form of authority, in the writing of popular management gurus, such as Tom Peters. The search for new forms of ethical and social cohesion is considered. Next, this framework is applied to management development, with particular reference to one fairly mainstream, if intensive, programme. Through quotes from the managers involved, we illustrate how this programme employed emotional experience to remould individual personality and hence corporate culture in a way that mimics the religious conversion process. Finally, we question both whether a largely involuntary business organization has an ethical right to claim the ‘souls’ of its managers, and whether this is likely to be a realizable goal, in any case.     

National culture and labour-market flexibility

This paper develops a cultural explanation for labour-market flexibility, building on the work of Lipset. Using Hofstede's conceptual framework for categorizing national cultures, certain hypotheses are derived concerning the association of various labour-market institutions and rigidities connected with employment, pay bargaining the treatment of the unemployed, and Hofstede's dimensions of national culture. These hypotheses are tested on data for OECD countries, using ordinary least squares regression. The results demonstrate a strong statistical association between Hofstede's cultural indices and the various labour-market rigidities. In particular, there is a strong inverse relationship between Hofstede's MAS variable and all our labour flexibility variables. Cultural values reflecting feminine gender structuring appear to be strongly associated with labour-market inflexibility. There is also a strong statistical association between scores on the UAI dimension, and employment rigidities and pay-bargaining practices. Cultural attitudes to power inequalities as reflected in the PDI index inversely related to rigidities in pay-bargaining practices. While the results demonstrate only statistical associations, they are suggestive of the possibility that culture plays more determining role. This has important implications for deregulation/regulation strategies.