A Neo‐Gramscian Approach to Corporate Political Strategy: Conflict and Accommodation in the Climate Change Negotiations*

ABSTRACT A neo‐Gramscian theoretical framework for corporate political strategy is developed drawing from Gramsci's analysis of the relations among capital, social forces, and the state, and from more contemporary theories. Gramsci's political theory recognizes the centrality of organizations and strategy, directs attention to the organizational, economic, and ideological pillars of power, while illuminating the processes of coalition building, conflict, and accommodation that drive social change. This approach addresses the structure‐agency relationship and endogenous dynamics in a way that could enrich institutional theory. The framework suggests a strategic concept of power, which provides space for contestation by subordinate groups in complex dynamic social systems. We apply the framework to analyse the international negotiations to control emissions of greenhouse gases, focusing on the responses of firms in the US and European oil and automobile industries. The neo‐Gramscian framework explains some specific features of corporate responses to challenges to their hegemonic position and points to the importance of political struggles within civil society. The analysis suggests that the conventional demarcation between market and non‐market strategies is untenable, given the embeddedness of markets in contested social and political structures and the political character of strategies directed toward defending and enhancing markets, technologies, corporate autonomy and legitimacy.     

Crowding Out Informal Care? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Germany*

This article evaluates the effects of a consumer‐directed home care programme (Personal Budgets) compared with the standard home care programmes of the German long‐term care insurance (LTCI). The evaluation makes use of a random assignment into a treatment group receiving personal budgets and a control group receiving either in‐kind benefits (agency care) or cash payments. Compared with agency care, personal budgets extend the support by independent providers, but leave health outcomes unchanged. Compared with cash payments, personal budgets tend to improve health outcomes, but double LTCI spending due to a strong crowding out of informal care by formal care.     

Why ‘Good Governance’ Fails: Lessons from Regional Economic Development in Colombia

By critically reviewing different strands of literature on institutional change and development, this essay argues that, in order to fully understand subnational economic development, we need to move away from ‘good governance' explanations in which geography‐specific analyses of power structures and elite interests are largely absent. Using findings for Colombia and insights from economic geography and heterodox political economy theories, this essay gives theoretical and conceptual guidelines and approximations for future studies on regional economic development. The contribution provides a place‐based discussion of how the historically evolved distribution of power balances, context‐specific elite interests, and the interaction between place‐bound actors and place‐less dynamics affect subnational institutional arrangements shaping policies and development outcomes. The conclusions drawn are not limited to Colombia and will prove beneficial to researchers studying regional economic development in subnational contexts elsewhere in the world.     

Uncovering Micro‐Practices and Pathways of Engagement That Scale Up Social‐Driven Collaborations: A Practice View of Power

This paper explores how large‐scale social‐driven collaborations might grow in scale and help promote political change. We present the results of a qualitative investigation of a complex platform where multiple and hybrid collaborations co‐exist and where civil society plays a central role. Based on a longitudinal comparative case study, we draw a processual model describing micro‐practices and pathways of engagement. We show that the emergence of these collaborations requires a new type of convener, one that is able to manage the interplay between the sharing/co‐creation of abundant resources and the coordinated decentralization of informal authority. Our study extends existing debates on the role of resources and authority, showing the complementarity between possession and practice perspectives of power. Finally, we identified synergies between collaboration and social movement literatures, particularly showing that large‐scale collaborations could be mobilized to refine social movement agendas and achieve more purposive collective action.     

The Foundations of International Business: Cross‐Border Investment Activity and the Balance between Market‐Power and Efficiency Effects

The foundational international business (IB) scholarship grappled with whether multinational enterprises (MNEs) are largely efficiency‐enhancing or market‐power inducing institutions. Contemporary scholarship, however, often associates foreign direct investment (FDI) with efficiency‐enhancing properties and thus neglects the market‐power interpretation of the MNE. Such an imbalance is problematic given that the theoretical and empirical justifications behind the field's embrace of the efficiency interpretation are not fully evident. Instead, both efficiency and market‐power effects are seemingly present in cross‐border investment activity. Based on a comprehensive sample of up to 4,361 cross‐border investments materializing between 1986 and 2010, we present theoretically‐grounded hypotheses with regard to when market‐power effects will tend to dominate efficiency effects. We find that cross‐border investments undertaken by emerging‐market MNEs in both developed and emerging markets tend to involve substantial efficiency effects and minimal market‐power effects when compared with the cross‐border investments undertaken by developed‐country MNEs in both developed and emerging markets.     

The impacts of perceived moral obligation and sustainability self‐identity on sustainability development: A theory of planned behavior purchase intention model of sustainability‐labeled coffee and the moderating effect of climate change skepticism

This study sought to elucidate the antecedents that may influence the effect of people's purchase behavior on the Earth's sustainable development. It included people's perceived moral obligation and sustainability self‐identity in the theory of planned behavior (TPB) model to investigate attitudes among the Taiwanese public's attitude toward purchasing sustainability‐labeled coffee and their purchase intentions. The moderating effect of climate change skepticism is also considered in this study. A total of 745 nationwide and self‐reported questionnaire valid data was collected in Taiwan. Hierarchical and moderated regression analysis results indicated that the components of the TPB model had positive influences on the public's purchase intention. The public's perceived moral obligation and sustainability self‐identity, proposed for inclusion in the TPB model, had significant and positive influences on purchase intention. The extended TPB model has higher explanatory power than that of the original model. The positive relationship between sustainability self‐identity and intention to purchase sustainability‐labeled coffee was moderated by climate change skepticism. This study provides marketers and the players in the supply chain with a comprehensive framework for understanding the influence of perceived moral obligation and sustainability self‐identity on purchase intention toward sustainability‐labeled products. In addition, this study responds to a call for a more thorough investigation of the effect of people's skepticism about climate change in the context of ethical and sustainable consumption decision‐making processes.     

Rethinking ‘Top‐Down’ and ‘Bottom‐Up’ Roles of Top and Middle Managers in Organizational Change: Implications for Employee Support

In this study we integrate insights from ‘top‐down’ and ‘bottom‐up’ traditions in organizational change research to understand employees’ varying dispositions to support change. We distinguish between change initiation and change execution roles and identify four possible role configurations in which top managers (TMs) and middle managers (MMs) can feature in change. We contend that both TMs and MMs can play change initiation and/or change execution roles, TMs and MMs have different strengths and limitations for taking on different change roles, and their relative strengths and limitations are compounded or attenuated based on the specific configuration of change roles. We subsequently hypothesize employee support for change in relation to different TM‐MM change role configurations. Our findings show that change initiated by TMs does not engender above‐average level of employee support. However, change initiated by MMs engenders above‐average level of employee support, and even more so, if TMs handle the change execution.     

Manager‐Union Bargaining Agenda Under Monopoly and with Network Effects

This paper investigates the bargaining agenda selection in a unionised monopoly with managerial delegation (MD). In contrast to the conventional wisdom, monopoly profits with MD under sequential Efficient Bargaining (SEB) exceed those under Right‐to‐Manage (RTM), while the union can prefer RTM to SEB: paradoxically, a conflict of interests between the parties may still exist but for reversed choices of the agenda. Consumption externalities change the picture. The monopolist still prefers SEB; however, provided that network effects are sufficiently strong, the union prefers SEB even for a relatively low bargaining power. Thus, the parties endogenously choose the SEB agenda which is also Pareto‐superior. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Innovation and corporate sustainability: An investigation into the process of change in the pharmaceuticals industry

Although there has been considerable research effort directed at refining the content of corporate environmental performance, e.g. corporate environmental reporting and accounting, there has been relatively little empirical investigation to date on the process of corporate eco‐change. This research reports on the quantitative and qualitative results of a survey of German and UK pharmaceuticals firms, which evaluated the significance of the various incentives, both intra‐firm and external to the organization, that have stimulated eco‐change. We find that, although the industry is one that has been characterized by voluntary agreements and proactive behaviour in the past, regulation still remains the main driver for sustainability improvements. New technology is the second most important driver. Stakeholder dialogue and inter‐firm cooperation were both revealed to be relatively weak forces for eco‐change. The study also tested the validity of the conventional neo‐classical economic world‐view of innovation in firms versus a more radical co‐evolutionary one. The former assumes that firms respond only to profit signals and do so efficiently, whereas the latter assumes that change is path dependent; i.e., the firms’ norms and routines and past experiences are influential. We find that, although the neo‐classical perspective stands up to our empirical investigation of eco‐innovation to some degree, the co‐evolutionary approach better captures the complexity of the corporate eco‐change process. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment     

Winning at all costs: An exploration of bottom‐line mentality,Machiavellianism, and organisational citizenship behaviour

This study seeks to advance the bottom‐line mentality literature by exploring an antecedent and outcome of employee bottom‐line mentality. We build and test a moderated‐mediation model by arguing that the personality trait of Machiavellianism promotes an employee's adoption of a bottom‐line mentality. Moreover, drawing on trait activation theory, we argue that this relationship is fully activated when the employee perceives that the organisation endorses a bottom‐line mentality. To expand our theoretical model, we also suggest that employee bottom‐line mentality inhibits organisational citizenship behaviour directed towards co‐workers. Lastly, we investigate whether an employee's perception of an organisation's bottom‐line mentality conditionally moderates the indirect effect of Machiavellianism on organisational citizenship behaviour directed towards co‐workers through the mediated mechanism of employee bottom‐line mentality. Our theoretical model is tested across two distinct studies. Study 1, a field study conducted within a variety of organisations, provides evidence for our initial predictions (Hypotheses 1 and 2). Study 2, a multisource field study conducted in multiple industries, replicates and extends the findings from Study 1 by providing evidence for the entire moderated‐mediation model. We find support for our hypothesised model across both studies. Implications for theory and practice are discussed, and suggestions for future research are identified.     

Truth and Robustness in Cross‐country Growth Regressions*

We re‐examine studies of cross‐country growth regressions by Levine and Renelt (American Economic Review, Vol. 82, 1992, pp. 942–963) and Sala‐i‐Martin (American Economic Review, Vol. 87, 1997a, pp. 178–183; Economics Department, Columbia, University, 1997b). In a realistic Monte Carlo experiment, their variants of Edward Leamer's extreme‐bounds analysis are compared with a cross‐sectional version of the general‐to‐specific search methodology associated with the LSE approach to econometrics. Levine and Renelt's method has low size and low power, while Sala‐i‐Martin's method has high size and high power. The general‐to‐specific methodology is shown to have a near nominal size and high power. Sala‐i‐Martin's method and the general‐to‐specific method are then applied to the actual data from Sala‐i‐Martin's original study.     

‘One‐Man Handled’: Fragmented Power and Political Entrepreneurship in Globalizing Mumbai

This article considers the fractured nature of state power in contemporary Mumbai. Based on a case study of the ongoing Dharavi Redevelopment Project, a 2‐billion US dollar initiative to redevelop Mumbai's most infamous ‘slum’ settlement as a mixed‐use, mixed‐income township, it details the new state strategies emerging to support urban development efforts in India today. Identifying the structural weaknesses that have traditionally hindered development planning in Mumbai, it describes how a private developer, acting as a political entrepreneur, has worked to consolidate the authority and resources necessary to overcome these institutional gaps and structural weaknesses. Situating the analysis in theories of state restructuring, this case sheds light on how the local Indian state is responding to the pressures associated with neoliberal globalization and competitive urbanism. While a growing literature in this area has offered important insights into emerging configurations of power, it remains overly focused on the role of NGOs in these efforts, failing to provide an adequate analysis of alliances between the state and other private actors. This article attempts to address this gap with an in‐depth examination of the political entrepreneur as a site of institutionalized, but ultimately incomplete, power in globalizing Mumbai.     

Simulating non‐normal distributions with specified L‐moments and L‐correlations

This paper derives a procedure for simulating continuous non‐normal distributions with specified L‐moments and L‐correlations in the context of power method polynomials of order three. It is demonstrated that the proposed procedure has computational advantages over the traditional product‐moment procedure in terms of solving for intermediate correlations. Simulation results also demonstrate that the proposed L‐moment‐based procedure is an attractive alternative to the traditional procedure when distributions with more severe departures from normality are considered. Specifically, estimates of L‐skew and L‐kurtosis are superior to the conventional estimates of skew and kurtosis in terms of both relative bias and relative standard error. Further, the L‐correlation also demonstrated to be less biased and more stable than the Pearson correlation. It is also shown how the proposed L‐moment‐based procedure can be extended to the larger class of power method distributions associated with polynomials of order five.     

Nonparametric methods and local‐time‐based estimation for dynamic power law distributions

This paper introduces nonparametric econometric methods that characterize general power law distributions under basic stability conditions. These methods extend the literature on power laws in the social sciences in several directions. First, we show that any stationary distribution in a random growth setting is shaped entirely by two factors: the idiosyncratic volatilities and reversion rates (a measure of cross‐sectional mean reversion) for different ranks in the distribution. This result is valid regardless of how growth rates and volatilities vary across different economic agents, and hence applies to Gibrat's law and its extensions. Second, we present techniques to estimate these two factors using panel data. Third, we describe how our results imply predictability as higher‐ranked processes must on average grow more slowly than lower‐ranked processes. We employ our empirical methods using data on commodity prices and show that our techniques accurately describe the empirical distribution of relative commodity prices. We also show that rank‐based out‐of‐sample forecasts of future commodity prices outperform random‐walk forecasts at a 1‐month horizon.     

Manuel Castells’The City and the Grassroots

Castells’ definition, developed in The City and the Grassroots, of urban social movements as movements which combine struggles over collective consumption with those for community culture and political self‐determination, reflects the dynamics of movements in the 1960s and 1970s — which have since undergone a series of transformations. In spite of these transformations and fragmentations, Castells’ analysis remains relevant to contemporary studies of urban movements. One of its legacies is the identification of the conflict lines along which, still today, the major urban contestations take place, even though most of the individual movements no longer converge in one multi‐class actor intent on urban social change. The issue of collective consumption is more topical than ever in the current conjuncture, as public infrastructure and services are curtailed, and as local as well as supra‐national manifestations of the anti‐globalization movement are zeroing in on the neoliberalization of the public sector. Also, Castells’ highlighting of the contesting of state power has proved prophetic, not only in the continued presence of autonomous strands in the varied protests against commercialization, privatization, surveillance and exclusion, but also because it implies a sharp critique of the limitation of the civic engagement discourse currently in vogue.     

A unified approach to standardized‐residuals‐based correlation tests for GARCH‐type models

In this paper, we propose a unified approach to generating standardized‐residuals‐based correlation tests for checking GARCH‐type models. This approach is valid in the presence of estimation uncertainty, is robust to various standardized error distributions, and is applicable to testing various types of misspecifications. By using this approach, we also propose a class of power‐transformed‐series (PTS) correlation tests that provides certain robustifications and power extensions to the Box–Pierce, McLeod–Li, Li–Mak, and Berkes–Horváth–Kokoszka tests in diagnosing GARCH‐type models. Our simulation and empirical example show that the PTS correlation tests outperform these existing autocorrelation tests in financial time series analysis. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Factor‐Based Identification‐Robust Interference in IV Regressions

Robust methods for instrumental variable inference have received considerable attention recently. Their analysis has raised a variety of problematic issues such as size/power trade‐offs resulting from weak or many instruments. We show that information reduction methods provide a useful and practical solution to this and related problems. Formally, we propose factor‐based modifications to three popular weak‐instrument‐robust statistics, and illustrate their validity asymptotically and in finite samples. Results are derived using asymptotic settings that are commonly used in both the factor and weak‐instrument literature. For the Anderson–Rubin statistic, we also provide analytical finite‐sample results that do not require any underlying factor structure. An illustrative Monte Carlo study reveals the following. Factor‐based tests control size regardless of instruments and factor quality. All factor‐based tests are systematically more powerful than standard counterparts. With informative instruments and in contrast to standard tests: (i) power of factor‐based tests is not affected by k even when large; and (ii) weak factor structure does not cost power. An empirical study on a New Keynesian macroeconomic model suggests that our factor‐based methods can bridge a number of gaps between structural and statistical modeling. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Testing Stationarity in Small‐ and Medium‐Sized Samples when Disturbances are Serially Correlated*

In this article, we study the size distortions of the KPSS test for stationarity when serial correlation is present and samples are small‐ and medium‐sized. It is argued that two distinct sources of the size distortions can be identified. The first source is the finite‐sample distribution of the long‐run variance estimator used in the KPSS test, while the second source of the size distortions is the serial correlation not captured by the long‐run variance estimator because of a too narrow choice of truncation lag parameter. When the relative importance of the two sources is studied, it is found that the size of the KPSS test can be reasonably well controlled if the finite‐sample distribution of the KPSS test statistic, conditional on the time‐series dimension and the truncation lag parameter, is used. Hence, finite‐sample critical values, which can be applied to reduce the size distortions of the KPSS test, are supplied. When the power of the test is studied, it is found that the price paid for the increased size control is a lower raw power against a non‐stationary alternative hypothesis.     

Exchange Rates and Fundamentals: Evidence from Long‐Horizon Regression Tests*

This article considers the long‐run relationship between nominal exchange rates and fundamentals from a different perspective. We apply a long‐horizon regression approach proposed by Fisher and Seater (1993) and find evidence supporting the explanatory power of exchange rate models. In particular, the Taylor‐rule model outperforms other conventional models. We then use the inverse power function (IPF) proposed by Andrews (1989) to investigate the power of the Fisher–Seater test. The IPF analysis provides additional evidence supporting exchange rate models.