Dario Gaggio. In Gold We Trust: Social Capital and Economic Change in the Italian Jewelry Towns

In the mid-1970s, Italy was a sort of mystery for internationalobservers. After the glorious years of the ‘economic miracle,’everything seemed to be going wrong. Both State-owned and largeprivate corporations, which had made an outstanding contributionto the fast growth experienced in the 1950s and the 1960s, werehit by serious problems of governance (for the former, the inappropriateintervention of the political power while the latter operatedunder the weight of inefficient ownership) and seemed to betrapped in an insurmountable crisis. Social conflict in thefactories was     

儒家文化、社会信任与普惠金融

中国儒家文化和社会信任是否会影响普惠金融的实践效果？历史经验和理论研究都对此做出了肯定的回答.然而,一些实践中的困境和理论上的未尽议题促使我们从微观层面上对此进行重审.通过分析中国综合社会调查数据,我们得出以下结论:社会信任促进了普惠金融的普及,而儒家文化的秉承与践行却弱化了普惠金融的惠及可能性;社会信任对普惠金融的影响更多地体现为社会关系推动的面向,而非文化推动的面向;儒家文化尚未渗透到社会信任体系之中——在金融意义上,儒家文化的影响并不表现在“信”的面向,而是嵌入到以“孝”为特征的家文化之中,并在一定程度上弱化了经济收入对普惠金融的积极作用.普惠金融的制度框架设计应以社会征信体系的完善为基础,引入社会利益倾斜机制和社会权利能力赋予机制,体现对社会责任的应有担当;同时应充分借助儒家文化与社会发展相互“合意”的一面,以文化推动并实现金融在普惠性和安全性之间的平衡.     

社会网络嵌入与企业家创新

本文在回顾现有从企业家个人品质研究创新的理论基础上,介绍了社会经济学关于网络结构的理论,并从企业家在创新过程中协调功能实现的角度,论述了社会网络嵌入与企业家创新的关系,指出社会网络嵌入是企业家从事创新活动的重要条件,这对中国的制度变迁来说具有重大的理论意义和实践指导作用.     

Consumer Culture and Political Ideology Plots in Social Media Campaigns

A number of studies are devoted to explicating global consumer culture and political ideology plots in traditional advertising. Nevertheless, studies of these plots in social media campaigns are scarce. In order to fill this gap, our study examines consumer culture and political ideology plots utilized by global brands in social media advertisements targeted to US Millennials. Employing semiotic analysis, a series of advertisements from automotive, food and beverage, electronics, personal care products, fast food, athletics and financial sectors were evaluated and interpreted. Our findings uncovered one unique main plot labeled “identity-of-self” and three subplots: 1) successful and young living, 2) Peter Pan syndrome, and 3) purposeful connectedness. Implications for practice and directions for future work are suggested.     

Transformation of Islamic Work Ethic and Social Networks: The Role of Religious Social Embeddedness in Organizational Networks

The aim of this study is to explore the influence of religious beliefs on social or work-related ties of managers who are member of organizational networks representing two different ideologies (religious and secular) in Turkey. In this research, the emergence of secular and devout entrepreneurs is considered as a phenomenon, and special attention is paid to religious transformation and secularism in Turkey. Social network analysis method is used to define the nature of communication links among 80 chairmen who are the members of two conflicting and dominant groups in Turkish business system. The findings show that Protestant work ethic suggested by Weber with regard to Christianity have attained a similar place over the past decade in Islamic organizational networks. The concern of political power in religion leads to organizational networks being nourished by religious norms and creeds in many developing countries. Especially in societies like Turkey where the state is dominant in the business life, organizations and managers prefer to be included in religious networks to make close contacts with the state. Another significant finding is that efforts of the members of religious networks—in spite of their relatively closed characteristics—in terms of being at the center of a network and taking the brokerage role, are highly developed on the contrary to the literature.     

Environmental Performance Focus in Private Family Firms: The Role of Social Embeddedness

The macro-level business ethics in Scholasticism contrasts with modern Anglo-Saxon Capitalism, which is very influential worldwide. Scholasticism, developed between the thirteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries, deals with key elements of free market morality, including private property, contracts, profits, prices, and free competition. For over 500 years Scholasticism tried to understand economic phenomena and business activities and reflected on them from an ethical perspective. Scholasticism offered the crucial lesson of the centrality of justice and the role of practical wisdom in considering market morality. Justice is seen as both a virtue and a principle, and commutative justice (justice in exchanges) with the common good of society as the reference for the Scholastics, is regarded as being especially important.     

Trust,but Verify: MD&;A Language and the Role of Trust in Corporate Culture

Recent scholarship in philosophy, law, and information systems suggests that respecting privacy entails understanding the implicit privacy norms about what, why, and to whom information is shared within specific relationships. These social contracts are important to understand if firms are to adequately manage the privacy expectations of stakeholders. This paper explores a social contract approach to developing, acknowledging, and protecting privacy norms within specific contexts. While privacy as a social contract—a mutually beneficial agreement within a community about sharing and using information—has been introduced theoretically and empirically, the full impact on firms of an alternative framework to respecting the privacy expectations of stakeholders has not been examined. The goal of this paper is to examine how privacy norms develop through social contract’s narrative, to redescribe privacy violations given the social contract approach, and to critically examine the role of business as a contractor in developing privacy norms. A social contract narrative dealing specifically with issues of privacy is an important next step in exploring a social contract approach to privacy. Here, the narrative is used to explain to analyze the dynamic process of privacy norm generation within particular communities. Based on this narrative, individuals within a given community discriminately share information with a particular set of obligations in mind as to who has access to the information and how it will be used. Rather than giving away privacy, individuals discriminately share information within a particular community and with norms governing the use of their information. Similar to contractual business ethics’ impact on global commerce in explaining how and why norms vary across global contexts, the social contract approach to privacy explains how and why norms vary across communities of actors. Focusing on agreements around privacy expectations shifts the responsibility of firms from adequate notification to the responsibility of firms as contractors to maintain a mutually beneficial and sustainable solution.     

Social Trust and Corporate Misconduct: Evidence from China

We study whether greater social trust is associated with a lower incidence of corporate misconduct. Both social norm and network theory suggest that social trust can affect managerial behavior and reduce the likelihood of misconduct behavior. Consistent with this prediction, we find that social trust is negatively associated with corporate misconduct behavior. Moreover, we show that, when media coverage is higher, the negative relation between social trust and corporate misconduct behavior is more pronounced. Further analyses suggest that social trust can help mitigate both disclosure-related and nondisclosure-related misconduct.     

Social Motives and Trust: Implications for Joint Gains in Negotiations

This study examined the role of trust via contingency model in a multi-issue multi-party negotiation setting and how it relates to outcomes. Results of a laboratory experiment with 288 undergraduate students confirmed both a main effect of Social Value Orientations (SVO), such that cooperative negotiators achieved higher joint gains than pro-self negotiators, and a main effect of Motivational Orientations (MO), such that pro-social negotiators attained higher joint gains than egoistic-oriented negotiators. Furthermore, the predicted interaction effect between SVO and MO, such that negotiators with a pro-self SVO attained higher joint gains in a pro-social, in contrast to an egoistic MO, condition was confirmed. This effect was fully mediated by trust. The dimension of trust that explained the SVO and MO interaction was that of concern for fellow negotiators as rated by oneself, as well as by an objective third-party observer. Implications for the strategic use of social motives and trust on effective information exchange and negotiated outcomes are discussed.     

Professional Ethics and The Culture of Trust

The cause of ethical failure in organisations often can be traced to their organisational culture and the failure on the part of the leadership to actively promote ethical ideals and practices. This is true of all types of organisations, including the professions, which in recent years have experienced ongoing ethical problems. The questions naturally arise: what sort of professional culture promotes ethical behaviour? How can it be implemented by a profession and engendered in the individual professional? The answers to these questions are of interest to business ethicists since the causes of ethical problems in business are often the same and the professions, as ethically challenged organisations, make useful and informative analogues for the measures to be adopted or avoided when the attempt is made to raise the ethical standards of business. Given this focus on the professions, it will be argued that the usual, direct attempts to control unethical behaviour by using codes of ethics, legislation and self-regulatory regimes, are not successful. The answer, it will be argued, lies in using an enforced self-regulation model that aims for ethics indirectly. Such a strategy seeks to develop a goal-orientated professional culture which is actively promoted by the leadership of the profession as well as the members. Specifically, the culture is one that seeks to promote trust in the profession and trustworthiness as a virtue exemplified in each individual. It will be argued that in order to develop a professional culture that cultivates trust a profession will need to develop certain institutions, programs and structures within the profession. I conclude by setting out a model of these trust-cultivating structures.     

Web 2.0 Social Networks: The Role of Trust

Online social networks (OSNs) have gained enormous popularity in recent years. Hundreds of millions of social network users reveal great amounts of personal information in the Web 2.0 environment that is largely devoid of security standards and practices. The central question in this article is why so many social network users are being so trusting. The focus is on theory-building on trust as a critical issue in OSNs. A theoretical framework is developed, which facilitates a multi-level and multi-dimensional analysis of research problems related to trust in OSNs. First, the structural and relational underpinnings of trust in OSNs are investigated from a governance perspective that integrates concepts of social network theory, social capital and the role of value in relational exchanges. Subsequently, the focus moves to the individual’s decision to trust and to processes through which trust actually emerges. Different types and sources of trust from the trust literature and their importance for trust-related decisions and behaviours in OSNs are discussed. Several research propositions are presented, which contribute to a better understanding of the role of trust and the relevance of facets of trust and social capital in OSNs.     

社会信任与企业扭亏绩效

信任作为一种典型的非正式制度,在宏观上是影响经济和社会进步的重要社会资本,在微观上也对企业行为产生正向效应,而信任机制在亏损企业扭亏过程中有着至关重要的作用。本文以社会信任作为切入点,基于2008-2016年中国沪深A股亏损上市公司的经验数据,考察社会信任对企业扭亏绩效的影响及其机制。研究发现:社会信任显著地提高企业扭亏绩效,即当地区社会信任水平越高,企业扭亏绩效也会随之提高。进一步研究发现,社会信任对企业扭亏绩效的促进作用具有异质性,即社会信任对企业扭亏绩效的促进作用主要体现在非国有企业、高市场化程度地区企业、大股东增持企业、机构投资者增持企业中。考察传导路径后发现,社会信任通过降低信息不对称程度,进而提高企业扭亏绩效。本文研究以提高企业扭亏绩效为目标考察了社会信任的经济后果,其研究结论对于生活在社会信任所形成的网络中的企业和地方政府,都具有管理和政策上的启示意义。     

集聚度、根植性与区域性特色文化产业群建设

集聚度与根植性是审视区域性特色文化产业群的两个维度,二者共同作用形成了区域性特色文化产业群的运行机理.本文通过实证检验显示,文化需求、文化创意的活跃程度、相关产业的支撑以及地方政府的支持对我国区域性特色文化产业群的建设具有重要影响,发展区域性特色文化产业群的建设要培育和集聚文化需求,优化环境,激活各种有利因素.并慎重选择文化产业群的建立时机、建立方式和文化产业群的类型.     

The Embeddedness of Responsible Business Practice: Exploring the Interaction Between National-Institutional Environments and Corporate Social Responsibility

Academic literature recognizes that firms in different countries deal with corporate social responsibility (CSR) in different ways. Because of this, analysts presume that variations in national-institutional arrangements affect CSR practices. Literature, however, lacks specificity in determining, first, what parts of national political-economic configurations actually affect CSR practices; second, the precise aspects of CSR affected by national-institutional variables; third, how causal mechanisms between national-institutional framework variables and aspects of CSR practices work. Because of this the literature is not able to address to what extent CSR practices are affected by either global or national policies, discourses and economic pressures; and to what extent CSR evolves as either an alternative to or an extension of national-institutional arrangements. This article proposes an alternative approach that focuses on an exploration of links between disaggregated variables, which can then be the basis for imagining new national-institutional configurations affecting aspects of CSR. It illustrates this approach with an exploration of the importance of development aid policy for CSR practices in global supply chains.     

Corporate Social Responsibility and the Benefits of Employee Trust: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective

Research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has tended to focus on external stakeholders and outcomes, revealing little about internal effects that might also help explain CSR-firm performance linkages and the impact that corporate marketing strategies can have on internal stakeholders such as employees. The two studies (N = 1,116 and N = 2,422) presented in this article draw on theory from both corporate marketing and organizational behavior (OB) disciplines to test the general proposition that employee trust partially mediates the relationship between CSR and employee attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Both studies provide evidence in support of these general relationships. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in the context of CSR and corporate marketing research.     

Rowena Olegario. A Culture of Credit: Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business

Rowena Olegario has written a narrative about the importanceof information in the development of the U.S. economy by exploringthe development of mercantile agencies, organizations that pioneeredthe practices of credit evaluation and reporting in nineteenth-centuryAmerica. The main argument throughout the book is that the establishmentof credit evaluation and reporting moved business behavior frombehind a veil of secrecy and institutionalized a culture oftransparency throughout the economy. Mercantile agencies accomplishedthis transformation by commodifying credit     

Consumer Trust,Social Marketing and Ethics of Welfare Exchange

The global corporate scandals such as Enron, Worldcom and Global Crossing have raised fundamental issues of business ethics as well as economic, social and anthropological questions concerning the nature of business competition and global capitalism. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to introduce the concept of “welfare exchange” to the existing notions of economic, social and anthropological notions of business and exchange in markets and society in the 21st century. Global competition and business success in the 21st century continue to raise the nature of economic value and the interaction among diverse actors in international markets, institutions and society. We believe that the nature of such exchange between consumers and organizations, which can also be termed social marketing, need to increasingly take into account a welfare and ethical component. In this paper, we introduce our concept of welfare exchange to emphasize the importance of such welfare and ethical issues in the global business environment of the 21st century.