The Effects of Environmental Factors on the Behavior of Chinese Managers in the Information Age in China

This paper examines the effects of environmental factors on the ethical behavior of managers using computers at work in Mainland China. In this study, environmental factors refer to senior management, peer groups, company policies, professional practices, and legal considerations. Ethical behaviors include attitudes to disclosure, protection of privacy, conflict of interest, personal conduct, social responsibility, and integrity. A questionnaire survey was used for data collection, and 125 mainland Chinese managers participated in the study. The results show that peer groups, professional practices, and legal considerations do influence the ethical behavior of mainland Chinese managers in the areas of social responsibility, integrity, and accountability. A discussion of the implications of the results is also provided in this paper.     

The Ethics of In-company Research: An Exploratory Study

This paper seeks to advance ethical practice in business and integrate ethics with management curricula. It focuses on the ethical dimensions of in-company research conducted by human resource practitioners who are part time students on a postgraduate research degree award (M.Sc. in HRM). These dual roles of academic researcher in HRM and HR practitioner can become blurred and present particular ethical considerations. Beyond ethical perspectives of HRM, the paper investigates the ethics of in-company research in terms of conceptual and operational factors. The main conclusion is that ethical guidelines need to be developed for M.Sc. in HRM students. Draft guidelines are offered as the basis for development.     

Advertising and the Professions

This article aims to assess the consequences for prices and consumer protection of permitting professional advertising. The need to protect consumers given their lack of knowledge in the buying of professional services is seen as explaining the role of professional self-regulation particularly with respect to entry standards. But the case is not so strong for advertising restrictions, and it is shown that there are logical reasons to expect such restrictions to raise fees without much protecting the consumer. Empirical studies are surveyed confirming the favourable effect of advertising on prices. The conclusion reached is that specific advertising of fees and specialism would not necessarily be costly to monitor and would bring benefits in terms of increased price competition.     

市场化条件下的妇女就业及其劳动权益保护——对上海非公有制企业女工的调查

根据复旦大学人口研究所2002年的调查资料,介绍上海市非公有制企业女工的工资报酬、她们所享有的一般劳动权益和特殊劳动保护权益.在市场化条件下,现有的法律和法规对妇女劳动权益的保护作用呈现减弱的趋势.呼吁全社会在关心妇女就业的同时,必须以极大的热情关注妇女劳动权益的保护.     

Ethical Standards for Human Resource Management Professionals: A Comparative Analysis of Five Major Codes

Focusing on professional codes of ethics in HR, this article establishes a foundation for understanding the contents of thesecodes and for future research in this area. Five key professionalethics codes in HRM are analyzed according to six obligations.The resulting characterizations revealed that these codes advocatefive principles related to integrity, legality, proficiency, loyalty, and confidentiality. Particular flaws in code content and implementationare identified with recommendations for addressing them. Also,suggestions for standardizing professional HR codes and forfuture research are discussed.     

Face and Emotion Recognition on Commercial Property under EU Data Protection Law

This paper integrates and cuts through domains of privacy law and biometrics. Specifically, this paper presents a legal analysis on the use of Automated Facial Recognition Systems (the AFRS) in commercial (retail store) settings within the European Union data protection framework. The AFRS is a typical instance of biometric technologies, where a distributed system of dozens of low‐cost cameras uses psychological states, sociodemographic characteristics, and identity recognition algorithms on thousands of passers‐by and customers. Current use cases and theoretical possibilities are discussed due to the technology's potential of becoming a substantial privacy issue. First, this paper introduces the AFRS and EU data protection law. This is followed by an analysis of European Data protection law and its application in relation to the use of the AFRS, including requirements concerning data quality and legitimate processing of personal data, which, finally, leads to an overview of measures that traders can take to comply with data protection law, including by means of information, consent, and anonymization.     

Drug Testing and the Right to Privacy: Arguing the Ethics of Workplace Drug Testing

As drug testing has become increasingly used to maximize corporate profits by minimizing the economic impact of employee substance abuse, numerous arguments have been advanced which draw the ethical justification for such testing into question, including the position that testing amounts to a violation of employee privacy by attempting to regulate an employee's behavior in her own home, outside the employer's legitimate sphere of control. This article first proposes that an employee's right to privacy is violated when personal information is collected or used by the employer in a way which is irrelevant to the terms of employment. This article then argues that drug testing is relevant and therefore ethically justified within the terms of the employment agreement, and therefore does not amount to a violation of an employee's right to privacy. Arguments to the contrary, including the aforementioned appeal to the employer's limited sphere of control, do not account for reasonable constraints on employee privacy which are intrinsic to the demands of the workplace and implicit in the terms of the employment contract.     

Strategic Choice and Organisational Context in HRM in the UK Hotel Sector

Human resource management in the UK hotel industry is typically held to be informal, instrumental and associated with poor employment relations. Some studies, however, have identified incidences of more formal, high-commitment HRM indicating greater diversity in employment practices. Using original research undertaken in south-west England, this article examines this diversity and the influence of organisational context in the formation of HRM strategy. By identifying patterns of employee relations practice it is possible to examine the influence of market factors and establishment size and the extent to which there is scope for strategic choice in HRM. The research indicates that whilst larger hotels operating in stable product markets might be more likely to display formal or strategic approaches to employee relations compared to the industry as a whole, this sub-sector still appears significantly divided in the extent to which managers feel able, willing or compelled to invest in associated practices.     

法律科技发展和法律语言研究

法律科技成为目前科技市场和法律服务活动中备受关注的领域,法律科技中有部分技术面向法律文档,处理包括专业术语在内的语言文字。结合已有研究,法律科技对语言处理具有一定的技术的意义,同时法律语言研究对技术应用具备一定的参考价值,综上,法律语言研究在法律科技发展中具有重要意义。     

Non-compete agreements: How fiduciary duty and covenants not to compete restrict managers’ mobility

Companies spend time and money training employees; in the case of a merger or acquisition, they spend resources such as cash, stock, and debt. It makes sense, then, that they do not want an employee to take the expertise the company underwrote to a competitor. Thus, employment contracts will often include non-compete clauses—sometimes known as covenants not to compete—which state that the employee cannot move to a competitor for a certain period of time. Though not all employees have the heightened fiduciary duty of board members and officers, they frequently have signed agreements that, at least on paper, restrict their employment mobility. Not only have officers and board members often signed such agreements as well, but they also have fiduciary duties further restricting their new employment plans. In decades of teaching courses in the legal environment of business as well as in business ethics, no topic flummoxes students more than this one. After all, in a free country, a person should be able to work where they wish, right? How can such restrictions be fair? Legally and ethically, this is a complicated area and one in which the old lawyer’s answer—it depends—is true. This article provides some parameters for employees and employers to know when fiduciary duty precludes certain employees from moving to a new company, including when those are legal in what ways they are fair.     

Defining privacy in employee health screening cases: Ethical ramifications concerning the employee/employer relationship

Issues of privacy and employee health screening rank as two of the most important ethical concerns organizations will face in the next five years. Despite the increasing numbers of social scientists researching personal privacy and the current focus on workplace privacy rights as one of the most dynamic areas of employment law, the concept of privacy remains relatively abstract. Understanding how the courts define privacy and use the expectation of privacy standards is paramount given the strategic importance of the law as a legal socializing agent. This article reports on two federal court decisions involving employer drug and HIV testing whose determinations relied on assumptions about the psychological dimensions of privacy. How the courts define privacy, the outcome of this definition and the ethical ramifications as it affects the employee/employer relationship are discussed.Michele Simms, as an adjunct professor of business communication and organizational behavior, has taught at the University of Michigan, Wayne State University and Oakland University schools of business in Michigan. In addition to teaching, she consults in the areas of worksite wellness, alternative dispute resolution, transition management and change.     

GDPR: A Step Towards a User-centric Internet?

While the potential empowering impact of the GDPR is huge, we argue that the ambivalent attitudes of users towards data protection, as well as the risk of differentiation of legal practice among member states, can seriously limit the real effects of the privacy reform.     

Ethical issues in contemporary human resource development

Training and development activities are perhaps the aspects of HRM that are least likely to come under ethical scrutiny. However, despite an espousal of ethical humanism, and various attempts to develop professional standards, training and development activities can be vulnerable to unethical practice.     

Anonymity and whistleblowing

This paper examines the moral arguments for and against employees' blowing the whistle on illegal or immoral actions of their employers. It asks whether such professional dissidents are justified in disclosing wrongdoing by others while concealing their own identity. Part I examines the concept of anonymity, distinguishing it from two similar concepts — secrecy and privacy. Part II analyzes the concept of whistleblowing using recent definitions by Bok, Bowie and De George. Various arguments against anonymous whistleblowing are identified and evaluated. The author concludes with a defense of the practice in terms of social benefits — primarily the redressing of wrongdoing.     

Why the Doctor Will NOT See You Now: The Ethics of Enforcing Covenants Not to Compete in Physician Employment Contracts

When a physician employment relationship terminates, the physician–patient relationship may also be terminated by enforcement of a covenant not to compete, which typically forces the physician to leave the geographic area for a period of time. This gives rise to several ethical dilemmas. The public interest is compromised when enforcement of these covenants contributes to the shortage of physicians in the community, and individual patients are harmed when their physicians are no longer available. The authors undertook a unique study to explore physician perspectives concerning the ethics of banning a physician from practice and the impact of the ban on both the physician and the physician’s patients. The results identified harmful effects that have not been raised in prior scholarly articles or reported court opinions. After reviewing the legal background of covenants not to compete, this paper presents the results of that study and concludes that resorting to the legal system for enforcement of covenants not to compete is not always the ethical course of action.     

HRM in Thailand: a post-1997 update

This essay updates an earlier study of human resource management (HRM) practices in Thailand, focusing specifically on HRM in the post-1997 Asian financial crisis. HRM in Thailand has undergone gradual, but significant, change, with movement away from more traditional styles of HRM and management rooted in personalism and social relationships, toward more flexible employment systems in which employment opportunities are based on merit and performance rather than connections and personal characteristics. These changes are clearly more pronounced in subsidiaries of multinational corporations, particularly those based in Western countries.     

控制权配置、制度环境与家族企业治理转型——基于国美电器“控制权之争”的案例研究

文章以国美电器"控制权之争"为背景,采用案例研究方法剖析了家族企业治理转型过程中因创业家族控制权让渡而引发的控制权私利及其诱发机理,并进一步构建模型揭示了投资者权益司法保护制度和经理人诚信与声誉机制两类制度因素对经理人控制权私利行动和创始家族控制权让渡决策的影响效应。研究表明,无论是权益司法保护,还是市场声誉机制都对经理人控制权私利行动产生显著约束,进而对创始家族控制权让渡和家族企业治理转型进程产生影响,即司法保护制度和经理人市场越发达,创始家族向职业经理人让渡的企业控制权越多,家族企业治理转型进程越顺利。     

Does organisational support promote citizenship? The moderating role of market-focused HRM

This paper describes how employment relationships and human-resource management (HRM) functions can influence employees’ citizenship role definitions in service settings. Integrating social exchange and role theory, the paper suggests that contact employees will reciprocate felt obligations of high-quality employee–organisation relationships (i.e. perceived organisational support (POS)) by expanding their role in ways consistent with contextual behavioural expectations. The longitudinal survey of 1387 contact employees and 108 managers in a large supermarket chain shows that POS and several market-focused HRM practices influence employees’ service-oriented citizenship role definitions. In particular, high-quality employment relationships contribute to expanded service-oriented citizenship role definitions when market-focused HRM practices were implemented.     

Consumer power and privacy: the changing nature of CRM

This paper briefly reviews the difficulties that privacy concerns are creating for the growth of e-business and customer relationship management (CRM). The paper introduces the concept that the changing nature of consumer power is an essential element in ensuring the success of relationship building. The paper argues that consumers should be studied using two dimensions of knowledge and attitudes towards CRM to create a privacy grid. Four segments are discussed in terms of customers’ reactions to information exchange and CRM activities. This grid is then translated into four distinct types of market situations and marketing strategies to be considered by CRM practitioners and recommendations made.