A Comment on Barnett and Block on Time Deposit and Bagus and Howden on Loan Maturity Mismatching

In Time Deposits, Dimension, and Fraud (2009), William Barnett and Walter Block argue that by borrowing short and lending long there is an over issuance of property rights. Their article, however, does not fully extend the consequences of their contribution. Once this is done, it becomes clearer that their argument suits a great impediment to banking, becoming a possible reason to support rather than to oppose fractional reserve banking. Bagus and Howden (J Bus Ethics 90(3):399–406, 2009) comment on Barnett and Block (J Bus Ethics 88(4):711–716, 2009), the authors claim that while maintaining the illegitimacy of fractional reserve deposits, borrowing short and lending long it is actually not illegitimate. An extension on Bagus and Howden (2009) will show that their line of argumentation can be applied as a defense of fractional reserve banking as well.     

营销的本质是管理交易而非买卖交易——兼论营销与销售的区别

"营销的本质"和"营销与销售的区别"是市场营销理论和实践的基本问题。从制度经济学的视角看,营销的本质是企业的一种管理交易,而不是产品买卖交易。营销具有管理交易的本质特征:生产性、效率性和层级性,而销售具有买卖交易的本质特征:分配性、价格性和平等性。营销本质上是生产者的行为,是产业资本的行为,而销售本质上是商人行为,是商业资本的行为。     

International Organisations: The Challenge of Aligning Mission,Means and Legitimacy

To be effective an international organisation must (a) be given an appropriate mission; (b) be given the means to accomplish its mission; and (c) be viewed as legitimate when carrying out the mission. This paper explores the problems in achieving these prerequisites for success first in a general discussion and then in an application to the WTO. Ensuring these conditions are met is not easy because there is an inherent tendency for many international institutions to experience ‘mission creep’, particularly when accountability for burden sharing is weak. This leads to the central dilemma facing many international organisations. If missions are expanded, and organisations given insufficient means, they are likely to fail (or fall short of optimal behaviour) and be criticised for ineffectiveness. However, the more extensive the means they are given, the more likely that their legitimacy will be questioned. The paper argues that the best way for the WTO to deal with these tensions would be to adopt an approach built on a more variable geometry in which countries would not all be required to participate in a single undertaking.     

Uncovered interest parity: it works, but not for long

If an investor borrows in a low interest currency and invests in a high interest currency, the interest differential accrues in a lumpy manner, formally just like the dividend payments on a stock. The investor will receive the interest differential discretely at the point when a position is rolled over from one day to the next. A position that is not held open overnight receives no interest differential because intradaily interest rates are zero. Using a large data set of intradaily exchange rate data, we run uncovered interest parity (UIP) regressions over different short time intervals taking careful account of the settlement rules in the spot foreign exchange market. We find results that are supportive of the uncovered interest parity hypothesis over very short windows of data that span the time of the discrete interest payment. However, adding even a few hours to the span of the window destroys the positive uncovered interest parity results.     

美国电影预告片检查制度及其合法性

预告片本质上是电影广告,这是美国预告片检查制度得以建立的必要性与合法性所在。作为电影广告,预告片在很大程度上能够影响电影票房收入。为了吸引观众,预告片以性、色情、暴力、吸毒等内容为主要叙事元素,引发政府与压力集团的谴责与反对,催生出美国预告片检查制度。这种检查制度建立于古典好莱坞时期,历经新好莱坞时期并延续至今。预告片检查的合法性基础在于预告片是不受《第一修正案》完全保护的商业表达。但是,随着制作艺术与技术的提升,预告片逐渐成为兼具商业性与艺术性的混合表达,预告片检查制度的合法性面临挑战。     

Corporate codes of ethics: necessary but not sufficient

While most large companies around the world now have a code of ethics, reported ethical malpractice among some of these does not appear to be abating. The reasons for this are explored, using academic studies, survey reports as well as insights gained from the Institute of Business Ethics' work with large corporations. These indicate that there is a gap between the existence of explicit ethical values and principles, often expressed in the form of a code, and the attitudes and behaviour of the organisation. The paper suggests that two basic reasons appear to be at the heart of the problem: ineffective ethics programmes and deficiencies in corporate culture. The paper concludes that successfully embedded corporate ethical values requires well‐designed ethics policies, sustained ethical leadership and incorporation of ethics in organisational processes and strategy as part of an ethical culture at all levels of the organisation. It makes some practical suggestions on how this can be achieved.     

论中国承接离岸服务外包的文化适应性问题

服务外包属于人才智力密集型产业,具有技术承载量大、附加价值高、资源消耗低、环境污染小、吸纳就业多等特点,是中国提升产业结构体系和转变经济发展方式的重要手段.但目前中国企业文化适应性较差,严重制约了我国在国际离岸服务外包市场上进一步扩大承接规模、提高服务质量、提升外包层次,应通过合理引进国外专门人才和全面提升国内员工素质,提高服务外包的国际竞争力.     

The Impact of Banality, Risky Shift and Escalating Commitment on Ethical Decision Making

This paper posits that organizational variables are the factors that lead to the moral decline of companies like Enron and Worldcom. The individuals involved created environments within the organizations that precipitated a spiral of unethical decision-making. It is proposed that at the executive level, it is the organizational factors associated with power and decision-making that have the critical influence on moral and ethical behavior. The study has used variables that were deemed to be surrogate measures of the ethical violations (OSHA and EPA violations), the risky shift phenomenon (executive team size), banality of wrong-doing (reputation score for firms) and escalating commitment (tenure with the firm/change in revenue for declining firms). The research found that there were small correlations between ethical violations and the three organizational variables.     

Questioning Organizational Legitimacy: The Case of U.S. Expatriates

It has been estimated that U.S. companies with global business operations can reduce their U.S. tax bill by up to 10 percentage points if they reincorporate in a zero or low tax offshore jurisdiction. But this activity, at a time of national crisis following the September 11 terrorists' attacks and recent spate of corporate scandals, has received a less than sympathetic response from the U.S. media, ordinary taxpayers, shareholders and politicians as concerns are raised about the reduction of the tax base and the lack of oversight and regulation in offshore centres. Offshore reincorporation has been condemned as immoral, unconscionable, dishonest and unpatriotic, accusations that cast doubt on the legitimacy of the companies concerned. In question is their right to conduct business in the U.S. and in particular, their right to still be viewed as American. Their legitimacy once bestowed so readily by the company's shareholders is now being questioned not only by shareholders but also the media, politicians, government regulators, pension funds and labour unions. Expatriate companies have been slow to respond to questions of their legitimacy, viewing their offshore move as a financial decision needing only the consent of their shareholders. However, times have changed and corporate legitimacy is now in the hands of all the company's stakeholders. Companies will need to explicitly consider the determinants of their legitimacy and the implications of the implied social contract under which they operate, to remain relevant in the days ahead.     

The Link Between Responsibility and Legitimacy: The Case of De Beers in Namibia

This article investigates the link between corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and the reasons for which legitimacy is ascribed or denied. It fills a gap in the literature on CSR and legitimacy that lacks empirical studies regarding the question whether CSR contributes to organisational legitimacy. The problem is discussed by referring to the case of De Beers’s diamond mining partnership with the Government of Namibia. A total of 42 interviews were conducted—41 with stakeholders and one with the focal organisation Namdeb. The 41 stakeholder interviews are analysed with regard to cognitive, pragmatic and moral legitimacy as defined by Suchman (Acad Manage Rev 20(3):571–610, 1995). The main finding is that the majority of statements on organisational legitimacy refer to moral legitimacy and most issues raised in this context challenge the company’s legitimacy despite its comprehensive CSR engagement. The study demonstrates that legitimacy gaps can be a result of communication practices that raise unrealistic stakeholder expectations and that the legitimacy gained by CSR engagement in one area cannot substitute legitimacy losses caused by failures in another.     

The Implications of Mismatching Organizational Decision-making and Communication Structures within US Retail Firms: the Role of Scanner Data

Scanner data processed in an efficient manner can provide retail organizations with a powerful managerial tool that can be used to support corporate buyers' merchandising decisions, manage inventory, provide retail sales support, and evaluate individual store performance. In the light of such potential, we examine how the distribution of scanner-generated information interacts with the locus of decision-making authority and affects the relationship between corporate buyers and store managers. We suggest that to avoid potential intra-firm conflicts between the corporate and store levels, the communication structure within an organization should be matched with a decision-making structure that shares a similar level of decentralization.     

Michael Strain: The American dream is not dead (but populism could kill it)

Business Economics -     

Trust Erosion During Industry-Wide Crises: The Central Role of Consumer Legitimacy Judgement

Journal of Business Ethics - Widespread unethical corporate misconduct in an industry triggers industry-wide crises. This research investigates how industry misconduct affects consumers’...     

The Interaction Between Suppliers and Fraudulent Customer Firms: Evidence from Trade Credit Financing of Chinese Listed Firms

Journal of Business Ethics - This study investigates the interaction between suppliers and fraudulent customer firms from the perspective of reputation damage and reputation recovery. Specifically,...     

Pro-environmental behaviors for thee but not for me: Green giants,green Gods,and external environmental locus of control

Understanding consumers' allocation of environmental responsibility to external forces (i.e., those perceived to be beyond their direct control) is important yet under-researched. This paper examines how these external attributions affect consumers' pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs). A model of external environmental locus of control (i.e., external-ELOC) is tested, consisting of two superordinate dimensions: powerful-others (encapsulating corporate and government responsibility facets) and chance/fate (incorporating God/higher-power and natural earth-cycle facets). The two higher-order factors negatively associate; such that consumers ascribing environmental responsibility to powerful-others engage in PEBs; whereas those attributing environmental change to chance/fate typically do not. The results inform practical and public policy implications; pinpointing ways for corporations and governments to target their pro-environmental efforts and to sway consumers who share in the ecological burden.     

On the Quality and Legitimacy of Green Narratives in Business: A Framework for Evaluation

Narrative is increasingly being recognised as an important tool both to manage and understand organisations. In particular, narrative is recognised to have an important influence on the perception of environmental issues in business, a particularly contested area of modern management. Management literature is, however, only beginning to develop a framework for evaluating the quality and legitimacy of narratives. Due to the highly fluid nature of narratives, the traditional notion of truth as reflecting ‹objective reality’ is not useful here. In this article, an alternative approach that evaluates a narrative in two stages is developed. First, a horizontal reading investigates the surface of the narrative, its textual features, instrumental devices and its integrity as a text, to assess the quality of a narrative. Second, a more philosophical or vertical reading makes explicit the underlying value assumptions that author and reader bring to the writing and reading of the narrative to assess the narrative’s claim to legitimacy. The framework is then tested against a narrative on the relationship between business and environment as espoused by a supply chain manager of a UK-based manufacturing company.     

产品内国际生产分工对中国的劳动需求效应分析——基于制造业转移承接国的视角

从国际产业转移承接国角度,借鉴Falk等提出的标准劳动需求方程模型,基于中国2002—2007年25个制造业行业面板数据,实证考察了产品内国际生产分工对中国劳动需求的总量效应和结构效应。研究结论显示,中国参与产品内国际生产分工促进了劳动需求总量的增长,但其对不同行业的影响程度表现出很大的差异。其中,劳动密集型产业、高技术行业和出口导向型行业的产品内国际生产分工对中国劳动需求的增长具有积极的促进作用,而资本密集型行业和进口替代型行业的产品内国际生产分工对劳动需求的增长存在负面效应。因此,进一步促进产业结构调整、消除行业就业壁垒和促进人力资本升级是中国深化国际分工的关键所在。     

Hiding in the Crowd: Government Dependence on Firms,Management Costs of Political Legitimacy,and Modest Imitation

Journal of Business Ethics - Although previous studies primarily claim that government-dependent firms can actively engage in compliance activities in order to achieve political legitimacy, access...