The Role of Commodified Celebrities in Children’s Moral Development: The Case of David Beckham

This paper presents an existentialist interpretation of the identity constituting meanings that middle‐class men and women ascribe to their bodies and their related motivations to engage in consumption activities that seek to transform their embodied selves. We begin by describing the relevance of the existential conceptualization of the embodied self to the postmodern condition of consumer culture. We apply this existential perspective to discern three dialectically structured themes drawn from phenomenological interviews with men and women across a broad age range. One emergent and unexpected finding is the extent to which these men and women expressed a constellation of common body image anxieties, thematic meanings, and self‐critical, objectifying interpretations of their bodies. Based on these findings and historical considerations, we propose that men's embodied selves are, like women's, fully inscribed in the patriarchal discourses that circulate throughout postmodern consumer culture. However, men occupy a distinct social space and, accordingly, we argue that their embodied selves are uniquely situated in a cultural model of hegemonic masculinity. We conclude that the postmodern ideal of the plastic, transformable body has become a resonant cultural metaphor through which middle‐class consumers enact their identity projects of creating a desired embodied self.     

Determinants of an Organization’s Website Ease of Use: The Moderating Role of Product Tangibility

The ease of use of an organization’s website is central to determining users’ experiences and behavioral intentions. Understanding how the site-related factors contribute to shaping perceived ease of use is thus critical. Nonetheless, we contend that the relative importance of these factors in shaping ease of use may vary according to the product offered by the organization. This research hypothesizes that the information quality of a website and its interactivity and aesthetics are antecedents to perceived ease of use and that the relative tangibility of the offered products moderates these relationships. The hypotheses are examined by performing a large-scale study in which each participant performs a task on one of 59 organizational websites. The study’s hypotheses were supported, and the results were then replicated using a second study conducted on a French-speaking sample. Site information quality is the strongest predictor of perceived ease of use, followed by the site interactivity and aesthetics. The results, however, underscore the moderating role of product tangibility. While the effects of interactivity and aesthetics are greater for sites offering services (e.g., communication, travel, insurance, and financial services), the effect of information quality is stronger for sites offering tangible products (e.g., electronics, books, and home improvement goods). The findings suggest that organizations offering tangible products should focus on providing their sites’ visitors with quality information, whereas organizations offering services should primarily focus on their sites’ aesthetics, interactive, and personalization features.     

The role of a municipality’s financial health in a firm’s siting decision

When deciding where to locate a new facility, a firm needs to consider the financial health of the municipality where its activities will take place. Unless it sites its facility in a financially viable community, a firm is putting a substantial investment at risk. Despite the importance of this issue, many firms pay insufficient attention to a municipality’s financial condition. Instead, they focus on matters such as the tax rate, the quality of the school system, or the absence of regulatory constraints. All of these features are important, but unless a municipality is financially healthy, they can evaporate before a company has attained its expected return on investment. There are 5 financial statements and 10 financial ratios that can be used to create a financial health template, which can help a firm to assess a municipality’s financial strength, or its counterpart financial weakness. The template goes beyond the debt-repayment focus of credit rating agencies to matters such as financial autonomy, cash flows, and borrowing capacity. We use data from three cities—Barcelona, Dublin, and Detroit (pre- and post-bankruptcy)—to demonstrate the template’s ability to facilitate comparisons among cities that are in different countries and that use different accounting systems.     

Children’s Responses to Traditional Versus Hybrid Advertising Formats: The Moderating Role of Persuasion Knowledge

Research on the impact of advertising on children has failed to keep pace with the rapidly changing media environment. Using an experimental approach, children’s responses towards traditional (television advertisement) versus new, hybrid advertising techniques (trailer, advergame, and their combination), and the moderating role of persuasion knowledge, are investigated. Results show that children who played an advergame have more difficulty recalling the advertised brand than children who saw a traditional television advertisement. When confronted with integrated marketing communications (a trailer followed by an advergame), children without knowledge of persuasive intent developed a more positive brand attitude than children with persuasion knowledge. The implications of these results are discussed.     

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Use of Ethics-Related Terms in 10-K Reports

We examine the occurrence of ethics- related terms in 10-K annual reports over 1994–2006 and offer empirical observations on the conceptual framework of Erhard et al. (Integrity: A Positive Model that Incorporates the Normative Phenomena of Morality, Ethics, and Legality (Harvard Business School, Harvard) 2007). We use a pre-Sarbanes-Oxley sample subset to compare the occurrence of ethics-related terms in our 10-K data with samples from other studies that consider virtue-related phenomena. We find that firms using ethics-related terms are more likely to be “sin” stocks, are more likely to be the object of class action lawsuits, and are more likely to score poorly on measures of corporate governance. The consistency of our results across these alternative measures of ethical behavior suggests that managers who portray their firm as “ethical” in 10-K reports are more likely to be systematically misleading the public. These results are consistent with the integrity-performance paradox.     

The Impact of Revenue Sources on Marketing Behavior: Examining Web‐Promotion and Place‐Marketing in Nonprofit Organizations

To overcome failure to generate profits from the goods they produce, nonprofit organizations have unique methods to generate and sustain capital flows resulting in distinct exchange relationships. This leads scholars to argue that nonprofit marketing strategies should differ as well. Given the lack of empirical work that investigates this possibility, this article explores how the uniqueness of the nonprofit funding environment shapes the ways in which nonprofits use business principles to market their products and services, asking if the resource acquisition process is the primary mechanism that predicts business‐like marketing behavior. Findings indicate that both the resource acquisition process and institutional relationships are influential in predicting business‐like marketing behavior.     

The Shaping of a Society’s Economic Ethos: A Longitudinal Study of Individuals’ Morality of Profit-Making Worldview

This study investigates the processes involved in the shaping of a society’s economic ethos. The discussion of ethics and economics has a very long history across multiple disciplines. The founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, likewise had a keen interest in this topic. However, with the development of economic science, scholarly assessment has shifted toward positive analysis while normative analysis has been left mainly to philosophers. By utilizing the newly developed morality of profit-making scale (MPM), the authors sought to understand how respondents’ economic ethical worldview shifts over time. Specifically, we theorized that the news media’s copious negative coverage of the gasoline price crisis of 2006 would significantly impact individuals’ MPM worldview. The results show that respondents’ explicit attitudes toward MPM were significantly impacted. However, respondents’ more deeply held, implicit economic ethical worldview was only slightly impacted. The authors argue that only patient, long-term explanation and argumentation can permanently affect a society’s economic ethos. Implications and future research directions for business researchers are outlined.     

The Economics of Japan’s Stagnation

The Japanese economy has been mired in subdued growth and deflation for more than two decades. This paper describes the key economic facts and features of Japan’s decades of stagnation. It discusses why long-term Japanese government bonds’ nominal yields have stayed very low in spite of elevated government debt ratios and chronic fiscal deficits. It also provides a brief overview of Abenomics and recent economic developments in Japan.     

The Winner’s Curse of Human Capital

We extend a model developed by Evans and Jovanovic (1989) to explain when start-ups are credit constrained. We show that the magnitude of the credit constraint is conditioned by the relative productivity of human capital in both wage work and self-employment. The effect of predicted household income on start-up capital is used to indicate the existence of financial constraint. Empirical analysis reveals that entrepreneurs with high human capital have both greater financial wealth and greater levels of start-up capital pointing to the endogenous nature of credit constraints. High human capital relaxes financial constraints, apparently due to greater productivity of human capital in wage work than in self-employment. Those who are the least likely to be credit constrained in self-employment are those that are least likely to switch into self-employment,and vice versa.     

The Mismeasure of Psychopathy: A Commentary on Boddy’s PM-MRV

Boddy and his colleagues have published several articles on “corporate psychopathy” using what they refer to as a Psychopathy Measure—Management Research Version (PM-MRV). They based this measure on the items that comprise the Interpersonal and Affective dimensions (Factor 1) of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), a widely used copyrighted and controlled instrument. The PM-MRV not only misspecifies the construct of psychopathy, but also serves as an example of the problems associated with an attempt to form a “new” scale by adapting items from a proprietary scale. The PCL-R measures a superordinate construct underpinned by four correlated dimensions or first-order factors, not just the two in the PM-MRV. The other two dimensions are Lifestyle and Antisocial, which together form Factor 2 of the PCL-R. As defined by the PCL-R, psychopathy requires high scores on both Factor 1 and Factor 2. Lack of validity aside, even if the PM-MRV were to be a useful measure of Factor 1, it would not discriminate between psychopathy and other “dark personalities,” such as Machiavellianism and narcissism, which, along with psychopathy, form the Dark Triad. This lack of discrimination stems from the fact that each of these personalities shares features measured by Factor 1 and, by implication, by the PM-MRV. Research findings based on the PM-MRV may have some meaning with respect to dark personalities in general, but their relevance to psychopathy, as measured with the PCL-R, is tenuous at best.     

Advancing Ethics in Public Organizations: The Impact of an Ethics Program on Employees’ Perceptions and Behaviors in a Regional Council

Ethics in public administration has been a subject of growing interest for both researchers and practitioners interested in the future of governance. This study examined the relationship between ethics and performance in local governance. We tested the effects over time of an ethics program on employees’ perceptions (awareness of the code of ethics, ethical leadership, inclusion of employees in ethical decision making [EDM], ethical climate [EC], organizational commitment, and quality of work life [QWL]) and behavior (organizational citizenship behavior) in one Israeli regional council. We conducted a longitudinal study of 108 employees, using data from a two-phase survey (before implementation of the ethics program and a year after) and objective assessments of employees’ behavior through managers’ evaluations. The main findings show that the ethics program was very effective, resulting in greater awareness of the code of ethics, increased inclusion of employees in EDM, and an improved EC. Furthermore, ethical leadership was positively related to employees’ awareness of the code of ethics, increased inclusion of employees in EDM, an improvement in the EC, greater organizational commitment, and higher QWL. Implications and suggestions for future studies are discussed.     

The Consequences of Consumers’ Use of Pre-Existing Social Relationships to Make Purchases

In this article, we extend and refine previous research on marketing relationships by specifically examining consumers’ use of pre-existing social relationships (i.e., friendships) with firm representatives to make purchases. This study identifies the various consequences of using pre-existing social relationships and integrates these new outcomes with existing research to develop a cohesive theoretical framework. Doing so highlights the unique advantages of developing stronger relationships between firms and customers, while also extending marketing scholars’ and practitioners’ understanding of relationship marketing. Finally, this study links the outcomes of using these relationships to important marketing constructs, such as satisfaction and loyalty.     

When a picture’s worth a thousand words: The effects of visual construal priming on information acquisition and choice

Individuals acquire information in an attribute- or alternative-based way depending on the construal level of the choice situation. This research contributes to the literature by showing that different information acquisition strategies can emerge not only as a function of the psychological distance from the object of evaluation but also through situational cues unrelated to the evaluation task, such as a visual priming. Furthermore, results show that which pattern of information acquisition is adopted in turn affects individual choices. While the literature has already found a direct effect of construal levels on choices, the present analysis supports the existence also of an indirect effect, mediated by the information acquisition pattern. Consequently, managers can implement simple tools, such as visual stimuli alongside the presentation of product-related information, to display information consistently with individuals’ construal levels, bearing in mind that the way consumers acquire information is a predictor of their choices.     

The Validity of Gibrat’s Law: Evidence from Ecuadorian Service SMEs

The objective of this research is to analyze the relationship between size and growth through the validation of Gibrat's law. A sample of 17,082 Ecuadorian companies in the service sector is used for the period 2010–2015. The estimation method used is that of quantile regression for panel data; the results suggest that small companies grow faster than their larger counterparts. The results show that the growth, measured through sales and employment, of SMEs in the service sector in Ecuador is not independent of firm size and therefore does not correspond to a random process.     

The entrepreneur’s mode of entry: the effect of social and financial capital

This article uses a French database of firms set up in 1998 to investigate the determinants of takeovers versus startups as a mode of entry. It focuses on two determinants that previous research has not fully analyzed: social capital and financial capital. Our findings suggest social capital affects the mode of entry. They show that entrepreneurs with social capital are more likely to create new firms from scratch than to take over existing firms. We confirm the effect of financial capital on the mode of entry. Bank loans are more often associated with takeovers than with startups and low initial wealth is more often associated with startups than with takeovers. These results show that finance affects the mode of entry.     

The Morality of Unequal Autonomy: Reviving Kant’s Concept of Status for Stakeholders

Though we cherish freedom and equality, there are human relations we commonly take to be morally permissible despite the fact that they essentially involve an inequality specifically of freedom, i.e., parental and fiduciary relations. In this article, I argue that the morality of these relations is best understood through a very old and dangerous concept, the concept of status. Despite their historic and continuing abuses, status relations are alive and well today, I argue, because some of them are necessary. We must therefore carefully specify the conditions in which such status relations may morally obtain, as well as the duties of virtue and duties of right to which all parties are subject when it does (including a duty of care) to clearly articulate the ways in which these putatively moral status relations that essentially involve an asymmetry of autonomy (status relations) can go well or badly even within the context of the Kantian tradition from which our current legal and social practices arose. To this end, I offer Kant’s own concept of status as a promising one because in Kant’s theory, status is a nexus of virtue and right that is reducible to neither property nor contract but akin to each in familiar ways. Once status is admitted as an alternative to property and contract, status may be extended beyond Kant’s domestic paradigm, most perspicuously to institutional ethics. In this article, I sketch a status-based theory of stakeholding that locates environmental impact, institutional oppression, and other significant features of our moral landscape within a Kantian framework of duties rich enough to more accurately characterize the complexities of stakeholding than current tradition has allowed.