Exploring the Ethical Dimension of Hawala

The aim of this paper is to explore the ethical dimension of hawala, an ancient informal financial practice rooted in Islamic moral traditions. Widely used in countries with an Islamic background and their diasporas, hawala is considered an important vehicle for the financial and economic development of some less developed countries. Nevertheless, in Western countries, hawala is regarded with suspicion due its controversial ethical nature. Unlike other Islamic financial institutions, the controversial questions are not the legitimacy of profit sources or the interest charged, but rather the lack of transparency that surrounds hawala transactions. Yet, the literature on hawala has neglected its ethical perspective. Our study delves into this dimension with a critical approach, using the Triple Font Theory, grounded on virtue ethics. We conclude that if hawala transactions are carried out with honesty, and fairness, this practice deserves a positive ethical appraisal. However, it is necessary to implement efficient regulatory measures to guarantee that the system is not abused by money launders and criminals. In practice, it becomes imperative to bring over a change in the regulatory approach to hawala toward a more ethically, culturally, and economically sensitive strategy. Thus, future research should focus on how “hyper-norms” or fundamental principles inherent to humanity, which are common to both “formal” and “informal,” “Western” and “non-Western” financial practices, could run the new AML/CTF regulation agenda.     

“Moral Distance” in Organizations: An Inquiry into Ethical Violence in the Works of Kafka

In this paper, we demonstrate that the works of Franz Kafka provide an exemplary resource for the investigation of “moral distance” in organizational ethics. We accomplish this in two ways, first by drawing on Kafka’s work to navigate the complexities of the debate over the ethics of bureaucracy, using his work to expand and enrich the concept of “moral distance.” Second, Kafka’s work is used to investigate the existence of “ethical violence” within organizations which entails acts of condemnation and cruelty purportedly in the name of ethics. Kafka’s work provides insight into the processes of moral distancing across a range of organizational contexts including highly formal as well as more informal settings. The paper enriches the concept “moral distance” by identifying the existence of facilitators of moral distance beyond the mechanisms of formal rationality that have been the focus of existing studies. We argue that Kafka’s intense portrayal of “ethical violence” points to an aporia at the very heart of organizational ethics.     

Institutional and corporate drivers of global talent management: Evidence from the Arab Gulf region

This study analyses how talent management (TM) is molded by institutional and corporate drivers. We borrow from the vast institutional literature to understand how organizations adopt and implement TM practices within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) context. This context is valuable not only because it tackles an under-researched region, but also because the type of variables found further our understanding of TM processes in non-Western contexts. Companies abide by localization rules to sustain their “legal” legitimacy, while trying to improve efficiency through actions that enhance their economic sustainability. Companies try to strike a strategic balance between local adaptation and global assimilation of their TM processes. We conclude by presenting a framework that portrays how various forces impact the TM process.     

Reproducing “rhetrickery” in online fertility marketing: harnessing the “rhetoric of the possible”

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the gap in research on visual and narrative persuasion in online fertility marketing contexts and reveals their reliance on rhetorical ruses embedded in the language of “choice” and “empowerment”. We assess four websites targeting women and men who have experienced infertility and expose their “digirhetrickery”, or use of deceptive rhetoric in digital space which exploits gendered stereotypes of the female body in ways that ultimately mislead their target markets about assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and the “liberatory” potential they offer. We advance digital rhetoric as an analytical method to the field of consumer research in order to engage in a reflexive analysis that reveals these underhand ideological operations. As “authorial voices” and narrative agents in digital advertising discourse are more cunningly subterranean, this study shows how the instrumentalization of “consumer empowerment” has become increasingly hyperbolic with particularly problematic consequences for infertile women consumers.     

A Model of Social Entrepreneurial Discovery

Social entrepreneurship activity continues to surge tremendously in market and economic systems around the world. Yet, social entrepreneurship theory and understanding lag far behind its practice. For instance, the nature of the entrepreneurial discovery phenomenon, a critical area of inquiry in general entrepreneurship theory, receives no attention in the specific context of social entrepreneurship. To address the gap, we conceptualize social entrepreneurial discovery based on an extension of corporate social responsibility into social entrepreneurship contexts. We develop a model that emphasizes mobilization and timing as underpinnings of social entrepreneurial discovery and offer distinct conceptual aspects and theoretic propositions instrumental to future social entrepreneurship research.     

Politicising Government Engagement with Corporate Social Responsibility: “CSR” as an Empty Signifier

Governments are widely viewed by academics and practitioners (and society more generally) as the key societal actors who are capable of compelling businesses to practice corporate social responsibility (CSR). Arguably, such government involvement could be seen as a technocratic device for encouraging ethical business behaviour. In this paper, we offer a more politicised interpretation of government engagement with CSR where “CSR” is not a desired form of business conduct but an element of discourse that governments can deploy in structuring their relationships with other social actors. We build our argument through a historical analysis of government CSR discourse in the Russian Federation. Laclau and Mouffe's (Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics, Verso Books, London, 1985) social theory of hegemony underpins our research. We find that “CSR” in the Russian government’s discourse served to legitimise its power over large businesses. Using this case, we contribute to wider academic debates by providing fresh empirical evidence that allows the development of critical evaluation tools in relation to governments’ engagement with “CSR”. We find that governments are capable of hijacking CSR for their own self-interested gain. We close the paper by reflecting on the merit of exploring the case of the Russian Federation. As a “non-core”, non-western exemplar, it provides a useful “mirror” with which to reflect on the more widely used test-bed of Western industrial democracies when scrutinising CSR. Based on our findings, we invite other scholars to adopt a more critical, politicised stance when researching the role of governments in relation to CSR in other parts of the world.

     

Professional Accountants’ Identity Formation: An Integrative Framework

Previous studies in Western contexts have examined the relationships between various board characteristics and CSR, yet the relationships need to be re-examined in non-Western contexts given differential theoretical premises across contexts. We specifically propose that the effects of board characteristics on CSR in Korea should be patterned distinctively from Western-based existing literature, focusing on three important board characteristics, such as a board’s independence, social ties, and diversity. Using a panel dataset from large Korean firms, we found that various relationships between board characteristics and CSR were non-linear, whereas most of the previous research on Western contexts found that the same relationships were linear. Specifically, curvilinear relationships were found between CSR and board independence (i.e., exponentially growing shape), CEO-outside director social ties (i.e., inverted U-shape), and educational diversity (i.e., U-shape). Our findings suggest that there is no universal feature of CSR-supportive board characteristics due to the unique characteristics of various institutional contexts.     

On the different “worlds” of intra-organizational knowledge management: Understanding idiosyncratic variation in MNC cross-site knowledge-sharing practices

This qualitative field study investigated cross-site knowledge sharing in a small sample of multinational corporations in three different MNC business contexts (global, multidomestic, transnational). The results disclose heterogeneous “worlds” of MNC knowledge sharing, ultimately raising the question as to whether the whole concept of MNC knowledge sharing covers a sufficiently unitary phenomenon to be meaningful. We derive a non-exhaustive typology of MNC knowledge-sharing practices: self-organizing knowledge sharing, technocratic knowledge sharing, and best practice knowledge sharing. Despite its limitations, this typology helps to elucidate a number of issues, including the latent conflict between two disparate theories of MNC knowledge sharing, namely “sender–receiver” and “social learning” theories (Noorderhaven & Harzing, 2009). More generally, we develop the term “knowledge contextualization” to highlight the way that firm-specific organizational features pre-define which knowledge is considered to be of special relevance for intra-organizational sharing.     

Managing Knowledge,Learning, and Time in Relationships Between Western and African Organizations

ABSTRACT

Time as a strategic variable has gained a great deal of attention in recent literature, but little has been reported on how to effectively manage time between strategic partners in a global context. In addition, there has been virtually no attention paid to time as a critical strategic variable when doing business in African countries. This paper examines the importance of time in developing effective operating relationships between Western and African countries. We posit the concept of strategic timescapes to provide managers with a way of visualizing the various dimensions of time that could vary from one culture to another. In addition, a means to effectively manage knowledge and learning between Western and African organizations is presented using the concept of “virtual” organizations to serve as the coordinating vehicle.     

Social entrepreneurship: A critical review of the concept

This paper undertakes an analytical, critical and synthetic examination of “social entrepreneurship” in its common use, considering both the “social” and the “entrepreneurship” elements in the concept. On both points, there is a range of use with significant differences marked by such things as the prominence of social goals and what are thought of as the salient features of entrepreneurship. The paper concludes with the proposal of a suitably flexible explication of the concept: social entrepreneurship is exercised where some person or persons (1) aim either exclusively or in some prominent way to create social value of some kind, and pursue that goal through some combination of (2) recognizing and exploiting opportunities to create this value, (3) employing innovation, (4) tolerating risk and (5) declining to accept limitations in available resources.     

A ‘glocalization’ approach to the internationalizing of crisis communication

This article focuses on the field of international crisis communication, whereby multinationals and their expatriate staff respond to crisis events in international and/or multicultural contexts. The field of international crisis communication is at or near a state of crisis due to lack of research and, more importantly, methods useful for practitioners. ‘Glocalization’—which is used successfully in fields as diverse as marketing, education, theology, and others as an effective and expedient way of leveraging global capabilities to meet local demands—is proposed as one method for addressing this need pragmatically. Using glocalization for the internationalizing of crisis communication benefits practitioners and researchers alike in a way that avoids imposing Western frameworks and interpretations onto non-Western crisis situations. We demonstrate the approach with a case study involving multinational McDonald’s Corporation and its foreign subsidiary, McDonald’s Japan.     

Feature-based attributes and the roles of consumers' perception bias and inference in choice

This paper considers decision contexts wherein consumers make choices among alternatives that contain a manifest feature-based attribute: i.e., a discrete, salient and important attribute that describes a dichotomous quality, such as “genetically modified”, “organic”, or “locally grown”. We propose a choice model that can explicitly account for a) perception bias with respect to such an attribute when its information is present, and b) inference formation if this attribute information is missing for some alternatives. The impact of different information presentation formats on consumers' perception bias and inference formation is then examined by applying theories from social psychology. Our model outperforms standard Random Utility models that omit explicit representation of these phenomena. Consistent with theories considered, we find significant evidence of perception bias and inference in the choice data. Our results also provide insights on how consumers may infer the quality of a missing attribute in different competitive framing contexts. Finally, our welfare estimates show that consumers may benefit simply from the information improvement regarding government labeling policies.     

Measuring market orientation: A multi‐factor,multi‐item approach

The marketing literature reflects remarkable inconsistency in defining two of its most frequently used terms, “the marketing concept” and “market orientation”. Through a critical review of the marketing literature and an empirical analysis of data collected from 248 Canadian firms, the authors established a four‐component measure of “market orientation”. The resulting multi‐factor, multi‐item instrument provides a foundation for future studies.     

Prioritizing Geo-References: A Content Analysis of the Websites of Leading Global Luxury Fashion Brands

ABSTRACT

The current study investigates the extent to which various types of references to geographic entities are being used in communications with consumers on global websites of 15 leading luxury fashion brands. Using the Relevance-Distinctiveness-Believability framework, we posit that references to country of brand origin and to relatedness to developed Western countries are the most distinct and relevant and will be used more frequently than references to brand globalness and non-Western developed countries. We also suggest that Caucasian (i.e., “White”) models will be depicted more frequently than other ethnicities to further connect brands to Western countries. The analysis of 3,750 explicit-verbal, implicit-verbal, and non-verbal geo-references supports our predictions. These results suggest that, at least for the luxury fashion industry, the value of references to the country of brand origin and to the brand's relatedness to Western countries is substantially higher than the value of brand globalness. The article discusses the applicability of the RDB framework for prioritizing different types of geo-references and suggests venues for future research.     

Toward a cross‐cultural theory of “exemplary organizations”: Evidence from Cuba

Management interest in “good companies to work for,” or “exemplary organizations,” has attracted the interest of researchers in the United States and Europe. We contribute to the literature on exemplary organizations by studying the representation of “exemplary organizations” in an unusual context, Cuba, and by inviting scholars to explore the cross‐cultural differences between what in different countries is viewed as an exemplary organization. Until now, studies on the best companies to work for have focused on companies operating in capitalistic economies. We aim to develop a better understanding of the representation of what a good place might be in an economic and ideological context that is in sharp contrast with the contexts in which this theme has been studied previously. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Expanding the magic circle – gamification as a marketplace icon

ABSTRACT

This article explores the gamification trend sweeping the globe promising increased engagement and motivation, in practically any industry, context and culture, based on a stratagem of “game design elements in non-game contexts,” which is its most quoted definition [Deterding, Sebastian, Miguel Sicart, Lennart Nacke, Kenton O'Hara, and Dan Dixon. 2011. “Gamification – Using Game-Design Elements in Non-Gaming Contexts.” Paper presented at the CHI EA “11 proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vancouver, BC, May 7–12.]. The rise of gamification as marketplace icon is examined and particularly claims that position gamification as the manifestation of a wider societal transformation into playful societies – a “ludic turn.” Many of these grandiose statements are the result of ahistoricity and ambiguity regarding the definition of gamification. Based on game philosophy, game studies and gamification research this article posits gamification as an emergent perspective, as distinct conceptualisation, on the rule-driven organisation of sociotechnical management systems that reference “games.” Of particular importance is the role of rules. Examples such as Frequent Flyer Programmes and Foursquare are analysed according to the player/consumer positions they bestow, which are explored from participatory, co-creational, critical and game philosophical perspectives. Conclusively, a “gameful” perspective of rule-generated goal-oriented behaviour, or “playful” perspective of instinctive and limitless fun, shed two challenging perspectives on the interpretation of gamification in the marketplace.     

Uppercase Premium Effect: The Role of Brand Letter Case in Brand Premiumness

Researchers have recently begun investigating how visual elements affect brand positioning. However, little is known about the effect of brand typeface features on brand premiumness. This paper proposes and verifies that letter case affects consumers’ perceived brand premiumness. Eight experiments, including one eye-tracking experiment, reveal that consumers perceive brands that use all uppercase letters (“uppercase brands”) as more premium than those that use all lowercase letters (“lowercase brands”). We refer to this effect as the “uppercase premium effect.” This effect is induced by the perceived conspicuousness of uppercase brands, a process which in turn is moderated by the product's social visibility. The effect is reversed for consumers who prefer subtle signals (“inconspicuous consumers”) because these consumers are likely to perceive a conspicuous uppercase brand as gaudy. Whereas status-motivated consumers are more likely to choose uppercase brands due to the increased premiumness perceptions, the increment in such perceptions does not further influence the purchase decisions of consumers indifferent to expressing status. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications and offer suggestions for further research.     

The democratic method of obtaining capital—culture,governmentality and ethics of mass investment

The past thirty years have witnessed a range of complex changes in global and national political–economic landscapes. One of the most dramatic aspects of these changes is the “globalization” of finance capital. “Finance” is often said to be at the center of a new and globalizing set of financial spaces in which “everyday” actors are increasingly asked to participate. However, these developments are often depicted in the critical literature in epochal terms as political–economic configurations arising out of macro‐structural episodes of change. In contrast to these approaches, this paper argues for a “cultural economy” for finance as a way of both situating recent developments in a more specific and historically subtle manner and underscoring the ways in which “finance” is lived and constituted at a “minor” or everyday level. By assessing the advertising initiatives of three campaigns of “mass investment” from earlier moments of the twentieth century, this paper foregrounds some of the contexts out of and against which neo‐liberal modes of globalized finance arise, concluding that more historically‐situated accounts could lead to more contingent, and hence, contestable analyses of “global finance”.     

The Need to Give Gratuitously: A Relevant Concept Anchored in Catholic Social Teaching to Envision the Consumer Behavior

The “gift exchange theory” articulated by Marcel Mauss, along with his core concept of a threefold obligation (giving/receiving/returning), is the dominant theoretical framework used to explain the majority of gift issues in marketing. This perspective assumes that some interest always lies behind gifts, such that a gift always implies a counterpart of receiving something in return. Despite the relevance of this approach in understanding the day-to-day consumer behavior, this paper presents empirical cases where the consumer is also able to give freely, that is to say without implying a counterpart or even expecting it. To explain those empirical cases, we mobilize a key teaching of the Catholic Church: the “gratuitous gift” and then introduce the concept of the “need to give.” We show that gratuitousness is a relevant concept to understand most of gifts made by consumers, and we develop the normative aspect of gratuitous gift for ethical marketers (i.e., what ethical marketers should consider to understand consumers properly and in a more humanistic way). We also show that Catholic Social Teaching offers an appropriate anthropology to understand consumer behaviors motivated by this need for gratuitousness. To conclude, we propose further avenues of research.