Ethics,morality and the subject: the contribution of Zygmunt Bauman and Michel Foucault to `postmodern’ business ethics

This paper discusses a `postmodern’ alternative to business ethics in the light of two authors: Zygmunt Bauman and Michel Foucault. Despite their different usage of the concepts `ethics’ and `morality', both offer an approach to ethics that avoids the problems of a self-enclosed subject inherent in liberal as well as in communal theories. Bauman and Foucault demonstrate how the continuation of social dialogue suffers from the postulation of fixed individual and organizational identities. Managers and other participants cannot formulate ethical rules on their own, but neither can they come together as a community without tensions and difference. Instead, embodied engagement in the reciprocal play of interpretations and influences keeps us ethically attuned to the limits of reason.     

Is the doctor in? A relational approach to job design and the coordination of work

When designing jobs, the degree of specialization is a key consideration. Though functional specialization allows workers to develop deep areas of expertise, it also increases the challenge of coordinating their work. In this article, we propose the concepts of stage‐ and site‐based specialization and posit that together they can counteract the divisive effects of functional specialization. Taking advantage of a natural experiment in physician job design at a Massachusetts hospital, we explore the impact of stage‐ and site‐based specialization on coordination and performance outcomes. Building on recent interest in relational approaches to job design, this study is the first to link relational job design to relational outcomes such as coordination. Our findings have practical implications for job design in professional service settings such as education, consulting, and health care. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

‘Escaping to the gallery’: understanding the motivations of visitors to galleries

• Whilst market research and academic studies by sociologists have identified the personal and socio-cultural factors that influence visits to galleries, there has been less attention to the area of motivational research. Understanding motivations is important as it reveals the underlying reasons why visitors choose to participate in specific leisure activities. This paper focuses on the motivations of two groups of visitors at events at an art gallery. A pre-tested motivational scale built around three factors, learning, social/family interaction and Escapism explained 71.5% of variance. Escapism explained 29.4% of that variance and was the core motivation. The findings of the research are important to both academics and practitioners as previously learning was thought to be the main motivation. This study should be replicated in other settings to evaluate whether gallery and museum managers need to re-consider the purpose, content and marketing of their programmes in a post-modern society.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How to prove,how to interpret and what to do? Uncertainty experiences of street-level tax officials

This study examines the kind of uncertainties frontline tax officials working with a trust-based inspection approach experience in interacting with citizen-clients. The classical literature on bureaucracy and the street-level bureaucracy literature suggest frontline officials face two kinds of uncertainties: information and interpretation problems. Analysing stories of Dutch frontline tax officials collected through in-depth interviews, this article shows that these two kinds of uncertainty only explain a part of the uncertainties experienced. Respondents also face action problems requiring improvisational judgements. The study furthermore finds that different sources underlie these uncertainties, pointing to possible explanations.     

Variation in the average leadership behaviour of managers across countries: Finnish expatriates’ experiences from Germany,Sweden, France and Great Britain

This paper presents the experiences of Finnish expatriates (n=36) from four European countries representing proposed cultural clusters in Western Europe. The focus is on variation in manager–subordinate interaction, i.e. on leadership behaviours of managers across countries. Based on cultural theory and existing comparative research, the national origin of managers is expected to influence their leadership behaviour. By reviewing various earlier comparative studies, working hypotheses are formed about expected variation across countries. The results indicate that variation could be identified in the average styles of managers across countries, although in most cases differences also emerged between expatriates’ reports. This variation in expatriates’ experiences indicates that variation within countries should also be kept in mind when discussing variation across countries. However, it was regarded as possible to form a model of typical characteristics of leadership styles of managers across countries from the perspective of Finnish expatriates based on the identified variation. The implications of variation identified across countries for expatriates and multinational companies are also discussed.     

Explaining the Reactions of Swiss Municipalities to The ‘Amalgamation Wave’: At the crossroad of institutional,economic and political pressures

Abstract

Public sector organizations are simultaneously subject to three types of environmental pressure: institutional, economic and political. How do these pressures influence the strategic behaviour of public organizations when confronted with efficiency-oriented reforms? We focus on the strategic behaviour of Swiss municipalities facing the amalgamation wave: a reform characterized by a strong economic rationale. Results confirm that the success of reforms depends not only on its matching with economic underpinnings. It is also necessary to take the political leadership and the responsibility of reform implementation.     

Response to the Letter to the Editor on ‘On Quantile-based Asymmetric Family of Distributions: Properties and Inference’

Rubio (2020) points out an identification problem for the four-parameter family of two-piece asymmetric densities introduced by Nassiri & Loris (2013). This implies that statistical inference for that family is problematic. Establishing probabilistic properties for this four-parameter family however still makes sense. For the three-parameter family, there is no identification problem. The main contribution in Gijbels et al. (2019a) is to provide asymptotic results for maximum likelihood and method-of-moments estimators for all members of the three-parameter quantile-based asymmetric family of distributions.     

The views and suggestions to the librarians’ quality of information

Firstly, the connotation and basic content of information literacy were introduced in this paper. Secondly, the relationship of information quality between the librarians and college students was discussed. Finally, the concrete measures for improving the librarians’ quality of information were suggested.     

Contrasting Burns and Bass: Does the transactional‐transformational paradigm live up to Burns' philosophy of transforming leadership?

Both proponents and critics view the transactional‐transformational paradigm (Bass, 1997, 1998) as the brainchild of Burns' (1978) philosophy of transforming leadership. However, Burns (2003) has criticized the paradigm's narrow managerialist orientation and the claim that it is uniformly applicable to any culture and organization. In this article, I first summarize and articulate Burns' (1978, 2003) and Bass' (1985, 1998) approaches toward leadership, then compare them by using a new four‐dimensional framework. Extending previous research (Yukl, 2006), the framework represents a useful tool for detecting the commonalities and differences between leadership theories with respect to the core dimensions, categories, and aspects of leadership. My inspection indicates that Burns' and Bass' conceptions stem from disparate contexts and differ in their applicability. Thus, Burns' (1978) ideas stem from political movements ideally characterized by mutual quest for shared meaning and active collaboration between leaders and followers. Conversely, Bass' (1985) approach springs from military training in which leaders transfer existing knowledge to followers and stimulate their activity by using a variety of tools from inspirational motivation to individualized consideration. This study has important practical implications as it delineates the boundary conditions of the transactional‐transformational paradigm and warns against its uncritical adoption in incongruent leadership contexts.     

Letter to the Editor: ‘On Quantile-based Asymmetric Family of Distributions: Properties and Inference’

We show that the family of asymmetric distributions studied in a recent publication in the International Statistical Review is equivalent to the family of two-piece distributions. Moreover, we show that the location-scale asymmetric family proposed in that publication is non-identifiable (overparameterised), and it coincides with the family of two-piece distributions after removing the redundant parameters.     

Digitalisation,unions and participation: the German case of ‘industry 4.0’

This article tackles the question of how labour representatives cope with the implementation of ‘Industrie 4.0’ in German manufacturing plants. Digitalisation of manufacturing is going along with challenges for employment, work organisation and working conditions. The article analyses one of the main strategies German unions have developed, the project ‘Work 2020’, which was to raise works councils' awareness of the workplace impact of digitalisation, improve their knowledge of the changes, raise their capacity to respond and, finally, lead to the negotiation of workplace agreements on this issue with employers. The results of the analysis show that a strong interplay between unions and works councils and the activation of works councils by the unions have become indispensable preconditions for coping with the new challenges both of digitalisation and of the ongoing erosion of the German system of labour relations.     

Correction to: Inside Buchanan’s Samaritan’s Dilemma: altruism,strategic courage and ethics of responsibility

Economics of Governance - The Samaritan’s Dilemma has largely been investigated, frequently by assuming that Samaritans help recipients out of altruism. Yet, Buchanan did not make any...     

Linking entrepreneurial and market orientation to the SME’s performance growth: the moderating role of entrepreneurial experience and networks

Entrepreneurial orientation and market orientation (EO and MO, respectively) have received extensive research attention in the past several decades. Although scholars widely agree that both MO and EO are critical to firms’ performances, a better understanding is still needed about how market and entrepreneurial orientation develop over time as well as their relative impact on the growth of the SME’s performance. This study does not consider MO and EO as generic resources that always positively influence firms’ performances; instead, it tries to explore contingent elements, such as social and business networks and accumulated entrepreneurial experience. The hypotheses were tested on 191 small and medium-sized electronic firms located in an Italian geographical cluster during two periods: 2005 and 2016. This study suggests that SMEs, which develop social networks, may enjoy considerable advantages from entrepreneurial and market orientation, improving their performance benefits. Moreover, our results show that previous entrepreneurial experience, when specific, can reinforce the impact of entrepreneurial and market orientation on firms’ performance growth. This analysis makes several important contributions to the management literature on the strategic orientation of firms, the entrepreneurial experience and network development.

     

Measuring the Returns to Networking and the Accumulation of Social Capital: Any Evidence of Bonding,Bridging, or Linking?

This article presents analyses of individual investment in social capital using both the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the UK Time Use Survey (2000) (UKTUS). We suggest a general theoretical framework that could possibly explain individual investment in various forms of social networking. Measures of social capital are then constructed in an attempt to capture the extent of individual investment in bonding, bridging, and linking networks. These measures, together with other socioeconomic indicators, are used as explanatory factors in wage equations, estimated using ordered probit, OLS, and instrumental variable approaches. We are unable to identify any consistent returns from investment in bonding and bridging networks. In contrast, the evidence suggests that any returns to investment in the development of linking social capital simply derive from the positive signals that group membership may transmit to potential employers. Our results underline the contrast between studies that consider social capital as an attribute of communities, as opposed to individuals, in that we find a negative return to social activity at the level of the individual.     

Women’s experiences of legitimacy,satisfaction and commitment as entrepreneurs: embedded in gender hierarchy and networks in private and business spheres

ABSTRACT

When a woman perceives legitimacy in her job as an entrepreneur from networks that are often influenced by the gender hierarchy that grants men higher status than women, she is encouraged in her job. What are the effects of gender hierarchy and networks on the legitimacy a female entrepreneur perceives and on her satisfaction and commitment to the job? A sample of 5997 female entrepreneurs in the developing world was surveyed for Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. They were found to experience legitimacy as entrepreneurs in their networks in the private sphere and the business sphere. Gender hierarchy constrains legitimacy more in the private sphere than it does in the business sphere. Legitimacy in the business sphere can fulfil the need to feel competent and enhance job satisfaction, while legitimacy in the private sphere can fulfil the need to feel related and enhance job commitment. The account contributes to a two-level contextualization of experiences: micro-level embedding in networks that are nested in macro-level embedding in gender hierarchy.