International Regulation on Health,Safety, and the Environment – Trends and Challenges

The international regulation of health, safety, and the environment has come far. Spurred by the United States, the United Nations established in the 1980's a tight net of rules that define minimum standards for the production and marketing of hazardous goods. The rules are for the most part non-binding. The successful conclusion of the GATT Uruguay Round now makes it imperative to balance the rules of international product safety law against the liberties demanded by international free trade. This challenge offers new perspectives for the development of international product safety law.     

Revisiting the Satisfaction–Loyalty Relationship: Empirical Generalizations and Directions for Future Research

This extensive literature review highlights the state of the art regarding the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty, both attitudinal and behavioral. In particular, it brings to light several issues that should be carefully considered in analyzing the efficacy of customer satisfaction in explaining and predicting customer loyalty. In fact, for many years companies all around the world have heavily invested in customer satisfaction in the hope of increasing loyalty, and hence, consequently, profitability. But after having gone through a detailed analysis, it is clear that this link it is not as strong as it is believed to be and customer satisfaction is not enough to explain loyalty. In fact, the major findings of this review are captured in the form of a few empirical generalizations. We generalize that, while there is a positive relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty, the variance explained by just satisfaction is rather small. Models that encompass other relevant variables as moderators, mediators, antecedent variables, or all three are better predictors of loyalty than just customer satisfaction. Further, the satisfaction–loyalty relationship has the potential to change over time. Similar weaker findings are uncovered and the study offers specific guidelines on who, when, and how much to satisfy. Finally, suggestions for future research to explore this domain are offered.     

Together and Apart: Exploring Structure of the Corporate–NPO Relationship

Financially significant relationships between corporations and non-profit organizations (NPOs) have increased in recent years. NPOs offer access to interests and ideologies that are lacking within most for-profit organizations. These partnerships form a unique bridge between for-profit and non-profit goals and offer significant potential to produce innovative ways of “doing business by doing good.” Exploration of the structural implications of these relationships, however, has been limited. The potential for ideological imbalance in these relationships, particularly for the NPO, has been poorly described. We explore the structure of Corporate–NPO relationships from the NPO's perspective under high pressure conditions such as large relational investments or negative pressure from stakeholders. Using data collected from 20 NPOs in Australia, we identified the use by NPOs of both formal and informal governance mechanisms within their partnerships. These mechanisms acted to align and defend important goals of the NPO. They allowed the NPO and their corporate partners to be simultaneously “together and apart.” Our study offers important insight toward the study of cross-sector relationships and the role of governance mechanisms.     

Trust and Stakeholder Theory: Trustworthiness in the Organisation–Stakeholder Relationship

Trust is a fundamental aspect of the moral treatment of stakeholders within the organization–stakeholder relationship. Stakeholders trust the organization to return benefit or protections from harm commensurate with their contributions or stakes. However, in many situations, the firm holds greater power than the stakeholder and therefore cannot necessarily be trusted to return the aforementioned duty to the stakeholder. Stakeholders must therefore rely on the trustworthiness of the organization to fulfill obligations in accordance to Phillips’ principle of fairness (Business Ethics Quarterly 7(1), 1997, 51–66), particularly where low-power stakeholders may not be fully consenting (Van Buren III, Business Ethics Quarterly 11(3), 2001, 481–499). The construct of organizational trustworthiness developed herewith is presented as a possible solution to the problem of unfairness in organization–stakeholder relations. While organizational trustworthiness does not create an ethical obligation where none existed before, stakeholders who lack power will likely be treated fairly when organizational trustworthiness is present.     

Food Safety: for Whom the Bell Tolls?

Fpr the food safety incidents occurred in recent years, enterprises involved have been severely punished, while judicial punishment for regulators conducting malpractices is a far cry from satisfactory.A supervision campaign for food safety triggered off by the steamed bun scandal in Shanghai has swept across the whole country.The next day after the tainted steamed bun scandal was reported in Shanghai on April 11, a citywide inspection of steamed buns was launched.Afterwards, rectification targeting at steamed buns was initiated in such places as Inner Mongolia, Tian-jin, Shangdong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang.     

Social Relationship of a Firm and the CSP–CFP Relationship in Japan: Using Artificial Neural Networks

As a criterion of a good firm, a lucrative and growing business has been said to be important. Recently, however, high profitability and high growth potential are insufficient for the criteria, because social influences exerted by recent firms have been extremely significant. In this paper, high social relationship is added to the list of the criteria. Empirical corporate social performance versus corporate financial performance (CSP–CFP) relationship studies that consider social relationship are very limited in Japan, and there are no definite conclusions for the studies in the world, because of scant data and the inappropriate methods, especially for supporting linear hypothesis which these studies are based on. In this paper, the CSP–CFP relationship is analyzed by an artificial neural networks model, which can deal with a non-linear relationship, using 10-year follow-up survey data.

Supporting the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011–2020

The Scottish Accident Prevention Council is responsible for promoting water safety in Scotland. It has long expressed concern that the number of reported drownings in Scotland underestimates the actual figures. The key aims of this study were to establish a valid database of water-based incidents in Scotland and test the under-reporting proposition.

A survey involving interviews and correspondence was undertaken to establish the sources of information on drownings. Once identified, a database was established and data for a 7-year period acquired.

The study identified the organizations essential to the establishment of a complete database. It also established protocols for gaining annual information. Data analysis confirmed a significant under-reporting of accident data and signalled a number of areas of concern with regard to those most at risk. The study produced, for the first time, a mechanism for recording complete details of drownings in Scotland.     

Top Ten Global Issues and Challenges In the Hospitality Industry for 2006

At the recent ISHC Annual Conference held in San Diego, California ISHC Members participated in a series of roundtable discussions to identify the ISHC Top Ten Global Issues and Challenges in the Hospitality Industry for 2006. While there were many issues     

Strengthening the Quality–Loyalty Linkage: The Role of Customer Orientation and Interpersonal Relationship

Customer loyalty has been suggested as the most important indicator of a firm's advantageous position relative to competitors. The effect of service quality on customer loyalty has been empirically proven in a variety of industries. For industries such as grocery wholesalers whose offerings seem to be almost homogeneous in the eyes of retail customers, by implication, service quality in itself may be insufficient. Therefore, this study aims to explore how to strengthen the effect of service quality on customer loyalty. In this study, we propose that customer orientation and interpersonal relationship may reinforce the quality–loyalty linkage. The empirical results showed that all three variables independently had significant power in discriminating among three levels of loyalty (high, medium, and low). Customer orientation and interpersonal relationships also functioned as moderators that strengthen the effect of service quality on customer loyalty. Moreover, customer orientation had a greater moderating effect than interpersonal relationship. The research findings could, we believe, assist wholesale managers to allocate their resources more effectively to establish customer loyalty in an era of fierce competition.     

Toward a More Coherent Understanding of the Organization–Society Relationship: A Theoretical Consideration for Social and Environmental Accounting Research

In this study we analyze the overlapping perspectives of legitimacy theory, institutional theory, resource dependence theory, and stakeholder theory. Our purpose is to explore how these theories can inform and be built upon by one another. Through our analysis we provide a broader theoretical understanding of these theories that may support and promote social and environmental accounting research. This article starts with a detailed analysis of legitimacy theory by bringing some recent critical discussions on legitimacy and corporations in the management literature into accounting research. The notion forwarded by legitimacy theory then serves as an overarching concept to examine the relationship between and among theories. We conclude that two theoretical considerations are important for future social and environmental accounting research. First, it must be acknowledged that some business entities initiate social activities based on direct interactions with stakeholders, whereas others may also undertake similar activities to manage their societal level of legitimacy. Second, from analyzing the perspectives of legitimacy theory, institutional theory, resource dependence theory, and stakeholder theory, it is possible to reach compatible interpretations of business social phenomena, and the selection and application of these theories should depend upon the focus of study.     

Exploring the Curvature of the Relationship Between HRM–CSR and Corporate Financial Performance

Journal of Business Ethics - This article contributes to the general literature on the relationship between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance, as well as to the...     

Predicting Under- and Overperforming SKUs within the Distribution–Market Share Relationship

This research presents a retail analytics application which uses machine learning (ML) to identify and predict under- and overperforming consumer packaged goods (CPGs) using retail scanner data. Essential to measuring market performance at the SKU level is the relationship between distribution and market share (the velocity curve). We validate that ML can reproduce the velocity curve, and ML is further used to predict underperforming, in-line performing, and overperforming SKUs relative to the velocity curve, based on a range of variables (SKU features) at a point in time. Our ML approach can correctly predict 83% of SKUs as under-, in-line-, or overperforming based on their characteristics. The research analyzes 9,321 SKUs of 2,565 brands across seven product categories of CPGs which were sold in 8,117 stores from 49 different retail chains of five different retail channels located in the US states of California, New York, Texas, and Wisconsin. The retail stores comprise convenience stores, drug stores, food stores, liquor stores, and mass merchandise retail stores. The data is Nielsen retail store scanner data for the calendar year 2014. The relationship between distribution and market share is a market-wide proxy for the ratio of relative sales in a category to, for example, aggregate shelf space, a key retail productivity metric. We further find indications that the distribution of SKUs across different store sizes, the stores’ category specialization, the line length of the brands, the overall performance of the parent brand, and sales consistency are the most important characteristics for the prediction of market share performance beyond the velocity curve. The methods and results presented will help CPG marketers (suppliers and retailers) understand which SKUs are under-, in-line-, or overperforming and the potential factors contributing to that performance. Optimizing assortments and portfolios is essential to decrease failure rates of individual SKUs. ML approaches can evolve to complementary support tools for such management problems.     

Workplace Guanxi: Its Dispositional Antecedents and Mediating Role in the Affectivity–Job Satisfaction Relationship

This paper examines dispositional sources of workplace guanxi and the mediating role of workplace guanxi on the affectivity and job satisfaction relationship. Data were collected from 808 respondents in multiple industries in a city in China’s northeast. The study found that both positive affectivity and negative affectivity have an effect on supervisor–subordinate guanxi and co-worker guanxi, which supports the proposition that workplace guanxi has a dispositional source. Supervisor–subordinate guanxi has a positive relationship with job satisfaction, although co-worker guanxi is not significantly related to job satisfaction. The research also found a mediating role of supervisor–subordinate guanxi on the affectivity and job satisfaction relationship, which suggests that supervisor–subordinate guanxi can extend the influence of affectivity to job satisfaction. Taken together, these results suggest that in a high power distance country such as China, supervisor–subordinate guanxi plays a more important role than co-worker guanxi in influencing job satisfaction. Theoretically, this study suggests the as yet unexplored possibility of dispositional antecedents of workplace guanxi and the role of workplace guanxi on the relationship between dispositions and workplace attitudes such as job satisfaction.     

Navigating the Changing Economy：——Challenges,Opportunities and Sustainable Growth

After 30 years of diplomatic and financial relationships,Chinese and U.S.corporation is more committed than ever to joining together and turning their combined strengths into financial success while overcoming economic obstacles.Chinese business leaders have never been more eager to gain critical knowledge,learn best practices,and forge robust networks and     

Self-regulation,Corporate Social Responsibility,and the Business Case: Do they Work in Achieving Workplace Equality and Safety?

The political shift toward an economic liberalism in many developed market economies, emphasizing the importance of the marketplace rather than government intervention in the economy and society (Dorman, Systematic Occupational Health and Safety Management: Perspectives on an International Development, 2000; Tombs, Policy and Practice in Health and Safety 3(1):24–25, 2005; Walters, Policy and Practice in Health and Safety 03(2):3–19, 2005), featured a prominent discourse centered on the need for business flexibility and competitiveness in a global economy (Dorman, 2000; Tombs, 2005). Alongside these developments was an increasing pressure for corporate social responsibility (CSR). The business case for CSR – that corporations would benefit from voluntarily being socially responsible – was increasingly promoted by governments and corporations as part of the justification for self-regulation. The aim of the article is to examine more closely the proposition that self-regulation is effective, with particular reference to the business case for workplace equality and safety. Based on a comprehensive literature review and documentary analysis, it was found that current predominant management discourse and practice focusing on diversity and safety management systems (OHSMS) resonate well with a government and corporate preference for the business case and self-regulation. However, the centrality of individual rather than organizational factors in diversity and OHSMS means that systemic discrimination and inherent workplace hazards are downplayed, making it less likely that employers will initiate structural remedies needed for real change. Thus, reliance on the business case in the argument for self-regulation is problematic. In terms of government policy and management practice, the business case needs to be supplemented by strong, proactive legislation, and worker involvement.     

Pensions and the Challenges of Adequacy and Sustainability: Irish Citizens’ Voices and Policy Implications

Intereconomics - Population ageing has been identified as a major societal challenge for all Western nations, driven by increasing life expectancies and reduced fertility, and occurring at...     

Unpacking the Goal Congruence–Organizational Deviance Relationship: The Roles of Work Engagement and Emotional Intelligence

Drawing from research on person–organization fit, work engagement, and emotional intelligence, this study investigates the mediating role of work engagement in the link between goal congruence and organizational deviance, as well as how this mediating effect might be moderated by emotional intelligence. Data captured from 272 employees of four IT companies show that the goal congruence between employees and their supervisor negatively affects the former’s organizational deviance, though this effect disappears when controlling for the intermediate role of work engagement. Further, emotional intelligence moderates both the positive relationship between goal congruence and work engagement and the negative relationship between work engagement and organizational deviance, such that these relationships become invigorated at higher levels of emotional intelligence. The findings also reveal that the indirect effect of goal congruence on organizational deviance through work engagement is more pronounced at higher levels of emotional intelligence, which offers evidence of moderated mediation. These findings have significant implications for research and practice.