Employee rights and issue-based inquiry: Reflections on papers in the special issue “Law Without Justice”

The articles in this special issue Law Without Justice are reviewed. Although (like many other students of employee rights) the authors did not conceptualize rights adequately, they advanced understanding of employee rights by linking the analysis of concrete rights to the larger social context. Further, by directing attention to the processes of social construction which affect the relationship betweende jure andde facto rights, the articles help to fill an important gap in the existing literature. Some implications for research on employee rights (and applied social science more generally) driven by social issues rather than theories are explored.     

Stock price reactions to recommendations in the Wall Street Journal “Small Stock Focus” column

This paper examines the information content of the “Small Stock Focus” column in the Wall Street Journal. The paper contributes to the literature by examining a source of secondary information that is readily available on a daily basis but has not been investigated. The results for the second half of 1993 suggest that the column tends to focus on stocks that have very large price changes, with an average absolute value that is more than 9%, on the day prior to the column publication date. Many of the companies appearing in the column appeared more than once in the six-month period covered by the study. The results are mixed with the strongest information content being associated with the good news, non-repeating observations. When repeat observations for the same company were excluded for the good news events, the AR₀ was 80 basis points and statistically significant and the CAR for days 1 through 5 was −1.61% and statistically significant. The volume analysis indicated that the non-repeating observations generally had a lower trading volume and larger AR_-1 than the repeating observations, suggesting that there is more information content for the less actively traded securities.     

Value of design for competitiveness – Introduction to the special issue

Good design is of great value today. However, in the future it will be of even greater value. The commoditization of traditional manufacturing and the increasing influence of 3D printing is driving profit out of manufacturing and into creating or owning the underlying product design. Consequently design in not only an important topic for journals on design, but also in other fields such as technology innovation management – hence this special issue in Technovation. The special issue consists of six papers covering a variety of topics including management and modularity.     

Defining the ‘Social’ in ‘Social Entrepreneurship’: Altruism and Entrepreneurship

What is social entrepreneurship? In, particular, what’s so social about it? Understanding what social entrepreneurship is enables researchers to study the phenomenon and policy-makers to design measures to encourage it. However, such an understanding is lacking partly because there is no universally accepted definition of entrepreneurship as yet. In this paper, we suggest a definition of social entrepreneurship that intuitively accords with what is generally accepted as entrepreneurship and that captures the way in which entrepreneurship may be altruistic. Based on this we provide a taxonomy of social entrepreneurship and identify a number of real cases from Asia illustrating the different forms it could take.     

Stock prices and exchange rates in VEC model—The case of Singapore in the 1990s

This paper uses an error correction model to explore 1) the asymmetric effects of four different exchange rates on Singapore stock prices and 2) the effects' sensitivity to economic instability. Both the Singapore currency appreciation against the U.S. dollar and Malaysianringgit and depreciation against the Japaneseyen and Indonesianrupiah lead to a longrun increase in stock prices for most selected periods of the 1990s; however, the effect associated with the U.S. dollar exchange rate has a sign reversal between the 1997–98 crisis period and the 1999–2000 recovery period. The influence of exchange rates on stock prices increases in a chronological order in the 1990s. The author would like to thank three anonymous referees and Joachim Zietz,JEF editor, for helpful comments. A summer research grant by the Franklin P. Perdue School of Business, Salisbury State University, is gratefully acknowledged.     

An introduction to the special feature section: Price,wage and employment adjustments in 2007–2008 and some inference for the current European crisis

The four papers in this issue are part of a collective effort coordinated by the ECB and European National Central Banks, the Eurosystem's Wage Dynamics Network Survey. They provide new and systematic evidence on wage and price flexibility in Europe and attempt to explain their determinants.     

Keeping the “T” in the WTO: where to next on environment and labor standards?

Agreement on a new trade Round depends partly on reassuring voters that it will contribute to better environmental protection and more social justice. That argument should be won comfortably. Increased international trade is a powerful tool for tackling poverty—the single biggest cause of environmental degradation and social misery world-wide—and many individual trade restrictions have direct, negative, environmental and social effects. Proposals to punish irresponsible environmental and social behavior through the WTO are a much more doubtful prospect. Without the underpinning of universally accepted environmental and social standards, trade restrictions are the wrong policy tool to use.     

Stock returns and real activity in the G-7 countries: did the relationship change during the 1980s?

Several empirical studies show that a substantial fraction of the changes in growth rates of real activity can be explained by lagged aggregate stock return variations in the U.S. as well as in other G-7 countries from the 1950s to the 1990s. However, the results presented in Binswanger.[International Review of Economics and Finance 9 (2000) 387] indicate that this traditionally strong relation has disappeared in the U.S. in the early 1980s. This paper shows that a similar breakdown occurred in Canada, Japan and in an aggregate economy consisting of the four European G-7 countries. The results provide evidence in favor of the hypothesis that speculative bubbles during the 1980s and 1990s were an international phenomenon.     

Why H does not measure information: the role of the “special case” legerdemain solution in the maintenance of anomalies in normal science

Anomalies or contradictions threaten a paradigm, and if they cannot be ignored, they must be either shown to be false, or must be resolved. Two common anomalies in the systems literature are examined: the contention that H measures information; and the contention that heat increase leads to entropy increase. It is shown that when faced with such anomalies, paradigm adherents often resort to legerdemain solutions, which appear to resolve the anomaly, either verbally or mathematically. Legerdemain solutions generally utilize special cases such as maximum or minimum values or equilibrium conditions, and will not hold for the general case. Thus they do not resolve the anomaly, but only appear to (hence the name legerdemain). It is shown further that legerdemain solutions are often responses to anomalies which are not major contradictions, but are rather the result of confusion in second-order or meta-paradigms. The satisfactory solution lies not in an appeal to a legerdemain solution, but in adherence to the consistent general principles of the primary paradigm, even if this necessitates some revision of terminology or principles in the secondary paradigm.     

Bridging “quality” and “quantity” in the study of criminal action

This article summarises the main findings of a study on the narrative construction of deviant actions which focused both on the contents and the structures of the narrative accounts provided by criminals. The research was conducted by collecting narrative interviews. These involved 34 individuals detained in two penal institutions in Rome. These accounts are typically constructed in a non-investigative context. Their exploration is mainly qualitative, but our aim here concern the quantitative sight of qualitative data and viceversa. The project was focused to find if there are any differences in the narrative accounts provided by different offenders, classified according to the type of crime they committed and their experience in the area of deviance. All interviews were analysed using a qualitative data analysis software and taking the “Evaluation model” as a reference. Participants were divided into three groups according to their criminal experience and into four groups according to the crime they committed. The results show that there are important differences in the way a crime is reconstructed by offenders with different criminal history. The paper also proposes solutions and innovative strategies to deal with quantification and qualitative data.