Organizational scandal on social media: Workers whistleblowing on YouTube and Facebook

The paper explores the emergence of organizational scandals on social media, and how the communicative dynamics of such scandals evolve as a social drama. I propose that when whistleblowers utilize information technologies to expose evidence of organizational misconduct, they, and their audiences, engage in meta- organizational discourse: The reflexive – immediate and durational – interactions through which organizational stakeholders instigate organizational scandals on social media, negotiate the normative boundaries of whistleblowing, and (de)legitimize the act of disclosing managerial transgressions online. I examine an organizational scandal embedded in the recent wave of workers’ unionization struggles in Israel in which whistleblowers performed the role of investigative journalists by posting a video on YouTube exposing a senior manager trying to dissuade workers from joining the union. Following that, on workers’ unionization Facebook pages, union supporters and opponents vigorously deliberated the intentions and consequences of publicly shaming their manager and damaging the reputation of their company. Analyzing workers’ discourse suggests that participants from both sides experienced the scandal as something that affected all company employees. They acknowledged the high visibility of their social drama and recognized the potential impact of whistleblowing online across organizational spatial and temporal boundaries.     

The ethics of ‘going green’: the corporate social responsibility debate

A significant proportion of authors of green business texts proposes that managers should be the instigators and guardians of a societal change towards sustainable development. There is the notion of managerial duty towards the environment. This paper attempts to unravel the implications of this call for managerial eco‐heroism. The reason that this unravelling is important is that there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that win–win situations – the ‘low hanging fruit’ – are progressively becoming less apparent for many firms. This implies a conflict between profitability and environmental performance. This translates into a (perhaps familiar) scenario for business: one greener option is more expensive, and the financial gains associated with it are insufficient to justify it on the grounds of profitability – ‘going green’ then means losing potential profits. A neoclassical and a socio‐economic perspective are provided as foundations for managerial reasoning. Even though the corporate social responsibility debate is not resolved, it is nonetheless of importance, not least because environmentally proactive managers might intend to increase social well‐being but actually reduce it through their green decision‐making. Thus the real‐world applicability of the positions adopted by the opposing philosophical schools is analysed. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

With a little help from abroad: The effect of low-skilled immigration on the female labour supply

We examine whether and how the inflow of female immigrants who specialize in household production affects the labour supply of Italian women. To identify the causal effect, we exploit the family reunification motives and network effects (i.e., the tendency of newly arriving female immigrants to settle in places where males of the same country already live) which is used as an instrument for the geographical distribution of female foreign workers. We find that when the number of immigrants who provide household services is higher, native Italian women spend more time at work (intensive margin) without affecting their labour force participation (extensive margin). This impact is concentrated on highly skilled women whose time has a higher opportunity cost. These results also hold after a battery of robustness checks. We present some further evidence that is also consistent with the idea that the impact works through substitution in household work rather than complementarities in the production sector. Finally, we show that immigration arises as a substitute to publicly provided welfare services, although this phenomenon raises concerns regarding the fairness and sustainability of this private and informal welfare model.     

基于可持续发展的国有企业绩效评价体系研究

本文以可持续发展理论为指导,论述了社会绩效、环境绩效和公司治理水平与企业财务业绩及可持续发展的关系,提出了国有企业绩效评价体系在财务业绩评价基础上,应增加社会绩效、环境绩效和公司治理指标,设计了盈余质量系数对企业的净利润进行修正,以克服企业利润操纵对财务业绩的影响,使财务业绩的评价更具客观性;提出了通过行业效率评价来解决行业差异对企业绩效影响的建议。     

Recasting Enterprise Strategy: Towards Stakeholder Research That Matters to General Managers

As well as specifying functional, business unit, and corporate levels of strategy, early strategy scholars delineated enterprise level strategy as the uppermost level of strategy. Enterprise strategy articulates how the firm engages with actors in its economic, social, and political environment to ensure long‐term corporate performance. As a growing body of evidence shows, heterogeneity in how firms identify, and engage with, their stakeholders can explain why some firms outperform their peers. However, my literature survey of more than three decades of published research reveals that enterprise strategy has stayed firmly in the shadows behind business and corporate strategy. Furthermore, many theories of firm–stakeholder relationships are normative (i.e. explain how firms should act) and do not inform strategy effectively. In this paper, I argue why enterprise strategy research is required as a cohesive body of work that connects with research in business and corporate strategy. I finish by proposing three research domains – strategic goals, organization design, and organization boundaries – that hold the potential to link stakeholder issues with mainstream concerns in strategy research and, thus, to revive a coherent research programme in enterprise level strategy.     

It's alright,it's just a bluff: Why do corporate codes reduce lying,but not bluffing?

Purchasing operates in an environment that frequently provides incentives for deception. Using self-concept maintenance theory and social learning theory, this article compares two distinct manifestations of deception in buyer–supplier negotiations: lying and bluffing. Scenario-based experiments provide evidence that corporate codes diminish severe manifestations of deception (lying) but not less severe ones (bluffing), and that bluffing is considered a negotiation skill. These findings reveal the boundary conditions of self-concept maintenance theory, which is applicable to lying but not to bluffing. Moreover, this article outlines an agenda for future research on deception in buyer–supplier relationships – an important but under-researched subject within our discipline.     

Opt Out or Top Up? Voluntary Health Care Insurance and the Public vs. Private Substitution

We investigate whether in a mixed insurance system, people enrolled into voluntary health care insurance (VHI) substitute public consumption with private (opt out) or just enlarge their private consumption without reducing reliance upon public provisions (top up). We specify a joint model for public and private specialist visits counts, allowing for different degrees of endogenous supplementary insurance coverage. We find evidence of opting out: richer and wealthier individuals consume more private services and concomitantly reduce those services publicly provided through selection into for‐profit VHI. Accounting for VHI endogeneity in the joint model of the two counts is crucial to this conclusion.     

非国有股东治理与企业风险承担水平——来自国有企业混合所有制改革的经验证据

以A股国有上市企业为样本,考察非国有股东治理对企业风险承担水平的影响。研究发现,非国有股东治理能够显著提升国有企业的风险承担水平,这种影响在2013年底国有企业混合所有制改革强化之后更加明显,在地方国有企业和竞争性国有企业中更加突出。进一步研究发现,非国有股东治理对企业风险承担水平的影响机制在于提高高管薪酬和降低代理成本,提高股权混合制衡度和超额委派董事均能提高企业风险承担水平。研究结论从企业风险承担的视角证实了混合所有制改革的效果,为进一步推进混合所有制改革提供了经验证据和借鉴。     

Incentives and the Efficiency of Public Sector-outsourcing Contracts

Abstract.  Outsourcing the provision of traditionally publicly provided services has become commonplace in most industrialized nations. Despite its prevalence, there still is no consensus in the academic literature on the magnitude (and determinants) of expected cost savings to the government, nor the sources of those savings. This article considers the arguments for (and against) outsourcing and then examines the empirical evidence pertaining to whether any observed savings occur and whether they persist over time. In addition, we examine the existing evidence for the 'redistribution hypothesis' and the 'quality-shading hypothesis', which critics have used to argue that outsourcing lowers government expenditure by lowering wages and conditions and/or lower quality services. Finally, we consider the impact of contract design on outsourcing outcomes. While the power of incentives is a strong theme in economics, recent work has suggested that high-powered incentives may be suboptimal for many public sector services, because they may crowd out intrinsic motivation, particularly in instances where agents are highly motivated. We discuss the implications of this insight for the efficiency of public sector outsourcing.     

Open innovation and the evaluation of internet-enabled public services in smart cities

This article is focused on public service innovation from an innovation management perspective. It presents research experience gained from a European project for managing social and technological innovation in the production and evaluation of citizen-centred internet-enabled services in the public sector. It is based on six urban pilot initiatives, which sought to operationalise a new approach to co-producing and co-evaluating civic services in smart cities – commonly referred to as open innovation for smart city services. Research suggests that the evidence base underpinning this approach is not sufficiently robust to support claims being made about its effectiveness. Instead evaluation research of citizen-centred internet-enabled urban services is in its infancy and there are no tested methods or tools in the literature for supporting this approach. The paper reports on the development and trialing of a novel Co-evaluation Framework, indicators and reporting categories, used to support the co-production of smart city services in an EU-funded project. Our point of departure is that innovation of services is a sub-set of innovation management that requires effective integration of technological with social innovation, supported by the right skills and capacities. The main skills sets needed for effective co-evaluation of open innovation services are the integration of stakeholder management with evaluation capacities.     

Climate Change and Mandatory Carbon Reporting: Impacts on Business Process and Performance

As part of their annual directors' report, UK‐listed companies are now required to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and account publicly for their contributions to climate change. This paper uses this mandatory carbon reporting to explore wider debates about corporate social responsibility and the purpose, practice, and impacts of such non‐financial reporting. Empirically, it combines documentary analysis of the carbon reporting practices of 176 large firms listed in the FTSE100 and/or subject to the UK government's adaptation reporting power with 60 interviews with stakeholders involved in carbon reporting. Firms disclose their emissions in response to financial incentives, social pressure and/or regulatory compulsion. In turn, rationales shape whether and how carbon reporting influences internal business processes and performance. The importance of reporting to the bottom line varies by sector depending on two variables – energy intensity and economic regulator status – yet there is limited evidence that carbon reporting is driving substantial reductions in emissions. Findings suggest reasons for caution about hopes for ‘nudging’ firms to improve their environmental performance and social responsibility through disclosure requirements.     

Worlds colliding: the translation of modern management practices within a UK based subsidiary of a Korean-owned MNC

This paper explores the factors that served to dislodge an espoused strategy of quality management with ‘soft’ HRM within a British subsidiary of a Korean owned multinational company. Accounts from British and Korean managers revealed competing sets of tensions at three levels: external organizational, intra-organizational, and internal workplace. The case is important for a number of reasons. First, research on UK based subsidiaries tends to have focused upon American and Japanese owned companies, with less evidence from MNCs from later industrialized economies. Second, evidence suggests that MNCs from Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have been experimenting with Western influenced high-performance work systems – but there is less evidence about how these are actually translated into the workplace. Third, there is a growing literature that suggests that the transfer of management practices in MNCs can be partly understood as a ‘negotiated process’, and disagreements may emerge between organisational actors in respect of the meaning and function of such practices. This article offers further support for this contention and offers insights into how these processes affected day-to-day management of the workplace and undermined the espoused strategy.     

The impact of consumer health information on the demand for health services

This paper empirically examines whether consumers use health information, from non-physician information sources, as a substitute or complement for health services – namely for physician visits and emergency room (ER) visits. An indicator of patient trust in physicians is developed and used as a proxy for potential unobserved heterogeneity that may drive both consumers’ propensity to seek information and to use physician services. The results, after correcting for sample selection bias and controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, concur with the literature, that consumer health information increases the likelihood of visiting a physician as well as the frequency of visits on average. However, low-trust consumers tend to substitute self-care through consumer health information for physician services. Further, better-informed consumers make significantly fewer ER visits suggesting that information may be improving efficiency in the market.     

高校校园企业的社会责任体系构建研究

高校商贸服务企业长期以来为高校师生提供丰富的生活服务需求,是保障校园正常运转的重要组成部分。本文在客观梳理高校商贸服务企业特点的基础上,对其社会责任体系的现状和特点作聚焦性地分析。其除了一般的社会责任之外,在营造校园文化氛围和人才培养中也承担着责任,指出小微企业的社会责任体系建设同样不容忽视。文中提出了构建完善的社会责任体系的途径,还尝试构建针对高校商贸服务企业社会责任的考核指标体系。     

The New Institutional Economics

Current English policy towards general practice is ambivalent between developing new forms of contractual governance and constructing more hierarchically organized bodies. NHS policy documents say that Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) will contract some primary care services and directly manage others. Depending on the balance, PCTs could either organize general practice through practice-based contracts or start developing into hierarchies (albeit with some subcontractors for the time being).

New Institutional Economics, in particular Williamson's version, defines conditions where hierarchies are likely to be more efficient than markets (in terms of what welfare economics recognizes as allocative efficiency) and conditions where the reverse holds. This article considers the implications of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) for redesigning the governance of publicly financed services such as general practice which allow direct public access, in which it is difficult to define and manage service quality, and which have a professionalized but fragmented workforce. In contrast to their alleged implications for the hospital sector during the 1990s, NIE theories imply that for publicly funded professional services such as general practice there are stronger economic arguments for constructing hierarchies than for reconstructing quasi-markets at local level.     

The social profitability of business incubators: a measurement proposal

Abstract

Public business incubators are services placed at the disposal of original, generally newly-created projects, to which physical accompaniment, supervision and location are offered at prices below market value. They have as their aim to help set in motion and consolidate these firms during the stages in which they are weaker. The ultimate goal consists in favouring the generation of innovative firms, inducers of high-quality jobs, which can diversify the local business fabric, thus becoming a key tool in local development. The present paper provides a methodology to study the economic – but above all social – impact of business incubators, based on the examination of 40 from the 42 incubators existing in the Valencian Community (a Spanish autonomous region with five million inhabitants). Data analysis allows us to state that, although business incubators are not economically profitable since they need financial aids and public investment to start operating, they do have social profitability, insofar as the activity developed by entrepreneurs permits to provide public administrations – via taxes – with returns exceeding what was invested in these incubators. It has been determined that 2.8 euros (which can be applied to a variety of social areas) are collected via taxes for each euro spent to start them up.     

A political ideology lens on social entrepreneurship motivations

ABSTRACT

The traditional literature regarding social entrepreneurship does not question the political dimension. On the contrary, it tends to de-politicize societal issues. A growing number of researchers underline how this perspective cannot address the complexity and the dialogical nature of social entrepreneurship. However, while there may be a case for incorporating a political perspective, there is currently no conceptual framework to systematically inform an empirical exploration of the role played by the political vision of entrepreneurs. In this paper, we use the concept of political ideology to offer a solid framework to show how politics can shape social entrepreneurs’ motivations. More precisely we identify three political profiles – anti-statist, reformist and neoliberal – which shape the motives to engage in social entrepreneurship. We take an embedded case study approach of 17 social entrepreneurs involved in a social innovation boot camp and reveal the existence of both, left and right-wing approaches in social entrepreneurship.     

Social enterprise push or corporate social responsibility pull? The mainstreaming of fair trade

Social enterprise organizations and activities combine market-oriented approaches with social aspirations, whereas corporate social responsibility strategies seek to integrate social aspects into core business strategies. The rise in social enterprise activity at the business end of the spectrum raises questions about how, where, and why social enterprise and corporate social responsibility might overlap. Through a review of literature, we demonstrate how the mainstreaming or corporatization of fair trade activity provides an example of this overlap. The tensions between the push of social aspirations within fair trade and the pull of commercial imperatives are highlighted. From a marketing viewpoint, a social enterprise push strategy is shown as typically undertaken from an organization perspective, whereas pull strategies in marketing are typically customer driven. We demonstrate that influences from both social enterprise and corporate social responsibility are evident in fair trade mainstreaming processes, although the extent to which each “pushes” or “pulls” varies across circumstances and interpretations.     

试论平衡计分卡对经济责任制的借鉴作用

随着我国经济的发展和企业改革步伐的不断加快,客观形势对国有企业管理水平的要求不断提升熏国有企业现行的经济责任制体系的局限性日益明显。文章以平衡计分卡为基础,分析了我国企业现行经济责任制发展的特点及存在的问题,提出借鉴平衡计分卡的管理思想,对经济责任制体系进行改造,构建适合企业实际的新的经济责任制综合考核体系。     

Engaging workers in resource-poor environments: the case of social enterprise in Vietnam

Abstract

How do social enterprises acquire and retain employees in resource-poor environments? This paper presents findings from a study examining human resource management (HRM) practices in transitional economy social enterprises, where research on HRM remains underexplored. Drawing on social exchange theory and employing a multiple-case study design, we examine the ways in which four well-established social enterprises in Vietnam use high-involvement work practices (HIWPs) to acquire, retain and support the performance of workers. The findings suggest that HIWPs increase the social exchange value of social enterprise employment but raise questions about business sustainability. We identify evidence of a unique bundle of HIWPs, which comprise four dimensions of the original model: information, knowledge, power, and rewards, and one new dimension, namely family-building practices.