A Location Choice Approach for Professional Service Firms

This paper discusses the use of the factor rating method for service facility site selection. The method combines the results of objective mathematical location choice models with other qualitative criteria to obtain a single quantitative score upon which the location decision is based. The simplicity and ease of understanding of the method, added to its ability to incorporate both subjective and objective factors, make it a useful decision tool. The method is particularly suitable for small professional service firms which may not have the resources to uti- lize more sophisticated location choice models.     

Business and the Public Affairs of Slavery: A Discursive Approach of an Ethical Public Issue

This article aims at understanding how “ethical public issues” are created, and dealt within a public arena. Here, we view ethical public issues as social constructs, which are the results of issue framing contests. Such an approach will enable us to understand how ethical public issues emerge and are shaped by strategizing actors (including firms, NGOs, the media, and governments), in an attempt to impose their own definition and preferred solution to the issue. We also propose key factors which explain the success of a framing attempt, and evidence of such success. The empirical case of the labor conditions in West Africa’s cocoa industry is used to illustrate this theoretical framework and methodological approach.     

A Strategic,Client Centered Marketing Approach for Professional Service Firms

No abstract available for this article.     

Corporate Integrity and Public Interest: A Relational Approach to Business Ethics and Leadership

This paper approaches the question of corporate integrity and leadership from a civic perspective, which means that corporations are seen as members of civil society, corporate members are seen as citizens, and corporate decisions are guided by civic norms. Corporate integrity, from this perspective, requires that the communication patterns that constitute interpersonal relationships at work exhibit the civic norm of reciprocity and acknowledge the need for security and the right to participate. Since leaders are members of corporate relationships, their integrity will be determined by the integrity of these interpersonal relationships, and by their efforts to improve them.     

Rule-Inequality-Aversion Preference and Conditional Cooperation in Public Goods Experiments: Economic Experiment Evidence from China

We provide an experimental investigation of the fair rule preference and its effect on anonymous cooperation, intending to test the hypothesis that people who exhibit high degrees of rule inequality aversion—consider “equality and mutual obligation under the social contract” as justified, are disgusted with free-rider behavior in the public goods game and are more likely to be conditional cooperators and make conditional contributions. Based on experimental work related to rule-preferences Chlaß and Moffatt (Giving in dictator games: experimenter demand effect or preference over the rules of the game? (No. 2012, 044). Jena Economic Research Papers, 2012) and the public goods game Fischbacher et al. (Am Econ Rev 100(1):541–556, 2010), we designed a dictator game with the option of buying a veto (when the veto was purchased, the level of rule inequality decreased, making it an ultimatum game) to measure rule preference, i.e., rule inequality aversion, and conducted a two-stage public goods experiment to identify the cooperation preferences and repeated cooperation levels of participants. We investigated the relationship between rule preferences and cooperative preferences (conditional reciprocal preference) and tried to explain the adjustments people made when making repeated contributions of public goods (conditional cooperation behavior) from a rule preference perspective. The results show that: (1) Heterogeneous rule-inequality-aversion preferences are found in lab; (2) The stronger the rule-inequality-aversion preference is, the higher the probability is for the individual to become a conditional cooperator in public goods experiment; (3) Individuals who have stronger rule-inequality-aversion are more sensitive to the contributions that are deviated from the norm. Compared to the theory of conditional cooperation types, rule-inequality-aversion preference has a better explanation power when it comes to the behavior adjustment in repeated public goods contribution.     

A Socio-technical Approach for Group Decision Support in Public Strategic Planning: The Pernambuco PPA Case

This article describes a socio-technical approach to public strategic planning. A multi-methodological framework with decision support systems (DSS) of problem structuring, multi-criteria decision analysis and strategic thinking was used in a decision conferencing process to support the key-players of the Pernambuco State Department of Social Development and Human Rights, in Brazil, to elaborate its 2008–2011 Multi-Annual Plan (PPA). This interactive process took place in June 2007, with thirty technical and political actors meeting in 5 consecutive days to discuss what should be the fundamental objectives/development axes of the PPA and to generate, assess and classify intervention programmes to achieve the objectives. Structuring objectives and programmes started by a group causal mapping session supported by the Decision Explorer DSS. Then, a multi-criteria group value model, created on-the-spot by means of the M-MACBETH DSS, helped the politicians in evaluating the overall benefit of each programme. The doability of the programmes was also appraised with MACBETH and, finally, the programmes were classified into four benefit versus doability categories defined in a $2\times 2$ strategic graph: “pearls” (programmes with high benefit value and easy to implement), “oysters” (high benefit but difficult to implement), “bread and butter” (easy to implement but of low added value) and “white elephants” (low benefit and difficult to implement). The group agreed that at least all pearls and oysters should be selected. The programmes were prioritised based on their value-for-effort and the robustness of the selection was analysed with the PROBE DSS a posteriori.     

论独立调查机制对多边开发银行公众问责制度的发展

在全球治理进程中,多边开发银行职能不断扩张,其跨国规制也因此直接影响到主权国家内部的个人,然而,现有的国际组织责任制度阻碍了个人向前者直接追责。为此,多边开发银行尝试在组织内部建立独立调查机制,为个人提供问责渠道。作为国际组织公众问责的开创性发展,独立调查制在为个人向国际组织问责提供渠道的同时,也在银行发展职能履行与个人基本权益维护之间找到了一个恰当的平衡点。然而,独立调查机制仍存在不足,表现为:问责实体依据局限于银行内部政策、问责机制忽略问题解决、问责独立性受管理层掣肘。增强决策透明度、以合法审查取代合规审查、强化调查机制问题解决功能、保证调查机制独立决策权是未来多边开发银行公众问责制完善的主要方向。     

A Conditional Role-Involved Purpose-Based Access Control Model

This paper presents a conditional role-involved purpose-based access control (CPAC) model, where users dynamically activate conditional roles in accordance with the context attributes. Based on conditional role, access permissions are assigned that represent what can be accessed for what purpose to roles under certain conditions. On the other hand, conditional purpose is applied along with allowed purpose and prohibited purpose in the model. It allows users using some data for certain purpose with conditions (for instance, Tony agrees that his income information can be used for marketing purposes by removing his name). The structure of a CPAC model is defined and investigated. Access purpose is verified in a dynamic behavior, based on user attributes, context attributes, and authorization policies. Intended purposes are dynamically associated with the requested data object during the access decision. An algorithm is developed to achieve the compliance computation between access purposes and intended purposes and is illustrated with role-based access control (RBAC). Access purpose authorization and authentication in the model are studied with the hierarchical purpose structure. The model separates authorization of access purpose from access decision that improves the flexibility of private data control.     

The Dilemma of Accountability for Professionals: A Challenge for Mainstream Management Theories

Professional institutions are increasingly confronted by fiscal constraints and political pressures to improve and increase their accountability in a competitive consumer-driven market. Accordingly, the need to ensure efficiency and accountability is of strategic importance. This article reports on a qualitative study of medical professionals that assessed the utility of financial incentives and external control methods derived from agency theory to ensure accountability of professionals. The authors argue that approaches derived from stewardship and institutional theories can extend the principal–agent perspective to sustain greater social and ethical accountability.     

Galvanising Shareholder Activism: A Prerequisite for Effective Corporate Governance and Accountability in Nigeria

Shareholder activism has been largely neglected in the few available studies on corporate governance in sub Saharan Africa. Following the recent challenges posed by the Cadbury Nigeria Plc, this paper examines shareholder activism in an evolving corporate governance institutional context and identifies strategic opportunities associated with shareholders’ empowerment through changes in code of corporate governance and recent developments in information and communications technologies in Nigeria; especially in relation to corporate social responsibility in Nigeria. It is expected that the paper would contribute to the scarce literature on corporate governance and accountability in Africa. Olufemi Amao (LLM, Warwick; LLM, Ibadan, Nigeria; LLB, OAU, Nigeria; BA, Ilorin, Nigeria; BL, NLS) is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Law, University College Cork, Ireland. He is a recipient of the President PhD Scholarship and the Department of Law Scholarship. His current research interests include Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Governance, Multinational Corporations and Human Rights. Kenneth Amaeshi is a Research Fellow at Warwick Business School. His research interests include commercialisation of intellectual property assets; governance of global innovation networks; R&D partnerships; sustainable innovation; multinational corporations and corporate social responsibility in developing economies. He is currently studying comparative political economy of corporate stakeholding and corporate social responsibility. He is the 2007 winner of the International award for excellence in the field of interdisciplinary social sciences, awarded by the international journal of interdisciplinary social sciences (Australia/USA).     

The Stakeholder Approach: A Sustainability Perspective

This article considers the stakeholder approach (SHA) to organisational management through the lens of what it means for humans to live sustainably on the Earth (that is, for there to be a sustainable world). In particular, the article considers if the SHA, as it is presented in mainstream academic and management literature, is supportive of corporate practices that advance the achievement of a sustainable world. The analysis shows the SHA to have significant failings in this regard when viewed against key sustainable world criteria, with issues of concern evident from the normative core of the SHA through to is practical application in the management setting.     

Humility in Business: A Contextual Approach

The virtue of humility is often considered to be at odds with common business practice. In recent years, however, scholars within business ethics and leadership have shown an increasing interest in humility. Despite such attention, the argument for the relevance of humility in business could be expanded. Unlike extant research that focuses on humility as a character-building virtue or instrumentally useful leadership trait, this article argues that humility reflects the interdependent nature of business. Through such an approach, the article gives an extrinsic motivation of the relevance of humility in business, and, from a theoretical point of view, links the intra-personal and intra-organizational perspective on humility to an inter-organizational one. The article contextualizes the virtue of humility by relating it to the economic, cognitive, and moral aspects of business practice and managerial work. It claims that the assumption of self-sufficiency in business is a grave misrepresentation of what business is—a practice characterized by interdependency. Potential links between virtue ethics, leadership, and contextually oriented theories of business, such as stakeholder theory, network theories, and resource dependence theory, are also identified.     

Collaborative Requirements Elicitation: A Process-Centred Approach

Requirements Elicitation is one of the first and most critical processes in system engineering. In this paper we will focus on the collaborative aspects of requirement elicitation, in the context of system development. To do so, we adopted the separation of concerns method. Using this method we separate engineering aspects from collaboration aspects in order to study both aspects and finally integrate them. For the collaborative aspect of requirements elicitation we looked at Collaboration Engineering. Collaboration Engineering is an approach to design and deploy processes for recurring collaborative tasks that can be transferred to practitioners to execute for themselves without intervention of professional facilitators. From an engineering perspective we will use the requirements engineering processes described by system engineering standard EIA-632 as a starting point. To integrate these we will use methods and techniques from Collaboration Engineering to specify the collaborative processes involved in this requirements elicitation approach. An object model was build using Unified Modelling Language. This model shows different concepts underlying our approach. Finally two case studies are presented to evaluate this approach.     

从功能翻译理论角度看公示语的翻译

公示语是一个城市的脸面和名片。公示语翻译的质量对于改善城市形象、城市文化建设至关重要。德国功能翻译理论代表诺德认为功能翻译理论中对译员培训最有应用价值的是：原文分析、翻译纲要和对翻译问题的分类。本文将把这三个方面应用到公示语翻译当中,提出公示语翻译策略。     

Corporations and NGOs: When Accountability Leads to Co-optation

Interactions between corporations and nonprofits are on the rise, frequently driven by a corporate interest in establishing credentials for corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this article, we show how increasing demands for accountability directed at both businesses and NGOs can have the unintended effect of compromising the autonomy of nonprofits and fostering their co-optation. Greater scrutiny of NGO spending driven by self-appointed watchdogs of the nonprofit sector and a prevalence of strategic notions of CSR advanced by corporate actors weaken the ability of civil society actors to change the business practices of their partners in the commercial sector. To counter this trend, we argue that corporations should embrace a political notion of CSR and should actively encourage NGOs to strengthen “downward accountability” mechanisms, even if this creates more tensions in corporate–NGO partnerships. Rather than seeing NGOs as tools in a competition for a comparative advantage in the market place, corporations should actively support NGO independence and critical capacity.     

Public Perceptions of Billboards: A Meta-Analysis

While outdoor advertising is currently the fastest-growing traditional advertising medium, the value of billboards to the public has long been debated. Drawing on a conceptual framework developed by Farris and Albion (1980), contrasting two schools of thought about advertising's economic and societal role, this study reports a meta-analysis of more than 100 surveys of U.S. public opinion toward billboards, covering almost eight decades of findings from more than 100,000 participants. Variables analyzed include the degree to which the public believes billboards are informative, entertaining, irritating, and helpful to the economy; in need of more regulation; and beneficial overall. Results suggest that, both historically and currently, consumers view billboards positively, and a strong majority do not support billboard bans. Moreover, the overall results are more supportive of the notion that the public subscribes to the Advertising = Information school of thought as opposed to the Advertising = Market Power school.