Social Responsibility and the Olympic Games: The Mediating Role of Consumer Attributions

Current literature suggests that corporate social responsibility (CSR) can affect consumers’ attitudes towards an organization and is regarded as a driver for reputation-building and fostering sustained consumer patronage. Although prior research has addressed the direct influence of CSR on consumer responses, this research examined the mediating influence of consumer’s perceived organizational motives within an NGO setting. Given the heightened public attention surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, data were collected from consumers of the Games to assess their perceptions of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) socially responsible initiatives. We hypothesized that consumers of the Games were likely to cognitively elaborate on CSR messages by way of three specific attribution effects derived from the literature. The results show that, contingent on CSR awareness, consumers responded positively to social efforts judged to be values-driven and stakeholder-driven; and a negative response was seen for efforts judged to be strategic. These attribution effects influenced various types of patronage and perceived organizational reputation.     

Critical Political Economy and Material Transformation

The starting point for this paper is that critical political economy needs to take up the challenge that originates in Marx's seminal contributions of conceptualising the economy as both processes of value creation and processes of material transformations. This is because, inter alia, the successful production of commodities requires knowledge of their constituent materials and their potential transformations and the ways in which these can be managed through the production process to allow the creation of surplus value and profits. Using the steel and automobile industries as an example, I show how a wide range of materials can be produced with a variety of desirable properties through careful control of the production process. Sophisticated management of the production process depends upon the knowledge of the properties of the materials and of the ways in which these can be combined and transformed to give types of steels with particular desired combination of properties. Capitalist interests have increasingly shaped the processes of R&D through which knowledge about the materials, their properties and their transformations has been developed and deployed to produce profits via producing steel and – inter alia – automobiles.     

Review essay: And leisure for all

Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City 1870–1920, by Roy Rosenzweig (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 320 pp., $29.95. ISBN 0–521–23916–8.

How Boston Played, by Stephen Hardy (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1982). 272 pp. $19.95 cloth. ISBN 0–930350–27–8.     

A Comparison of Long-Haul and Short-Haul Business Tourists of Hong Kong

A number of studies have demonstrated the impact of distance on the volume, profile and behavior of pleasure tourists. To date, none has examined the effect of distance on business tourists, even though they represent a significant share of all travel. Distance exerts two inter-related effects on travel. The decaying effect on demand with increased distance is well established. Distance also acts as a “filter”, advantaging some groups for short-haul travel and effectively excluding others from long-haul travel. This filtering effect results in substantially different observed behavior between short and long-haul pleasure markets. This study examines the filtering effect of distance on tourist profile and subsequent behavior of business travelers who visited Hong Kong. The sample includes eight short-haul and six long-haul markets. Substantial differences are observed in the profile and resultant behaviors of the two cohorts, although the differences are more subtle among business tourists than pleasure tourists.     

Identification of house price bubbles using user cost in a state space model

This article studies how much variation in house prices results from nonfundamental factors. We propose a relative valuation approach to quantifying a bubble in housing by incorporating the housing User Cost into a state space model. We find that UK house prices were undervalued from January 1995 to May 2001 and subsequently moved into a bubble over the period to October 2012. Our results support the bounded rationality hypothesis in the long run. However, we also find that the irrational and the rational expectation hypotheses can coexist in the short run when explosive bubbles are driven by price dynamics.     

How prior realized outcomes affect portfolio decisions

Investors have been shown to have particular preferences when it comes to the characteristics of stock they hold in their portfolios, while prior gains and losses have been shown to impact on individuals’ economic decisions, both in an investment context and more widely. This paper is the first to investigate how prior gains and losses affect investors’ preferences for particular stock characteristics and so shape their portfolio compositions. Using a rich dataset combination from China, we conclude that prior realized outcomes play an important role in shaping portfolio composition through their impact on the characteristics of stocks that investors choose to hold. We find that positive prior realized outcomes encourage investors to select stocks with a variety of characteristics broadly consistent with higher risk taking (for example, higher betas and higher levels of idiosyncratic risk), though there are some differences across investor classes. While our empirical results are in line with what one would expect from the existing literature on the disposition and house money effects, we also consider other possible interpretations of the results.     

Conceptualizing brand values in the charity sector: the relationship between sector,cause and organization

Charity brands have been found to assist income generation by enhancing donor understanding of an organization and what it stands for. Despite an increasing interest in this topic few studies have addressed the dimensions of such brands and sought to explore the link (if any) with donor behaviour. In this paper, we focus on the personality traits of non-profit brands and begin by exploring how these may be structured. Reporting the findings of a series of nine focus groups, we conclude that dimensions of personality apply at the sector, causal and organizational levels and that the perception of specific categories of trait may be linked to individual giving behaviour.     

‘Nothing gets done and no one knows why’: PCS and workplace control of Lean in HM Revenue and Customs

This article examines the willingness and capacity of public sector unions to mobilise action against changes in the labour process in order to maintain some measure of control at the point of production. Taking as an instance an extended dispute in Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs over the introduction and impact of Lean processes, it marshals evidence gathered from documentary sources, branch representatives and national lay full‐time officers to engage with the notion of a trade union bureaucracy. In taking a union with a left‐wing leadership and a section with 80 per cent membership with an expressed willingness to escalate industrial action, the article tests Hyman's 1979 contention that, rather than a concentration on a bureaucratic caste, a much better explanation for conservatism centres on the nature of social relations within the union that encompass a wider layer of representatives.