Disbanding an Effective System for Self Regulation of Advertising: Beyond the Media Council of Australia

This paper analyses the role of government, advertisers, advertising agents, and the industry complaints body in unravelling what was once an effective self regulatory system for advertisements. It outlines the connection between the system for the accreditation of advertising agents and the system of fuzzy Codes of Practice rules for the content of advertisements that regulated Australian advertising until the end of 1996. It shows how a revamped competition policy, government review, aggrieved advertisers and an entrenched Advertising Standards Council contributed to the demise of the Media Council system of self regulated advertising. The paper describes the new self regulatory system that has been put in place and analyses both the old Media Council Code of Practice rules and the rules of the new Advertiser Code of Ethics.     

Heterogeneous gender effects under loss aversion in the economics classroom: A field experiment

This article evaluates the impact of loss aversion as a behavioral motivator on students’ classroom performance. Conducting an experiment with University of Kentucky undergraduate students, the authors framed student grades as a loss and gain. In treatment sections, the students began with full marks and lost points as the semester progressed, whereas in control sections, under a traditional grading scheme, students accumulated points throughout the semester. We find that treated individuals, on average, do not have a statistically different final grade than individuals in the control class. However, we uncover a heterogeneous gender effect. On average, a male in the treatment class scores between 3.17 and 4.05 percentage points higher on the final grade than a male in the control class, ceteris paribus. Conversely, a female in the treatment class scores between 3.61 and 4.36 percentage points lower on the final grade than a comparable female in the control class.     

Business strategies for transitions towards sustainable systems

This paper develops a strategic perspective for business to contribute to the innovation of societal systems. Sustainability issues at the level of societal sectors cannot be addressed by single organizations but need to be thought of as systemic challenges in which business, government and civil society each play different roles. Sustainability involves structural changes over longer periods of time, and requires co‐evolutionary changes in technology, economy, culture and organizational forms. We propose that the transition management framework offers a fruitful way to analyze such co‐evolutionary processes of social transformation and subsequently develop strategies to influence and accelerate such processes. We present the case of two firms working in this new context of transition management in The Netherlands. From these cases we conceptualize a more general approach for business to redefine and reframe the societal context in which it is operating and develop novel business strategies. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

National Security as a Corporate Social Responsibility: Critical Infrastructure Resilience

This article argues for an extension to the scope of corporate social responsibility (CSR) research to include a contemporary issue of importance to national and global security, critical infrastructure resilience. Rather than extending the multiple perspectives on CSR, this study aimed to identify a method of recognising CSR-related issues, before applying it to two dissimilar case studies on critical infrastructure resilience. One case study was of an international telecommunications company based in the US while the other was of the railway network in Britain during a period of privatisation. The method used was derived from Okoye’s (J Bus Ethics 89(4):613–627, 2009) common reference core for CSR. Both case studies satisfied all the criteria sought which points to critical infrastructure resilience as being an emerging CSR issue. Because ongoing change characterises CSR, the method may have application for identifying future new CSR strands. As the findings suggest that some aspects of national and global security are CSR-related phenomena, the study demonstrates how CSR research may be significant at a societal, national and global level. Implications of the study include a broadening of the value and reach of contributions from CSR researchers and practitioners.     

Bending and Stretching the Health Care Cost Curve

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) has a number of provisions that aimed at slowing the rate of growth of health care spending. This paper examines the most prominent of these provisions and finds them to be seriously flawed and unlikely to deliver savings as intended. They are either too weak or liable to compromise quality. Moreover, some of the most important drivers of health care costs, such as fee for service payments to physicians under Medicare or limitations on physician liability are not addressed adequately. Thus, it is unlikely that the PPACA in its present form will do much to reduce the growth rate of health care expenditures.     

Intergenerational Welfare Participation in New Zealand

New Zealand panel data, which provide extensive information on the benefit histories of parents and their children, are used to estimate an intergenerational correlation coefficient in social welfare dependency. Recent estimation techniques for addressing issues of measurement error are applied to this analysis. The long-term benefit histories of parents and instrumental variable techniques provide useful lower and upper-bound estimates of the true intergenerational correlation. Our results suggest that the true correlation coefficient between the welfare participation of parents and their offspring is somewhere between one-third and two-thirds, but probably much closer to the lower limit in this range. Approximately one-quarter of this effect appears to operate through the lower educational attainment of children reared in families receiving social welfare benefits.