The potential of African trade integration – Panel data evidence for the COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite

ABSTRACT

The COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite FTA, formed in 2011, is supposed to be a milestone towards Africa's continental trade integration. This study analyzes the impact of regional integration among the Tripartite countries on their bilateral imports before that date to evaluate the latest integration efforts. We estimate an extended gravity model on a large panel of 51 African countries using yearly observations from 1995 to 2010. We proxy existing formal trade barriers by sample average tariff data on imports from the world as well as indicator variables for the membership in regional FTAs. We consider different estimation techniques and discuss distinct sets of fixed effects. The PPML regression results indicate that remaining tariffs are significantly negatively correlated with imports throughout the preferred multiplicative models. An FTA status does not show a clear-cut import enhancing effect. In the specifications that control for country-year effects, the EAC coefficient is positively correlated with imports, and the COMESA and SADC FTA membership show a positive relation to imports within some reduced-sample robustness checks.     

The human experience of ethics: a review of a decade of qualitative ethical decision‐making research

Qualitative studies are an important component of business ethics research. This large amount of research covers a wide array of factors and influences on ethical decision making published between 2004 and 2014. Following the methodology of past critical reviews, this work provides a synopsis of the diverse array of qualitative studies in ethical decision making within the business ethics literature. We highlight the distinct and investigative nature of qualitative research, synthesize and summarize findings, and suggest opportunities for future research. We conclude with a recommendation for developing qualitative studies in business ethics and a call for an increased openness when considering this valuable and underrepresented strategy of inquiry.     

The Mabey and Johnson bribery scandal: A case of executive hubris

Convicted for paying bribes to secure contracts abroad, Mabey and Johnson (M&J), a UK construction firm, made both legal and international business history. Drawing on hubris as a lens, we examine M&J's bribery scandal in Ghana and Jamaica. Through a qualitative study of court documents, witness statements, newspaper articles, and internal company emails, we unpack the bribery scheme operated by M&J executives that enabled the firm to illegitimately win major government contracts in Ghana and Jamaica. Fueled by executive hubris, M&J's practice of bribing foreign officials to secure contracts effectively insulated M&J executives from day‐to‐day realities. Over time, the firm's executives viewed themselves as infallible, exempt from established mores, invincible, and were unremorseful for their actions. Building on these findings, we develop a hubris‐bribery heuristic framework showing how individual, organizational, and institutional contexts constitutively fueled executive hubris, driving bribery at M&J. The implication for theory and practice is examined.     

Task Conflict,Narcissism and Entrepreneurial Capability in Teams Planning a Business: A Moderated Moderation Approach to Explaining Business Planning Performance

Drawing on the dynamic self‐regulatory processing model of narcissism, we hypothesize that in teams planning a business, task conflict relates positively to business planning performance and that this link is reinforced by the team's narcissism. By integrating aspects of human capital theory, this brighter side of narcissism is amplified where the narcissism is aligned with entrepreneurial capability and the team members' belief in their entrepreneurial capability. The findings of the moderated moderation analysis examining 66 teams of entrepreneurship students support the study's assumptions and provide meaningful implications for social psychology and personality researchers in entrepreneurship.     

Prague’s community gardening in liquid times: challenges in the creation of spaces for social connection

ABSTRACT

Building on the concept of liquid leisure, this paper examines the current potential of community gardening in Prague to create collaborative place-bound communities. By looking closely at the fluctuation of members of selected gardens and the reasons for withdrawal from this activity, we try to see if changes in the member base have any consequences for the functioning of the gardens and the social groups created around them. The results are based on an analysis of interviews held with representatives of community gardens in Prague. Our results document that community projects such as community gardens can be sustained as gardeners come and go and can still fulfil important social, educational and environmental needs of gardens’ immediate neighbourhoods. Moreover, the perception of community around the garden is negotiated and re-negotiated by individual gardeners. The community can play a different role throughout different stages of people’s lives and other changing contexts. Experiences of nuclear families, tribal groupings, collaborative and interest communities often intersect in the space of community gardens. Gardening as a leisure activity, as well as community creation and belonging can, thus, be approached from very different perspectives in the context of liquid modernity.     

Keeping Their Cards Close to Their Chests: How Non‐Delegating CEOs Avoid Forced Career Ends

It is a common belief that CEOs must delegate to be successful. We hesitate to support this generalization and investigate how the distribution of responsibility within top management teams (TMTs) can influence the likelihood of a CEO’s dismissal. Consistent with an agency theory perspective, our results indicate that CEOs may choose not to delegate their responsibilities to other executive TMT members, so as to benefit from an increased information asymmetry vis‐à‐vis the board of directors. Taking the resource‐based view as a complementary theoretical perspective, we find that non‐delegating CEOs benefit from their greater firm‐specific knowledge, which the board of directors considers as a valuable resource that should be retained. Our work also demonstrates that a more intense CEO–TMT interaction weakens the relation between non‐delegation and the likelihood of CEO dismissal. In sum, our research shows that the CEO’s delegation decision does not necessarily lead to a competence distribution that is in the firm's best interest; rather, it reflects a complex interplay between the potentially opportunistic career interests of the CEO, the involvement of other TMT members and the board of directors. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Open issues in happiness research

Happiness research is one of the most vivid and fruitful parts of modern economics. The focus is on empirical findings. In contrast, theoretical work has been rather neglected. The paper deals with three areas needing more analytical work: the choice or imposition of comparison or reference groups; and the extent, speed and symmetry of adaptation to positive and negative shocks on happiness. In both areas, theoretical propositions are derived which can in the future be empirically tested. The third area relates to the political economy of happiness. Many governments intend to take the happiness index as a criterion of how successful their policies are. As a consequence, survey respondents get an incentive to misrepresent their happiness level, and governments to manipulate the aggregate happiness indicator in their favor. A country’s constitution must induce governments to carefully observe human rights, democracy, the decentralization of political decision making, and market institutions and provide people with the possibility to acquire a good education and find a suitable job.     

Struggling with Meaningfulness when Context Shifts: Volunteer Work in a German Refugee Shelter

This article draws on an ethnographic study of volunteer work in a German refugee shelter to explore how individual experiences of meaningfulness are intertwined with shifting discursive and organisational contexts. At the beginning of the so‐called refugee crisis, societal discourses portrayed this volunteer work as extraordinarily meaningful – a state we capture through the metaphor of ‘overflow’. This ‘overflow’ mobilised volunteers and was an important point of reference for framing their work experiences as meaningful. Later, shifting discursive and organisational contexts challenged their framings. Instead of letting go, however, the ‘overflow’ triggered volunteers to reframe their experience in dysfunctional ways in order to sustain their sense of meaningfulness. This paper reveals how shifting societal discourses feed into individual experiences of meaningfulness, shows how individuals may respond to such shifts in problematic ways and theorises the nature of such shifts in drawing on Swidler’s notion of settling contexts.     

E-Learning in der Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft

Using electronic media as teaching and learning tools is no longer a novelty; the fast development and diffusion of §new media”, such as CD-ROM and theWorldWideWeb, have given the use of these media a big boost in recent years. Thus, a number of electronic learning projects have been developed in the field of communication and media studies, of which, however, no general overview was available so far. This article provides such an overview, allows for classification and evaluation of these projects, and thus represents a prerequisite for the future success of such projects. A survey by the authors among communication and media studies departments in German-speaking countries accounted for 14 electronic learning projects that showed fairly diverse emphases with respect to their contents, concepts, didactics, technology, and organisation. In a case study on the Leipzig-based §Distance Learning Propädeutikum" (DLP), the article explores the advantages of electronic learning systems and discusses the challenges in the development and application of such systems. This section also draws on the results of a project-specific evaluation. Both the survey and the case study show that rather than substituting courses or cutting costs on instructors, the main advantage of electronic learning systems lies in their ability to make teaching and learning processes more independent of temporal and spatial constraints.