Selling whiteness? – A critical review of the literature on marketing and racism

ABSTRACT

This article provides a critical review of the literature concerning marketing and racism, grounded in theoretical foundations drawn from critical race theory, whiteness theory and attendant models of privilege and oppression in society. The extant literature indicates a relationship between racism, marketing and social hierarchies which manifest with regard to marketing representations of people of colour and racialised groups; discriminatory practices in the marketplace and the roles of marketing professionals of colour. However, multiculturalism and anti-racism efforts attempt to counter racist practices; yet, the impacts of these efforts are unclear. Directions for future research are suggested.     

Nursing and technology: a love/hate relationship

The fundamental value of information technology in clinical settings is no longer in question, as clinicians enter and retrieve information in order to deliver care and the benefit of ubiquitous availability to clinical data using computers cannot be overplayed. The question now is how to increase adoption, improve productivity, and support transformational changes in health care delivery. It is important to get the interplay between people, process, and technology right for successful implementations which support care transformation. We must lead projects with the clinical practice changes being enabled by the technology, and then ensure the technology supports the practice change. Nurse leaders must consider letting the quality improvement process drive and define when and how technology is used, running our projects as practice changes and not IT implementations, with nursing sponsors owning the projects and leading the charge.     

The voluntary adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards and loan contracting around the world

Using a sample of non-U.S. borrowers from 40 countries during 1997 through 2005, this paper investigates the effect of the voluntary adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on price and nonprice terms of loan contracts and loan ownership structure in the international loan market. Our results reveal the following. First, banks charge lower loan rates to IFRS adopters than to non-adopters. The difference in loan rates in excess of a benchmark rate between the two groups is about 20 basis points for all loans and nearly 31 basis points for London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR)-based loans. Second, banks impose more favorable nonprice terms on IFRS adopters, particularly less restrictive covenants. We also provide evidence suggesting that banks are more willing to extend credit to IFRS adopters through larger loans and longer maturities. Finally, IFRS adopters attract significantly more foreign lenders participating in loan syndicates than non-adopters.     

Hedge fund incentives,management commitment and survivorship

Management ownership in hedge funds sends conflicting signals—signals which reduce investors’ perception of survivorship risk. We document that decisions on management ownership are purposely self-selected. Such decisions are most likely motivated by unique incentive mechanisms imbedded in hedge funds. We examine the impact of managerial ownership decisions on fund survivorship risk by accounting for unobserved fund manager motivations that affect both ownership decisions and survivorship risk. Our findings suggest that the conventional argument that having management commitment can reduce survival risk (and therefore align the interests between managers and investors) is significantly overstated. These results are robust to using alternative ownership measures and controlling for different samples.     

Critical accounting and communicative action: On the limits of consensual deliberation

Richard Laughlin's work provides a framework for scholarly engagement that includes process (middle range thinking), a societal model of administration, and a means for reflexive and collective decision-making. The framework draws on Habermas’ theory of communicative action, which is underpinned by a deliberative, consensus-oriented conceptualization of democracy. Based on recent developments in political theory and related applied fields, we argue that deliberative democracy is only one of several democratic bases useful in understanding and/or improving accounting and accountability systems to better meet the needs of diverse contemporary societies. In particular, we contend that, in relying on Habermasian-style deliberative democracy, Laughlin's conceptualizations do not fully account for the dimensions of disagreement and difference in democratic interactions. Drawing on the work of agonistic political theorists and studies from the applied fields of communicative planning and critical policy analysis, we argue that deliberative democracy approaches based on ideal speech criteria and universalistic consensus need to be balanced with theorizations that recognize the reality and value of more open-ended and unfinalizable struggles among actors with different histories, cultures, and/or ideological orientations. While cognizant of the challenges involved in bridging deliberative-agonistic conceptualizations of democracy, such endeavors provide opportunities for (re)theorizations that offer promise for enriching critical accounting by, as we argue, reinforcing the critical/political in critical accounting. To this end, we consider possibilities of forging links between Laughlin's work and our own proposals for dialogic/polylogic accountings based on agonistic democracy in an effort to foster more enabling accounting praxis.     

Compositional gaps and downward spirals in international joint venture management groups

We argue that compositional gaps in international joint venture (IJV) management groups, along parent company lines, will accentuate distinct managerial coalitions. Such gaps can occur on dimensions of observable demography, less apparent demography, or psychological characteristics. While compositional gaps in IJV management groups can provide the basis for healthy substantive conflict, such gaps—particularly if they are large—also tend to induce relationship conflict and heighten substantive conflict beyond its beneficial range. This can set off a downward spiral of relationship conflict, substantive conflict, and behavioral disintegration in the group. These harmful group processes further interact reciprocally with any tensions that might exist between the IJV parents, engendering a second downward spiral. Our model has implications for the performance of international joint ventures, and it serves as a foundation for designing interventions to avoid the downward spirals we portray. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

PREFERENCES FOR STATE TAX AND SPENDING POLICIES: EVIDENCE FROM SURVEY DATA ON THE ROLE OF INCOME

Employing a commonly-used method of creating a continuous income variable from categorical data, we obtain results from a fiscal survey that reveal a strong nonmonotonic effect of income on the willingness to pay additional taxes for state expenditures on education and public aid. The existence of income-demand schedules that are U- or inverted U-shaped casts doubt on the appropriateness of assuming that the median income voter is decisive. After investigating the sensitivity of our results to different income measures, we suggest that fiscal surveys should be designed to provide sufficiently detailed information about respondents'incomes, especially for high-income respondents.     

Privatization in Eastern Europe: Opportunities and pitfalls

More than 20 years of experience in Eastern Europe has proved that the only way to produce good organizational results is to put companies into the hands of real owners. That means privatization.     

On variable ordination of modified Cholesky decomposition for estimating time-varying covariance matrices

Estimating time-varying covariance matrices of the vector of interest is challenging both computationally and statistically due to a large number of constrained parameters. In this work, we consider an order-averaged Cholesky-log-GARCH (OA-CLGARCH) model for estimating time-varying covariance matrices through the orthogonal transformations of the vector based on the modified Cholesky decomposition. The proposed method is to transform the vector at each time as a linear transformation of uncorrelated latent variables and then to use simple univariate GARCH models to model them separately. But the modified Cholesky decomposition relies on a given order of variables, which is often not available, to sequentially orthogonalize the variables. The proposed method develops an order-averaged strategy for the Cholesky-GARCH method to alleviate the effect of order of variables. The merits of the proposed method are illustrated through simulations and real-data studies.     

Economic reform and interprovincial inequalities in China

This note is an attempt to explore two issues: (1) the trend of interprovincial inequality in the post-1978 reform era in China; and (2) the factors behind the dynamics of interprovincial inequality. Using recently released provincial gross domestic product (GDP) data, we have shown that interprovincial inequality decreased in the fast half of the 1980s, but started to increase in the second half of the 1980s. To understand the impact of sectoral reforms on interprovincial inequality, the overall inequality in provincial per capita GDP is decomposed into the contributions by the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. It seems that the trend of interprovincial inequality has been largely induced by the reforms of the industrial sector which make up a large share of the secondary sector. In addition, national income data from the socialist national accounting system are used to identify the impact of interprovincial resource flows on interprovincial inequalities. The findings seem to suggest a relative decline in the role of redistributive budgetary transfers.