Work-Family Conflict: A Virtue Ethics Analysis

Work-family conflict has been examined quite often in human resources management and industrial/organizational psychology literature. Numerous statistics show that the magnitude of this employment issue will continue to grow. As employees attempt to balance work demands and family responsibilities, organizations will have to decide to what extent they will go to minimize this conflict. Research has identified numerous negative consequences of work-family stressors for organizations, for employees and for employees' families. There are however many options to reduce this strain, each with advantages and disadvantages. An ethical analysis, from a virtue ethics perspective, is applied to this timely issue to present an alternative view in addressing this critical business decision. In addition, a strong connection between the virtue ethics analysis and a well-known management theory is given to provide a foundation for managerial implications for resolving work-family conflict.     

“Following” or “attracting” the customer? Japanese Banking FDI in Europe

Using firm-level Japanese FDI data on investment into 18 European countries between 1970–2000 in all industries (banking, manufacturing, wholesale/retail distribution, and business services), this study examines if the “follow the customer” (FTC) hypothesis holds for firm-level data. The results suggest that banks do follow their customers into a foreign market, as part of a larger strategy that goes beyond the FTC theory. The firm level data show that the majority of FDI into a host country occurs after the foreign bank has established operations. Policy implications of this finding include the suggestion that host economies liberalize their financial sector early in an effort to attract banking FDI which then will attract non-banking FDI rather than the reverse.     

Bank-led restructuring in Poland: the conciliation process in action1

Poland's 1993 Enterprise and Bank Restructuring Programme (EBRP) tried to force state-owned commercial banks to build institutional capacity and resolve their problem loans. The outcome of its innovative bank-led workout (‘conciliation’) process, documented in this study of 62 firms, is decidedly mixed. The EBRP forced banks to confront their problems, helped them to build instituional capacity in their workout units, and furthered the difficult task of weeding out and closing clearly unviable firms. Yet it had limited power to promote needed restructuring or privatization in firms. The conciliation agreements were relatively unsophisticated and include few tangible requirements for operational or management change. The first two years of implementation saw a slowdown (over earlier years) in the rate of layoffs, a decline in average operating profitablility, and very little real privatization. The main impact of conciliation appears to have been to reduce debt service and thereby give firms ‘breathing room’.     

Investment and technological choice in a right-to-manage model

We analyze the interactions between investment and local wage bargaining in a putty-clay model where the investment decision commits the firm to a particular capital intensity. This technological precommitment is used strategically in order to manipulate the bargaining outcome. We show that this strategic behavior induces a nonmonotonic relationship between the capital and labor demands of the firm and most of its environmental parameters (e.g., the bargaining power of the union, its minimum wage requirement, the capital cost). The results we obtain in our putty-clay framework thus contradict several conclusions of the standard literature on wage bargaining and investment.     

Implementing a corporate environmental strategy: establishing coordination and control within multinational companies

This article presents the results of an empirical study that investigated coordination and control within multinational companies over six key aspects of their environmental strategy. Specifically, it first examines the level of centralization of these key issues. Second, it investigates whether there is a positive relation between three variables associated with organizational complexity and the level of centralization of the environmental issues. Statistical analyses of the data obtained from a sample of 98 North American multinationals were conducted. The study's results revealed that most companies have adopted a global environmental standard to govern their worldwide business activities that is supported by strong central controls over both environmental performance evaluation of facilities and decisions regarding the development of environmental programs. Results also revealed that there are limited links between organizational complexity and most aspects of the environmental strategy. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

HURDLE MODELS OF ALCOHOL AND TOBACCO EXPENDITURE IN SOUTH AFRICAN HOUSEHOLDS1

Estimates of participation or expenditure elasticities depend upon the assumptions made regarding the observation of zero expenditure at the household level. This research examines two single‐hurdle models across two commodities for which nearly two‐thirds of the observations are zero. The research shows that one hurdle model consistently outperforms the other, and does so for intuitively appealing reasons.     

Does the Choice between Wage Inequality and Unemployment Affect Productivity Growth?

Abstract. We present a non-scale continuous-time overlapping-generations growth model that provides an explanation for why economies with relative wage rigidity feature higher unemployment, but not slower productivity growth, than economies with flexible wages. The compression of the wage distribution associated with relative wage rigidity slows down human capital accumulation and growth ceteris paribus . But unemployment among the low-skilled workers strengthens the incentives to invest in human capital and, hence, growth. The two effects are offsetting, and growth is independent of the prevailing degree of relative wage rigidity. This knife-edge result is robust with respect to some modifications of the model.     

Coordination versus differentiation in a standards war: 56K modems

56K modems were introduced under two competing incompatible standards. We show the importance of competition between internet service providers in the adoption process. We show that ISPs were less likely to adopt the technology that more competitors adopted. This result is particularly striking given that industry participants expected coordination on one standard or the other. We speculate about the role of ISP differentiation in preventing the market from achieving standardization until a standard setting organization intervened.