Engaging the commodified face: the use of marketing in the child adoption process

This paper evaluates the ethical consequences of the use of marketing techniques in the child adoption process within England and Wales. Since 1995 the political climate in the UK has seen a reassessment of the manner in which the state organises care for children who are within its legal guardianship. Successive UK governments have acknowledged the under‐utilisation of child adoption as a moral and efficient means of child‐care. However, the presentation of child adoption in a more active fashion involves concerns about the manner in which child adoption has been organised. Increasingly child adoption organisations and social work professionals are being made accountable through the language of customer service and performance measurements. The use of commercial techniques such as marketing is justified on utilitarian grounds. However, any utilisation of marketing within the child adoption process is forced to ensure that the child is not de‐centred. Legislation requires that the needs and welfare of the child are the first consideration for the adoption agency. Here we begin to see tensions between the humanitarian project that is child adoption, and the unease produced by viewing the child as human ‘product’. This invites analysis via critical theory. The use of marketing in child adoption raises issues related to the objectification and commodification of the child and prospective adopters. Within child adoption it is assumed that we must engage with the child as ‘face’ (Bauman, 1995). But will these assumptions stand the encroachment of marketing techniques into this very sensitive area?     

Australasian environmental economics: contributions,conflicts and ‘cop‐outs’*

Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non‐market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much of the controversy has centred on the validity of valuations generated through the application of stated preference methods such as contingent valuation. Suggestions to overcome some shortcomings in the work of environmental economists include the commissioning of a sequence of non‐market valuation studies to fill existing gaps to improve the potential for benefit transfer.     

What do uncertainty-averse decision-makers believe?

Summary. This paper introduces the concept of firm belief, which is proposed as a new epistemic model for a wide class of preferences. In particular, firm beliefs are shown to have the following desirable properties: (i) they are derived from preferences according to a plausible rule of epistemic inference; (ii) they satisfy standard logical properties; and (iii) tractable representations of firm belief are available for all (suitably continuous) biseparable preferences [13, 14], including the Choquet expected utility [30] and maxmin expected utility [16] classes. We also use firm belief to construct a generalization of Nash equilibrium for (two-player) normal form games. Received: December 14, 1999; revised version: February 26, 2001     

INTERACT: Developing software for interactive decisions

This paper describes the development and use of a piece of software, INTERACT, for analyzing situations under the control of several interested parties. After briefly discussing forms of analysis used, it outlines the design philosophy of the software itself. Particular attention is paid to its intended use in a decision support role. The functions typically performed in the course of analysis are illustrated using a worked example. Finally, avenues for further development are outlined.An earlier version of this paper was read at the Conference on Decision Making under Conditions of Conflict, University of Waterloo, Ontario, August/Sept 1992     

The internationalization of management knowledge dissemination: A dialectic

Most management academics today are concerned with making what they teach more relevant, just as employers operating internationally seek management graduates with at least an exposure to global issues, if not actual experience. In the light of increasing globalization of business, this relevance would undoubtedly be concerned with the internationalization of management education. How to do this effectively is not a simple issue—it involves a number of dimensions, including the student body, faculty, and the method of instruction as well as what is taught. This paper adopts two diametrically opposed approaches to international business, namely those of Porter and Ohmae and contrasts the globalization of management education under these criteria. The conclusion is, not unexpectedly, that neither perspective is entirely right or wrong, but that each offers a valuable framework for the evaluation of options.     

Exploring the need for (extreme) speed: motivations for and outcomes of discontinuous NPD acceleration

ABSTRACT

New product development (NPD) speed is an important concern for firms in today’s fast-paced economy. While existing literature has focused on continuous NPD speed improvements, this paper explores discontinuous NPD acceleration, or dramatic reductions in development time relative to firms’ normal NPD cycles. Across two studies, the authors interview managers to develop a typology of strategic motivations for discontinuous NPD acceleration, followed by a survey of 218 NPD managers to validate the typology and identify important differences across firm types, including those in new product performance, innovation levels, and configurations of organisational characteristics. The results suggest that discontinuous NPD acceleration is most profitable when firms are proactive and have specific configurations of culture, capabilities, and structure. The authors also discuss implications for theory, practice, and future research.     

An Empirical Investigation of the Growth Cycle Theory of Small Firm Financing

This paper empirically tests the financial growth cycle model for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which postulates that as firms become larger, older, and more informationally transparent, their financing options become more attractive. We add to the literature by providing one of the first empirical tests of the model using a large, cross-sectional data set. Our results partially support the financial growth cycle model. Specifically, our results show larger firms, as measured by total number of employees, are more likely to use public equity funding or long-term debt as opposed to insider funding.     

Understanding the Components of Bank Failure Resolution Costs

In this paper, we demonstrate how the resolution costs associated with over 1,000 bank failures from 1986 to 2007 are distributed across the method of resolution, bank size, regulatory periods, and the existence of fraud. In addition, we document the time spent in the resolution by the resolution method and legislative period. Finally, we show how various classes of claimants against the failed banks bear the costs of the failure.     

I used to work at Goldman Sachs! How firms benefit from organizational status in the market for human capital

How does employer status benefit firms in the market for general human capital? On the one hand, high status employers are better able to attract workers, who value the signal of ability that employment at those firms provides. On the other hand, that same signal can help workers bid up wages and capture the value of employers' status. Exploring this tension, we argue that high status firms are able to hire higher ability workers than other firms, and do not need to pay them the full value of their ability early in the career, but must raise wages more rapidly than other firms as those workers accrue experience. We test our arguments using unique survey data on careers in investment banking. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.