Spatial determinants of productivity growth on agri‐food Spanish firms: a comparison between cooperatives and investor‐owned firms

This study analyses the effect of the spatial factor, location, and interaction effects among peer companies, on the productivity growth of agri‐food companies in Spain. With this aim, we build a productivity growth index and apply a multiequational Seemingly Unrelated Regression on a sample of 344 Spanish cooperatives and investor‐owned firms for the period 2010–2012. Our findings show that agri‐food firms are influenced by spatial factors finding interesting differences between cooperatives and investor‐owned firms. With regard to the geographical location, cooperatives in the western of Spain show higher productivity growth rates, whereas investor‐owned firms in the northeast of Spain present better results. The interaction effect among closer peer companies is also a relevant factor to determine the productivity growth in agri‐food companies. This factor is more relevant for cooperatives than for investor‐owned firms.     

Editorial: Special Issue on the Impact of Business Ethics on Public Life

Even though management scholars have offered several views on the process of corporate sustainability, these efforts have focused mainly on the technical aspects of sustainability while omitting the fundamental role played by individual moral competences. Therefore, previous work offers an incomplete and somewhat reductionist view of corporate sustainability. In this article, we develop a holistic framework of corporate sustainability in which both the moral and technical aspects of sustainability are considered. We do so by integrating the ethical, normative perspective of the Catholic social teaching (CST) with the competitive view of the natural resource-based view. This framework highlights the importance of CST principles and ideas in developing executive moral competences such as moral sensitivity and awareness, and moral cognition and motivation. Moral competences, in turn, influence the organizational selection of environmental strategies, giving leaders the intrinsic motivation to promote both a longer-term stance on corporate sustainability efforts and a relentless search for greener business models. Such strategies move the firm closer towards achieving environmental sustainability. Hence, by bridging the individual, normative-ethical with the organizational, implementational levels of corporate sustainability, our framework provides a more realistic, coherent, and complete perspective on the complex process of achieving corporate sustainability.     

Institutional stock trading on loan market information

One of the most important developments in the corporate loan market over the past decade has been the growing participation of institutional investors. As lenders, institutional investors routinely receive private information about borrowers. However, most of these investors also trade in public securities. This leads to a controversial question: Do institutional investors use private information acquired in the loan market to trade in public securities? This paper examines the stock trading of institutional investors whose portfolios also hold loans. Using the Securities and Exchange Commission filings of loan amendments, we identify institutional investors with access to private information disclosed during loan amendments. We then look at abnormal returns on subsequent stock trades. We find that institutional participants in loan renegotiations subsequently trade in the stock of the same company and outperform trades by other managers and trades in other stocks by approximately 5.4% in annualized terms.     

Ethics on the Web: Applying Moral Decision-Making to the New Media

This paper examines the advent of the Web as a critical media tool in the promotion and sale of goods to consumers and the ethical questions it raises that are issues of public policy. We examine four traditional ethical rationales that guide organizational decision-making – utilitarianism, distributive justice, moral rights of man and relativism, further characterized as "ends-based", "equity-based", "rules-based" and "comparison-based" rationales – and we apply them to four moral dilemmas attributed to the proliferation of dot.com companies as they relate to consumer welfare. We find that ethical rationale in the New Media is largely non-existent, and where it exists, it is primarily reactive and driven by utilitarian or relativistic reasoning. We attribute this condition to the newness of the industry and to its economic context, representing, as it does, many characteristics embodied in the concept of the "perfect market." We offer some remedies to improve ethical conduct by e-business.     

SOCIO-ECONOMIC FACTORS IN LAND CLASSIFICATION

Three interpretive systems of soil classification for agriculture were compared with respect to land use, crop yields, and certain economic characteristics. Sixty-eight farms in the Peace River area of British Columbia were classified as high or low under the ARDA, soil survey, and agronomic classification systems. Mean values for the two categories of farms under each classification system were computed and tested for statistical significance. The results indicated that as the number of significant differences increased, so did the management consideration. Consequently, the agronomic classification was the best indicator, followed by the ARDA system, and then the soil survey productivity index. Considering the basic concepts of the classification systems, this trend was not entirely unexpected. The results suggest that the management factor should play a larger role in developing viable interpretive soil classification systems and that co-operation should be sought among the various disciplines concerned with agricultural land use. LES FACTEURS SOCIO-ECONOMIQUES DANS LA CLASSIFICATION DES SOLS ACRICOLES – Trois systèmes de classification des sols agricoles ont été comparés avec I'aide du type d'utilisation des sols, du rendement des récoltes et de certaines caractéristiques économiques. Soixante-huit fernws dans la zone de “Peace River” en Colombie Britannique out été classifiés, en deux catégories avec I'aide de I'ARDA de I'enquête des sols et des systèmes de classification agronomique. Les principals valeurs pour les deux catégories de fermes appartenant à chaque système de classification ont été calculées et testées afin de vérifier leur signification statistique. Les résultats indiquérent que le nombre de différences significatives augmentaient en mêmc temps que la qualityé du “management”: Conséquence directe, la classification agronomique etait le meilleur indicateur, suivi du systeme ARDA et enfin de lindice de productivityé de l'enquête des sols. Étant donné les concepts de base de ces systèmes de classification, cette tendance n‘était pas complètement inattendue. Les résultats suggèrent que le facteur de “management” devrait jouer un rôle plus large en développant des systèmes de classification des sols viables et que la coopération devrait être recherchée parmi les différentes disciplines concernées par Vutilisation agricole des sols.     

From ‘embrace and change’ to ‘engage and change’: trade union renewal and new management strategies in the UK automotive industry?

This article focuses on the relationship between the introduction of new management techniques (NMTs), trade union responses and employee attitudes in the automotive industry in the UK. In contrast to a prevailing pessimistic prognosis for the survival of traditional industrial relations in the 'new management' environment, unions remain as an independent and dissenting force. Paradoxically, one of the significant features driving union recovery has been the opportunities presented by the very nature of NMTs themselves which, among other things, have opened the possibility for increased local autonomy.