Democracy,Cooperation and Business Success: The Case of Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa

Are democracy and success compatible in a business organization? In this work we show how Spain’s Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa (MCC) has made it possible. MCC can be considered a world leader in cooperativism. It is one of the few contemporary business organizations that can be viewed as a democracy, and it represents a unique experience in the use of democratic and participatory methods in management. MCC has developed its own Management Model based on its cooperative principles, on modern management practices and on the cutting edge experiences of the most advanced companies. In this work we analyze the key elements of MCC’s democratic management model, developed around aspects such as corporate culture, organizational structure or human resources. We also look at the case of Irizar, a component cooperative of MCC internationally known for its successful management model. Finally, we outline some practical implications of introducing democracy into organizations, drawn from the experiences of MCC and Irizar.     

The Influence of Confucian Ethics and Collectivism on Whistleblowing Intentions: A Study of South Korean Public Employees

The current study presents the findings of an empirical inquiry into the effects of Confucian ethics and collectivism, on individual whistleblowing intentions. Confucian Ethics and Individualism–Collectivism were measured in a questionnaire completed by 343 public officials in South Korea. This study found that Confucian ethics had significant but mixed effects on whistleblowing intentions. The affection between father and son had a negative effect on internal and external whistleblowing intentions, while the distinction between the roles of husband and wife had a positive effect on those intentions. The effects of collectivism were also different depending on the specific types of collectivism. Horizontal collectivism had a positive effect on both types of whistleblowing intentions, whereas vertical collectivism did not show any significant effects on whistleblowing intentions. These results indicate that cultural traits such as Confucian ethics and collectivism may affect an individual’s whistleblowing intentions in degree and direction, making blanket predictions about cultural effects on whistleblowing difficult.     

Shaping Ethical Perceptions: An Empirical Assessment of the Influence of Business Education,Culture, and Demographic Factors

Recent events at Enron, K-Mart, Adelphia, and Tyson would seem to suggest that managers are still experiencing ethical lapses. These lapses are somewhat surprising and disappointing given the heightened focus on ethical considerations within business contexts during the past decade. This study is designed, therefore, to increase our understanding of the forces that shape ethical perceptions by considering the effects of business school education as well as a number of other individual-level factors (such as intra-national culture, area of specialization within business, and gender) that may exert an influence on ethical perceptions. We found significant effects for business education, self-reported intra-national culture, area of specialization within business, and gender for some and/or all areas of ethics examined (i.e., deceit, fraud, self-interest, influence dealing, and coercion). One of our most encouraging findings is that tolerance for unethical behavior appears to decrease with formal business education. Despite the prevalent stereotype that business students are only interested in the bottom line or that business schools transform idealistic freshman into self-serving business graduates, our results suggest otherwise. Given the heightened criticism of the ethicality of contemporary managerial behavior, it is heartening to note that, even as adults, individuals can be positively affected by integration of ethics training.     

ANFA — National Money Creation as an Existential Threat to the Currency Union?

The recent publication of the previously secret Agreement on Net Financial Assets (ANFA) directed the public’s attention to the possibility that national central banks could create money through purchases of securities on their own account. This paper provides an overview of the legal foundations for ANFA and shows the varying extent to which the member countries use these regulations. What are the interests, risks and consequences for the countries in crisis and the currency union as a whole? Is the ECB properly monitoring ANFA purchases? Could money creation via ANFA act as an explosive device for the currency union?     

Crossing the Boundaries of Obligation: Are Corporate Salaries a Form of Bribery?

Trans-National Corporations (TNCs) pay relatively high salaries to local people in host countries. TNCs assume that such employees will accept an employeeÇôemployer relationship similar to that which exists in North America, but the obligations and personal interests that such a relationship create often directly conflict with systems of obligation already established in the host country. When TNCs do business across the boundaries of systems of obligation, corporate salaries can be seen as a form of unethical bribery. In this paper, the core case of business bribery is described consistent with the usual philosophical analysis of bribery, and the grounds for thinking bribery is unethical are made clear. The amount of a bribe is irrelevant to the ethical analysis. Bribery is distinguished from tips and grease on structural grounds. The concept of a system of obligation is defined, and examples given that show the variability of systems of obligation in host countries. Arguments are given to show that salaries paid by TNCs create obligations and personal interests which sometimes conflict with existing systems of obligation, and that such payments have the same structure as more traditional forms of bribery. The ethical issues of corporations crossing the boundaries of systems of obligations are discussed.     

Ordered Weighted Disagreement Functions

In this paper a preference aggregation procedure is proposed for those cases in which decision-makers express their preferences by means of a ranking of alternatives. Among the most commonly applied methods for this purpose are those based on distance measures between individual and collective preferences, which look for the solution that minimizes the disagreement across decision-makers. Some models based on the minimization of the distance between rankings include weights to adjust the relative importance of the agents in the final decision, although in those cases, the weights are related with an a priori evaluation of the individuals and not with the behaviour of the agents in the group decision making process. In the model proposed here, a weighted disagreement function whose emphasis is on the ordered position of the individuals’ disagreement values is developed. In order to solve the problem, a mixed-integer linear programming model is constructed.     

Ethical Orientation and Awareness of Tourism Students

The tourism industry is one of the largest industries in the world, and despite recent events that have made its operating environment more complex, the industry continues to grow [Theobald, 2005, Global Tourism, 3rd edn., Butterworth-Heinemann/Elsevier]. Commensurate to the size of the industry is a growth in the number of students pursuing degree courses in tourism around the world. Despite an increasingly sophisticated literature, the relative recency of the industry and its study has meant little attention has been paid in the ethics literature to the dilemmas facing tourism managers and its students. Based on interviews with senior members of the tourism industry six scenarios are developed with pertinence to the challenges faced by industry practitioners today. This paper then applies the Multidimensional Ethics Scale [Reidenbach and Robin, 1990, Journal of Business Ethics, 9, 639–653] to tourism students at three prominent universities in the U.K., Canada and Australia. In total, 438 responses are achieved. The results have importance for the instruction of tourism students for the future, but also in informing decisions about the tools tourism destinations can effectively employ to control the future direction of the industry     

Entrepreneurial intention and career choices: the role of volition

Developing entrepreneurship among students and helping them to build their career plans and improving their employability is the core of public policy in many countries in Europe (Branchet et al. in J Small Bus Enterp Dev 18(2):384–402, 2011). Following some empirical researches (Boissin et al. in J Small Bus Entrep 22(2):101–122, 2009), we know some predictive factors for the emergence of an entrepreneurial project. But another question remains largely unexplored: What are the psychological mechanisms that may interplay in entrepreneurial intention and career choices? Our research aims to demonstrate that entrepreneurship is an objective which relies entirely on willingness, and, therefore, is much more dependent on interpersonal features than on economic and environmental constraints. In particular, we wish to highlight the personal dynamics in shaping, maturing, and implementing a choice of entrepreneurial career in order to extract volitional characteristics of this career choice. The hypotheses are tested using data from interviews conducted with French students in business schools, engineering schools, and universities. Our dynamic approach to study the psychosocial processes involved in the definition of an entrepreneurial career helps to understand the interest of young people in the entrepreneurial process. This research has demonstrated that volition has a key role in binding an individual commitment to an ambitious career objective.     

A Review of The Empirical Ethical Decision-Making Literature: 1996–2003

This review summarizes and critiques the empirical ethical decision-making literature from 1996–2003. One hundred and seventy-four articles were published in top business journals during this period. Tables are included that summarize the findings by dependent variable – awareness, judgment, intent, and behavior. We compare this review with past reviews in order to draw conclusions regarding trends in the ethical decision-making literature and to surface directions for future research.Michael J. O’Fallon is a graduate student in the Department of Management and Operations at Washington State University. His primary research interest is individual ethical decision-making and behavior in organizations. Recently, he has explored issues in organizational behavior, human resource management, and consumer behavior toward genetically modified foods.Kenneth D. Butterfield is an associate professor of management at Washington State University. He received his Ph.D. in Business Administration from The Pennsylvania State University. His research has been published in a variety of academic journals, including Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Business and Society, Business Ethics Quarterly, Human Relations, Journal of Higher Education, Journal of Managerial Issues, and Research in Higher Education. His current research interests involve organizational behavior issues such as managing ethical decision-making and behavior in organizations, examining why people fail to recognize moral issues, understanding academic dishonesty and promoting academic integrity, and examining organizational punishment from the manager’s perspective.