Is silence golden? An empirical analysis of firms that stop giving quarterly earnings guidance

We investigate firms that stop providing earnings guidance (“stoppers”) either by publicly announcing their decision (“announcers”) or doing so quietly (“quiet stoppers”). Relative to firms that continue guiding, stoppers have poorer prior performance, more uncertain operating environments, and fewer informed investors. Announcers commit to non-disclosure because they (i) do not expect to report future good news or (ii) have lower incentives to guide due to the presence of long-term investors. The three-day return around the announcement is negative. Stoppers subsequently experience increases in analyst forecast dispersion and decreases in forecast accuracy but no change in return volatility or analyst following.     

Constrained Morality in the Professional Work of Corporate Lawyers

In this article, we contribute to sociological literatures on morality, professional and institutional contexts, and morally stigmatized ‘dirty work’ by emphasizing and exploring how they mutually inform one another in lawyers’ work activities. Drawing on interview data with 58 practitioners in the commercial legal industry in Singapore, we analyze how they experience professional and institutional constraints on the expressions of morality in their work. Our findings illustrate how a dominant managerial and economic focus maintains and reproduces a constrained form of morality, limited to instrumental, utilitarian and commercial ends, and subordinated to lucrative client and firm interests. We discuss our findings in terms of the need to research and reform professions in ways that support more rounded and unconstrained moral reflexivity and autonomy in how work is undertaken and valued. This in turn has implications for how organizations and professions might achieve alternative moral institutional orders, and for legal work to avoid the moral and social taints of dirty work.

     

An empirical analysis of the relationship between university investments in Technology Transfer Offices and academic spin‐offs

The aim of this paper is to analyze the role of university Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) in contributing to the creation and the performance of academic spin‐offs (ASOs). More specifically, it investigates the relationship between resources invested in TTOs in term of employees and the creation and growth of ASOs. The empirical analysis refers to Italy, where since 1999 academicians have been allowed to be actively involved in setting up companies for the ‘industrial use of research’. We used data on ASOs and resources invested by Italian universities in TTOs during the 2002–2011 period to investigate if and to what extent such investments contributed to the birth and growth of ASOs. We also controlled the results using information on university and on local context, in which university is located. The results of the empirical analysis show that in a first phase academicians reacted more promptly than universities to the opportunities offered by the new legislation, which may in part be due to the organizational rigidity that characterizes Public Administration in Italy. However, the empirical analysis also shows that after this initial phase the size of the TTOs (in terms of employees) has had a positive influence on the number of new ASOs (i.e. birth), but not on the performance of ASOs (i.e. growth), which is influenced by both long‐term investments in research (i.e. the quality of research results) and other variables linked to the regional and national contexts, such as the presence of incubators or the level of economic development. Our results regard a widely studied topic and should provide incremental findings for the community of entrepreneurship scholars and relevant implications for policy makers and TTO managers.     

Exploring the influence of family on adolescents’ seafood consumption choices

Seafood in the adolescent diet has many benefits, yet a number of adolescents do not consume the recommended levels. Despite this the consumption of seafood by younger consumers has received scant attention in the extant literature. Previous studies on adolescents’ food‐related behaviour tend to focus on general choice mechanisms or perceptions of food and mainly relate to fruit and vegetable intake. The present study seeks to address this gap through investigating the impact of family upon the consumption of seafood by younger consumers through exploring adolescents’ attitudes and behaviour in regard to eating seafood. Utilizing an exploratory qualitative methodology, seven focus groups of adolescents aged 13–19 years were conducted at two schools in South West England. Discussions covered a range of issues related to adolescent seafood consumption. The use of thematic content analysis found that the family, and parents in particular, exert high levels of influence over adolescents’ consumption of seafood both at home and when dining out. The parent who does the shopping and cooking has the greatest role. Sibling preferences and dietary choices also influence whether seafood is served in the home. Of value to researchers and management are the insights gleaned into the influences on adolescents’ attitudes towards and behaviour in regard to eating seafood. In particular, encouraging seafood consumption will rely upon interventions aimed at both parents and children and need to take into account adolescents’ diet and lifestyle preferences, while also acknowledging the influence of peers and the school food environment.     

CEO duality,succession, capabilities and agency theory: commentary and research agenda

We offer a new explanation for the relationship between CEO duality and firm performance that accounts for managerial capabilities and succession planning. Our reinterpretation of findings by Worrell, Nemec and Davidson (1997) is consistent with the new explanation. We also make suggestions for future research. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exploring Point of Sale Strategies for Improving Seafood Retailing: The Case of the Australian Oyster Industry

The commodification of many food products, combined with increasing market share of supermarkets, has increased the importance of point of sale (POS) strategies in specialty food retailers such as fishmongers. This study seeks to develop strategies to improve the retailing of seafood in fishmongers, specifically oysters, an underutilized species; although they are eaten by many consumers, purchase frequency is low. A literature review identifies the key drivers and barriers to oyster consumption and the information consumers want at POS. Based on these findings, a retailing strategy is developed and tested in two consumer focus groups with results informing revisions to the recommended retail strategy, importantly including a change in collateral from a production focus to a consumption focus. This study contributes to theory and practice by bringing together the existing literature on drivers and barriers and consumer information requirements about oysters to develop and to test practical retail strategy concepts.     

Parents' Leisure,LGB Young People and “When We Were Coming Out”

ABSTRACT

This article examines parents' leisure experiences in relation to their child's coming out process and developing lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) identity. Thirteen heterosexual-identifying parents (seven mothers and six fathers) from Canada and the United States were interviewed about the social context and relational aspects of their leisure experiences (e.g., special events and holidays, friends, co-participants, co-workers). Analysis showed that leisure contexts could be altered in relation to their child's developing LGB identity and cultural norms related to heterosexism and homophobia. Three main themes that best reflected the mothers' and fathers' experiences emerged: (a) grieving heterosexist ideals and reframing familial expectations, (b) encountering homophobia and the loss of community, and (c) coming out of the family home and creating a supportive network.     

What is the Comparative Advantage of the Service Learning Pedagogy? Insights from Development Economics

We rely on the Kolb learning cycle and the experiences from two development economics class to analyze the comparative advantage of service learning pedagogy. We hypothesize that service learning is uniquely positioned to improve learning outcomes in applied/policy-oriented specializations. We conceptualize learning outcomes from a discipline-specific perspective where service hours are directly linked to the course content. We argue that the sustainability of service learning in applied/policy-oriented disciplines is limited by journal-entry orthodoxy and short-term costs. Emotive journal entries often encourage an “everything goes” response which threatens the credibility of service learning and limits its use in specializations that value objectivity. Service hours imply costs to faculty and students that exceed those of traditional approaches. This can serve as a disincentive for course adaptation, despite the decline in these costs over time, and enrollment. Our analysis encourages instructors to explore alternatives to the widely used journal-entry and to seek opportunities to inform students of the expected long-run benefit/cost tradeoffs. We encourage administrators to support faculty who teach classes that are predisposed to service learning in ways that can reduce short-run costs. With its comparative advantage and the united efforts across the academy, we expect that in the long-run service experiences will routinely be used to complement traditional lectures in applied/policy-oriented classrooms across the academy.     

The impact of vendor incentives on Quick Response

Quick Response (QR) is an important business strategy that was initiated in the mid 1980s to deal with competition, slow growth, and reduced margins in the apparel industry. The purpose of this paper was to explore QR strategies focusing on the development of vendor partnerships. A vendor partnership model of QR implementation and channel relationships was developed using an exploratory sample of US retail firms. The model was tested using correlation analysis. Major findings indicated that these firms gave vendors incentives to adopt QR and that firms having more advanced QR programmes perceived fewer problems than those with less advanced programmes. A partial relationship was found between QR and improved financial performance. Finally, the length of time firms had been practicing QR did not guarantee a more advanced QR programme.