Honesty, Individualism, and Pragmatic Business Ethics: Implications for Corporate Hierarchy

The boundaries of honesty are the focal point of this exploration of the individualistic origins of modernist ethics and the consequent need for a more pragmatic approach to business ethics. The tendency of modernist ethics to see honesty as an individual responsibility is described as a contextually naive approach, one that fails to account for the interactive effects between individual choices and corporate norms. By reviewing the empirical accounts of managerial struggles with ethical dilemmas, the article arrives at the contextual preconditions for encouraging the development of reflective moral agents in modern corporations.     

Towards a Strategy for Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is emerging as a significant organizational and management challenge. The pressures of the emergence of the global knowledge economy, and recognition of knowledge as a key and intangible asset are making the effective management of knowledge a priority. This surge of interest has paid relatively little attention to the object of management-knowledge. Epistemologists and sociologists have produced a variety of definitions and classifications, but there is no consensus. However, with the growth in IT capability, a clear operational distinction can be drawn between information and knowledge. The former can be captured, stored and transmitted in digital form. The latter can only exist in an intelligent system. This distinction is used to develop models of the interaction between knowledge and information, and of the appropriate balance between the two in different situations. On the basis of this model, the challenges of 'knowledge management' are: Establishing and optimizing the information-knowledge balance appropriate to (or providing a competitive advantage) a company or industry; Implementing IT-based productivity improvements in information management; Implementing people- and socially-based mechanisms to enhance knowledge management; Explicitly addressing the knowledge-information interface and mechanisms for improving the processes of transition from information to knowledge, and from knowledge to information; Identifying and maintaining the core knowledge of an organization.     

Reward design and CEO succession in the UK

Previous research has shown that top executives often rise to the peak of their organizations after a long-term employment relationship, and that internal promotion to the top is reflected in enhanced baseline salaries. Using data from a representative sample of UK companies, the links between the fixed and variable elements of the Chief Executive Officer's compensation package are examined and whether the appointment has been promoted internally or recruited from outside of the company. From this analysis, it is concluded that the positive impact on basic pay of elevation to the top job from within the company is not present in total compensation or the structure of pay. It also emerges that although tenure does not significantly impact on the structure of pay, it does alter total reward through its impact on the value of options granted: longer company tenure reduces both the award of share options and the total value of the remuneration package; job tenure, on the other hand, raises the executive's reward primarily through its positive impact on baseline salary. Though share ownership reduces the performance sensitivity of earnings, increases in baseline salary are reflected in greater exposure to the use of share options.     

Measuring perceived pre-purchase risk for a new industrial product

Risk is an important element in industrial adoption decisions. This paper proposes a method to investigate how different group of individuals influencing the adoption of a new industrial product differ in their assessment of the risks. Two dimensions of risk are distinguished: (1) the likelihood that adoption of the new product will have undesirable consequences, and (2) the perceived intensity of these consequences both at the organizational and at the individual level. Purchase consequences are measured in terms of product economics and product reliability. Multivariate analysis of variance is used to assess how decision participants differ in their assessment of risk components. An attempt is made to assess the relative importance of these various components in the formation of individual preferences. The implications of the analysis for the development of better industrial marketing strategies are discussed.     

Naturalizing bodies and places: Tourism Media Campaigns and Heterosexualities in Costa Rica and New Zealand

Drawing on feminist, queer and poststructuralist theories of sexuality this article contributes to the field of tourism branding. Research findings on tourism media campaigns-New Zealand’s ‘100% Pure campaign’, and Costa Rica’s ‘No Artificial Ingredients’—illustrate how places and bodies are co-constructed and heterosexualized. We argue that both campaigns employ familiar landscape tropes of ‘nature’, ‘pureness’, ‘wilderness’, and ‘escape’, which discursively construct places and bodies as ‘natural’, ‘exotic’, and ‘romantic’. We draw on ethnographic and interview data to consider the lived experiences of these discourses for tourists and tourism businesses. By paying attention to the sexualized representations made and remade through tourism media campaigns the article challenges hegemonic conceptualizations of sexualities and offers an exciting future research agenda for tourism studies.     

The Measurement and Structural Modeling of the Reasonableness of Workplace Accommodations

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) guarantees protection from discrimination for persons with a disability. The ADA requires employers to make reasonable accommodations for persons with physical and mental disabilities unless doing so would produce undue hardship on the organization. Fifteen years after the passage of the ADA, the question as to what is a reasonable accommodation remains controversial, especially for some types of disabilities. In this study, a reasonable accommodation scale is proposed and tested using structural equation modeling in hopes that such a scale will aid the courts and organizations in determining what is reasonable. Individuals’ level of awareness of disability issues is also examined in the model to examine the relationship between awareness and willingness to accommodate. Results indicate acceptable fit of the model to the data and provide support for the proposed scale. Furthermore, the relationship between awareness of disability issues and willingness to accommodate was significant. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Market Orientation and Raw Material Control

Much of the existing literature on market orientation emphasizes the role played by the competencies of companies in selling products. However, in industries that rely on a natural resource sector for its primary input, another constraint may dominate: the limitations on supply of that input. We examine this issue in the context of a particular natural resource sector, the fishery, as a case study of the more general phenomenon. Using the example of Norway's apparent lack of market orientation as a supplier of fresh fish, the paper demonstrates how the characteristics of natural resource sectors as well as how public policies are used to manage those sectors may place significant roadblocks in the way of developing a market orientation by the industries that depend on those sectors for raw material. The paper notes that there has been an increased consumer demand for fresh fish, away from the frozen product. This, in principle, should lead to an increased need for a market orientation by sellers and closer relationships between the primary processors and the distributors of fresh seafood. However, several barriers, including those associated with fishery management, hinder this process. These include the presence of a structure where earnings from fishing are independent of quality, the seasonality of supplies in the raw fish markets, the way fish quotas are managed, the structure of first hand sales, and the underdeveloped relationships between supermarkets and the primary processors. In short, the analysis identifies critical linkages between fishery management and the marketing of seafood. Its broader contribution is to increased understanding of the interdependencies between the marketing of natural resource-based products and public management of that resource.     

Economic espionage and interallied strategic cooperation

Incidents of economic espionage by foreign governments against US corporations, persons, and institutions are numerous and very costly. Meeting this challenge has become a high national priority, and several significant measures have been taken by Washington that affect the business community directly and indirectly. Allies of the United States are among the principal culprits. This raises a potentially serious issue: How to pursue mutually beneficial, essentially cooperative, interallied strategic relations while economic relations among allies are acquiring a sharper competitive edge? Thus far, economic espionage has not jeopardized traditional security ties. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.