The Limits of Strategic Rationality: Ethics, Enterprise Risk Management, and Governance

This article explores the links between strategic goals, enterprise risk management, and ethics. We offer a typology of managerial attitudes toward strategic goals and rationality and explore the interaction between strategic and ethical decision making. In so doing, we offer a practical framework for managers to approach ethical dilemmas in the highly complex, volatile, and risky economy that we currently find ourselves in.     

Injuries,inequalities and health in Europe

Injuries account for a significant burden of mortality, morbidity, disability and health care costs. They differentially affect age and sex groups and reveal massive inequalities in occurrence within and between countries in Europe. Within countries, the poor suffer most and have least ability to change their exposures to risk. Addressing inequalities in injury occurrence would play a valuable role in reducing the differential burden of ill-health between rich and poor. Despite the evidence for many effective injury-related interventions, limited attention has been devoted to addressing injuries as a public health priority. This paper questions why attention has been limited to date and suggests policy action to support injuries being addressed as a mainstream concern by national and international health policy-makers. The paper briefly highlights the public health burden of injuries and violence; illustrates the range of inequalities that characterise their occurrence; highlights the scope for public health action and considers the extent to which policies that reduce the overall burden of injuries may also reduce inequalities in their occurrence; and finally examines why there has been a limited policy response to date and suggests ways of advancing the agenda.     

Productivity in Chinese Provincial Agriculture

Technical change, technical efficiency and multifactor productivity indices are reported for a multiple-output, multiple-input production technology using Chinese provincial data for the 1979-95 period. Results show significant variation in productivity change from year to year and province to province. Using panel methods, we regress the three production indices on several factors important in explaining productivity changes. Decollectivisation in the early 1980s accounts for a significant expansion of the frontier, while rural industrialisation decreased agricultural productivity. Productivity is also sensitive to relative grain prices, to natural disasters such as flood and drought, and proximity of the provinces to coastal areas.     

Building Societies and Strategic Sourcing: Criteria and Dynamics

In the literature of strategic management outsourcing has become recognised as a means to achieve a range of strategic benefits. This article examines the criteria employed by building societies to select and evaluate opportunities for outsourcing. The societies’ sourcing decisions are subject to multiple criteria that, together with a conservative culture, act to limit the use of outsourcing. Case material is used to develop a model of sourcing that relates the processes of evaluation, review and learning to changes in the technological, legal and market environment. Changes in the environment require the societies to retain the ability to monitor; review and possibly reverse sourcing decisions.     

Flat Earth Economics: The Far-reaching Consequences of Flat Payoff Functions in Economic Decision Making

Economists tend to emphasize the optimum, but in many cases, even large deviations from optimal decisions make little difference to the payoff. This has far-reaching implications that are under-recognized, including: ( a ) decision makers often have a wide margin for error in their production planning decisions, and flexibility to pursue factors not considered in the calculation of payoffs; ( b ) optimizing techniques are sometimes of limited practical relevance for decision support; ( c ) the value of information used to refine management decisions is often low; and ( d ) the benefits of using "precision farming" technologies to adjust production input levels are often low.     

The Political Economy of the Global Environment

Issues of the ‘global commons’ have secured a prominent place in environmental discourse. The temperature-regulating functions of the global atmosphere and radiation control functions of stratospheric ozone offer clear examples of true public goods. Other environmental assets, such as biodiversity and forests, are treated as if they are public goods, but in reality are complex mixtures of private goods, local public goods and global public goods. The approach to the provision and protection of these goods has tended to focus on the development of international agreements, such as those at the Rio de Janeiro ‘Earth Summit’ in 1992. But do these agreements contain the relevant incentives to conserve the global commons? Much depends on one's view of human nature. The Scottish economic tradition suggests that unless incentives focus on ‘self love’, as postulated by Hume and Smith, improvements will, at best, be marginal. A richer array of policy measures is obtained by analysing the potential for ‘global bargains’, trades that improve the environment whilst making each party better off. The souls of Hume and Smith surely approve recent developments in practical global bargains.