Playing with the Pieces: Deconstruction and the Loss of Moral Culture

This paper investigates the assumptions and implications of the notion of deconstruction as they are found in writers concerned with organization theory and organization ethnography. Deconstruction, and postmodernism generally, is shown to be a continuation of modernity's attack on cultural authority and its celebration of the ideology of individualism with its concomitant of endless criticism. Deconstruction posits the oppositional nature of language and symbolism as a 'violent hierarchy' and seeks to overturn this hierarchy to achieve human freedom. This reading of the repressive aspects of culture is shown to undermine the essential dynamic of culture, which is a recurrent splitting of what is from what is not in the process of forming meaning.
By opening up structures of meaning to expose their repressed contents, deconstruction aspires to question all authority. This is particularly threatening to the ethical aspects of organizational culture, because it suggests a continuous attempt to question the boundary between right and wrong. Indeed, orders of right and wrong are seen by deconstruction as mere political attempts at controlling an organization. Ethics is reduced to politics; authority is confused with power.
I argue here, instead, that stable structures of meaning are needed over time to found a traditional and thus legitimate base for business ethics. Contrary to deconstruction's goal of opening meaning to its repressed opposite, I assert that memory should be seen as a moral decision based on past experience. Business ethics requires stable moral standards and, no less, the capacity to believe in them.     

The Global Brain by Satish Nambisan and Mohanbir Sawney

Books reviewed in this issue:

• ? The Global Brain
• ? Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules
• ? Reinventing Project Management: The Diamond Approach to Successful Growth and Innovation
• ? Selling Blue Elephants: How to Make Great Products that People Want before They Even Know They Want Them

     

Principles vs. Practice in New Product Planning

The product planning practices at nine large companies in the electronics industry are described and examined in the light of three principles derived from modern management practice. Major deviations between principle and practice are revealed. Close examination of the firms' new product activities suggests that the deviations stem from the inherently complex nature of the process and the premium it places on the need to manage it effectively. Suggestions for improving product planning performance are made. These relate to the need to make the process more uniform and systematic, to improve the guidance provided by strategic planning, and to obtain greater input to the process from marketing research.     

Optimal destabilizing speculation or why the optimum tariff may oscillate

Summary This paper uses general equilibrium tools to explore the issue of destabilizing speculation in the context of market power. We show how an individual or a nation may optimally use price destabilization to raise its welfare and show that the nonspeculator does not necessarily suffer. The cases considered are 1) inflection points in the foreign offer curve, 2) an upward sloping foreign excess demand curve which crosses the price axis more than once, 3) a nonconvex foreign social trade indifference curve, and 4) reversed transfers.We thank Kent Kimbrough and an anonymous referee for their comments, the Duke University Research Council for funding and F.L. Smith for word processing. Much of the paper was written while Feldman was a visitor at Duke.     

Investor behaviour and contagion

This paper examines two open questions in international finance. First, what is the relative importance of different linkages in causing global financial crises? The second question concerns whether or not investor behaviour affects contagion. I use a two-market agent-based model that incorporates insights from behavioural finance to answer these open questions. Simulated managers only affect contagion when they control a small proportion of the total assets in each market. This evidence may partly explain the Russian contagion to Brazil where direct linkages did not exist. In addition, results show that global managers must make up between 40 and 50% of both local markets in order to become a more important linkage than that of international trade.     

Effective rates of protection and the Fordney-McCumber and Smoot-Hawley Tariff Acts: comment and revised estimates

This paper provides corrected calculations of the effective rate of protection for a wide disaggregation of US industries under the two important interwar tariff regimes.     

Managerial compensation and corporate spinoffs

Research summary : This article investigates how corporate spinoffs affect managerial compensation. These deals are found to improve the alignment of spinoff firm managers' incentive compensation with stock market performance, especially among spinoff firm managers that used to be divisional managers of the spun‐off subsidiary, and particularly when the spun‐off subsidiary performs better than or is unrelated to its parent firm's remaining businesses. By contrast, incentive alignment does not improve for the parent firm managers running the divesting companies. This finding appears to be driven by a significant post‐spinoff increase in these managers' incentive compensation, the magnitude of which is inversely related to governance quality in their firms. Together, these results elucidate how spinoffs influence managerial compensation in diversified firms and the companies they divest. Managerial summary : This article explores how spinoffs affect incentive alignment: the correlation between incentive compensation and stock market performance. The incentive alignment of spinoff firm managers improves following these deals. These gains are the largest when spinoff firm managers used to be divisional managers of the spun‐off subsidiary and when the spun‐off subsidiary performs better than or is unrelated to the other businesses in the parent firm. By contrast, incentive alignment does not improve for parent firm managers. Instead, the level of these managers' incentive compensation rises significantly post‐spinoff, and the magnitude of this increase is inversely related to governance quality in these firms. Together, these results shed light on the ways in which spinoffs influence managerial compensation in diversified firms and in the companies they divest. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Corporate spinoffs and analysts' coverage decisions: The implications for diversified firms

Research summary: This paper investigates how spinoffs improve the quality of analysts' research about diversified firms, theorizing that these deals may induce analysts to revisit their earlier coverage decisions. The gains resulting from these shifts are expected to be more pronounced when a firm undertakes a legacy (rather than a non‐legacy) spinoff, which removes the business that may be constraining analysts' coverage decisions in the first place. Consistent with this argument, firms that undertake legacy spinoffs experience greater improvements in the composition and quality of their analyst coverage than their non‐legacy counterparts, and in their overall forecast accuracy and stock market performance. Taken together, these findings shed light on the relationships among the scope decisions, analyst coverage, and valuations of diversified firms. Managerial summary: Existing research has established that when companies undertake spinoffs, analysts produce more accurate forecasts about the divesting firms than they did prior to those deals, and the stock market performance of those firms also improves relative to pre‐spinoff levels. This paper explores the effects of legacy spinoffs (the spinoff of a firm's original or “legacy” business) for forecast accuracy and stock market performance. Firms that undertake legacy spinoffs are found to enjoy greater improvements in forecast accuracy and stock market performance than their non‐legacy counterparts. These findings are driven by the fact that legacy spinoffs induce analysts to revisit their existing coverage decisions to a greater extent than non‐legacy spinoffs, contributing significantly to the economic benefits of these deals for shareholders. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.