Measuring Corporate Citizenship in Two Countries: The Case of the United States and France

Based on an extensive review of the literature and field surveys, the paper proposes a conceptualization and operationalization of corporate citizenship meaningful in two countries: the United States and France. A survey of 210 American and 120 French managers provides support for the proposed definition of corporate citizenship as a construct including the four correlated factors of economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary citizenship. The managerial implications of the research and directions for future research are discussed.     

How many educated workers for your economy? European targets,optimal public spending,and labor market impact

This paper studies optimal taxation schemes for education in a search-matching model where the labor market is divided between a high-skill and a low-skill sector. Two public policy targets - maximizing the total employment level and optimizing the social surplus - are studied according to three different public taxation strategies. We calibrate our model using evidence from thirteen European countries, and compare our results with the target from the Europe 2020 Agenda for achievement in higher education. We show that, with current labor market characteristics, the target set by governments seems compatible with the social surplus maximization objective for some countries, while being too high for other countries. For all countries, maximizing employment would imply higher educational spending than that required for the social surplus to reach its maximum.     

The export of manpower from Pakistan to the Middle East, 1975–1985

This article summarizes the major findings of recent research undertaken on: (1) Pakistani migration to the Middle East, and (2) on international labour migration in the Middle East and North Africa. The export of manpower from Pakistan for temporary employment in the Middle East has risen dramatically since the oil boom of the mid-1970s. As a consequence, remittances, which constitute the major gain from migration, have become an important source of foreign exchange, amounting to almost 80% of total merchandise export earnings by 1980/ 1981. The direct beneficiaries of these remittances are a million or so migrant households, whose average premigration income was somewhat above the national average household income. Remittances have enabled these households to significantly increase current consumption and purchase assets with the potential of improving their future income stream. Domestic labour has also benefited to the extent that migration has contributed to rising real wages in recent years.Migration has not, however, been an unqualified gain for the economy as a whole. The major cost has been the decline in productivity caused by the departure of quality labour among manual skills and professional categories, both of which cannot be easily replaced. It seems that, on balance, Pakistan has benefited from this labour export. Prospects for continuing migration on a substantial scale remain good for the near future, provided, of course, that projected growth rates of oil exporters materialize. The net benefits for the economy from migration in the coming years will primarily depend upon the extent to which scarce skills can be speedily replaced and remittances utilized to build productivity-increasing assets.     

Branding and relationships: Customer and supplier perspectives

This paper explores and investigates the role of branding within financial services. Specifically, the study aims to assess the importance of branding and its associated elements including brand image and brand experience in the relationships that exist between consumers and their financial brands. It aims to achieve this through research, which identifies gaps between the managerial and consumer perspectives on branding in relationships in retail financial services. It is well established that the characteristics of services are different from those of manufactured goods and that service personnel play a central role in the services experience. Moreover, the concept of relationship marketing within services proclaims the importance of one-to-one relationships between businesses and customers as well as relationships between consumers and their brands. Drawing from the fields of brand management, relationship marketing and services marketing, this research aims to investigate the perceptional differences between consumers and suppliers in relation to the importance of branding in financial service relationships. The research findings indicate that brand experience appears to be far more salient than brand image in shaping and building meaningful and lasting brand perceptions and promoting customer retention.     

French multinational companies’ strategies and co-ordination mechanisms: the role of human resource management in Europe and Nigeria

The everchanging European context may well lead to the evolution of MNCs’ strategies in Europe and to the evolution of the control mechanisms within their subsidiaries. The author analyses the issue from the angle of human resources management, considered as an informal control tool that is widely recognized by both scholars and managers. This research therefore aims at analysing whether or not and how HRM systems embody a possible integration process in the European economic space. The methodology is based on a case study from a French multinational company belonging to the automobile industry while the investigation, a comparative analysis of the headquarters-subsidiaries relationships in England, Spain and Nigeria, points out the specificity of the European context regarding corporate strategy orientations, subsidiary roles and personnel transfer policies. The major conclusions from such an analysis suggest a framework that gives prominence to the differentiation of the management process between Europe and Nigeria.

These results confirm previous literature on co-ordination mechanisms in complex business organizations.     

Shared Value and the Impartial Spectator Test

Growing inequality and its implications for democratic polity suggest that corporate social responsibility (CSR) has not proved itself in twenty-first century business, largely as it lacks clear criteria of demarcation for businesses to follow. Today the problem is viewed by many commentators as an ethical challenge to business itself. In response to this challenge, we begin by examining Porter and Kramer’s (Harv Bus Rev 89(January–February):64–77, 2011) call for a shift from a social responsibility to a shared value framework and the need to respond to the problem of the ‘separation thesis’ between business and ethics (Wicks, Bus Soc 35(1):89–118, 1996; Harris and Freeman, Bus Ethics Q 18(4):541–548, 2008). We identify the eighteenth century economist and philosopher Adam Smith in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a source for an ethical approach to business. Building on his central concept of ‘sympathy’, we introduce the idea of the Impartial Spectator Test, which we argue builds on traditional stakeholder perspectives and which provides an objective route to ethical criteria of demarcation. We conclude by assessing how this approach adds to the existing debate around social responsibility and shared value.     

Mapping accessibility in Belgium: a tool for land-use and transport planning?

This paper compares the spatial structure of car accessibility to towns and to railway stations during peak and off-peak hours in Belgium for the country’s 2616 municipalities. A clustering method is applied. It is shown that in a highly urbanised country, the situation is far from being spatially equitable in terms of accessibility, and some areas are more favoured than others. Congestion increases spatial inequalities, differently according to absolute or relative measures of change. By means of examples, this paper shows that even simple accessibility indicators could be useful to support decisions taken by planners and politicians (e.g. as regards the development of residential, industrial and business park areas). Maps indicate the spatial inequalities in terms of accessibility to urban centres and transport nodes, and the impact of congestion on these inequalities. The absolute and relative time losses due to congestion affect different areas in different ways. The location of new developments further increases the congestion problem and the spatial disparities. This paper also insists on the caution that should be adopted when measuring and interpreting “accessibility”, its measurements, its inputs, its temporal changes in absolute and relative terms as well as the need for spatially disaggregated data.