Manager-Employee Relationships: Guided by Kant's Categorical Imperative or by Dilbert's Business Principle

The relationship between Employer and Employees is a central one in the world of business. While an important relationship, it is one that is often a source of tension for the workplace. Employers are seemingly in constant mistrust of workers, while workers often look upon their bosses as "less than competent". In the American world of business today, should this "adversarial" relationship continue or should the Employer–Employee Relationship be governed by different rules. Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative offers some insights into the way this relationship should be viewed. Also, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead has some important points to add to the discussion of this crucial business relationship. A look at the case involving Malden Mills Textile Plant and its CEO Aaron Feuerstein will be used to launch this discussion.     

How Australian organizations use global communications

Global communications technology offers those organisations that embrace it many strategic advantages in conducting business overseas. Despite this, it has not been a technology that Australian organisations have rushed to implement.This paper investigates several Australian organisations and looks at their use of global communications technology. The organisations chosen are a mix of those that are Australian owned and foreign companies. Some of the organisations have been exporting their products or services for a number of years, whilst others are new to business operations on a global scale.Whilst the number of organisations researched is small, there appears to be a clear indication that global communications is a technology that all the Australian organisations (included in the research) have investigated. However they have then only proceeded to implement the technology, provided that it offers some definable form of competitive advantage when conducting business overseas.The organisations included in the research may not have had a definite management strategy in place for global communications initially, but, as the technology has become more efficient, has proven to be advantageous or has been accepted by an organisation's competitors, it has been included in management's strategic planning.The results also show that the implementation of global communications has enhanced profitability. However, the additional profit is not always derived from an increase in revenue but often a reduction in costs.The research shows that those foreign organisations with headquarters overseas have been much quicker to implement the technology for one or more of the following reasons: to increase their competitive advantage to improve company reporting to lower the costs of communication to provide more efficient methods of sharing common information.     

Ethical Ideology and the Ethical Judgments of Marketing Professionals

The present study extends the study of individuals' ethical ideology withinthe context of marketing ethics issues. A national sample of marketing professionals participated. Respondents' ethical ideologies were classified as absolutists, situationists, exceptionists, or subjectivists using the Ethical Position Questionnaire (Forsyth, 1980). Respondents then answered questions about three ethically ambiguous situations common to marketing and sales. The results indicated that marketers' ethical judgments about the situations differed based on their ethical ideology, with absolutists rating the actions as most unethical. The findings are consistent with those of two earlier studies that utilized samples of business students (Barnett et al., 1994, 1995). The results suggest that personal moral philosophy is an important influence on ethical decision making that should be considered in empirical studies of business ethics. The results also support the utility of the Ethical Position Questionnaire (Forsyth, 1980) as a means for researchers and practitioners to assess individuals' ethical ideology.     

Ethical and Unethical Bargaining Tactics: An Empirical Study

Competitive negotiators frequently use tactics which others view as "unethical", in that these tactics either violate standards of truth telling or violate the perceived rules of negotiation. This paper sought to determine how business students viewed a number of marginally ethical negotiating tactics, and to determine the underlying factor structure of these tactics. The factor analysis of these tactics revealed five clear factors which were highly similar across the two samples, and which parallel (to a moderate degree) categories of tactics proposed by earlier theory. Data from one sample also permitted comparisons of the appropriateness of certain tactics across gender, nationality, ethnic origin and perception of one's negotiating style.     

Explaining the Familiarity-Liking Relationship: Mere Exposure,Information Availability,or Social Desirability?

A large and diverse body of marketing literature suggests that well-known brands enjoy several advantages compared to less familiar brands. Specifically, brands with higher levels of familiarity appear to achieve higher levels of liking or preference among both consumers and retailers. This familiarity-liking relationship has proven to be one of marketing's most robust and reproducible empirical generalizations. However, there remains a considerable amount of uncertainty as to the conditions under which this relationship arises. In this study, we identify, conceptualize, and empirically assess three alternative hypotheses of the familiarity-liking relationship: mere exposure, information availability, and social desirability. Our results suggest that social desirability is the most powerful of these three potential mechanisms underlying the familiarity-liking phenomenon.     

Ambush marketing: The ethical issues

Ambush marketing is now, for some companies, a strategic alternative to formal association through the purchase of legitimate sponsorship rights. Research evidence indicates that this ambush activity may damage sponsors' events and even the interests of sports governing bodies and individual sports people. Legal issues clearly arise, but the body of case law is as yet slight. Discussion often focuses on property rights, but these too can be problematic if a major sports event of popular cultural significance is concerned. Four ethical perspectives—utilitarianism, duty-based ethics, stakeholder analysis, and virtue ethics—can provide a framework for the debate on the ethics of ambush marketing. A range of possible actions to create more ethical commercial sponsorship are identified and briefly evaluated. In particular an international code of conduct for event sponsorship seems to be an idea whose time has come. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The Effects of Activity and Aging on Rural Community Living and Consuming

Effects of social activity and aging on variables related to individual motivations, community membership, and consumer behavior were tested for 287 late middle-age and 343 elderly respondents living in three rural communities. Those actively involved were more satisfied with aspects of the community than their less active counterparts, and they expressed stronger intentions to shop with local retailers (inshopping). Klderly respondents were more satisfied with their community, and had higher inshopping levels than the late middle-age respondents. Findings suggest an “embeddedness” of market place activity in the social networks of the rural communities. The number and purchasing power of older persons offer opportunities to rural businesses who are alert to the concerns and unmet needs of these consumers.     

The equipment hypothesis and US economic growth

In several articles published in the 1990s, de Long and Summers argued that investment in producer durables had a high propensity to generate externalities in using industries, resulting in a systematic and substantial divergence between its social and private return. They maintained, moreover, that this was not the case for structures investment. Together, these claims constitute the equipment hypothesis. This paper explores the degree to which the history of US economic growth in the 20th century supports it.     

Atypical Work and Pay

Atypical work has long been criticized in popular debate as providing poorly compensated, precarious employment. Yet the empirical evidence is both incomplete and mixed. The main contribution of the present paper is to estimate wage differences for the full set of these alternative work arrangements while simultaneously controlling for observed demographic characteristics and unobserved person-specific fixed effects. The paper also allows for the skewness in atypical worker earnings while retaining the Mincerian human capital earnings function. Our improved estimates are consistent with some of the more optimistic findings reported in the literature, the caveat being that we are examining here only the wage component of the total compensation package.