The Relevance of Western Corporate Governance in Mitigating Management Misconduct in Thailand

This article provides empirical evidence on the relevance of structures central to Western models of corporate governance in mitigating management misconduct in Thailand. We find no evidence supporting the effectiveness of Western-based corporate governance structures such as board independence, audit committee effectiveness, and separating the roles of CEO and Board Chair in limiting management misconduct. However, we do find evidence supportive of independent directors with more experience and longer tenure, the presence of institutional ownership, and concentrated controlling ownership in limiting management misconduct. This provides some support for the validity of resource dependency theory in an emerging economy setting.     

Corporate cash holdings and political connections

We examine the relation between corporate liquidity and political connections measured via lobbying expenditures. This is an interesting question as many of the motives for holding cash should be diminished by political connections. Results indicate a significant and inverse relation between cash levels and lobby expenses and that the marginal value of cash decreases with lobbying. Taken together, these findings suggest firms react optimally to the reduced benefits of cash linked to political connections and that the market recognizes the weakened benefits of cash. Overall, our research shows another way political connections can shape corporate policy.     

Resource orchestration for team‐based innovation: a case study of the interplay between teams,customers, and top management

The resource orchestration concept has attracted considerable interest in contemporary innovation research. However, resource orchestration is a manager‐centric framework and not all of its components necessarily reflect the value‐creation processes of organizations focusing on team‐based innovation. Drawing on a single‐case study of an innovative Swedish software company, we illustrate the roles of autonomous teams, customers, and top managers in orchestrating resources for team‐based innovation. Moreover, we introduce the concept of resource flocculation to describe how key actors co‐orchestrate various resource orchestration processes. The study contributes to research on resource orchestration by adapting the model to the conditions characterizing team‐based innovation, and to research on team‐based innovation by addressing how innovative teams are related to overall resource orchestration processes and, ultimately, organizational innovation outcomes.     

评估“正确”的风险

正董事会会议中经常会传来这样的声音:我们所要冒的险值得吗?尤其是在战略对话中,这个问题看似简单、常见,但答案却不简单无论管理层和董事会是否意识到,风险隐藏于任何组织的战略里,潜伏在你所做的一切决定中:拓展新市场;引进新产品;购买生产线;筹建新厂房;投资未知的研发活动等。一个公司的战略方向和执行战略方向的能力是这次冒险之旅能否成功的关键。因此,风险评估应该是战略制定过程中不可或缺的一部分。     

Is there a case for revising the UNWTO's Global Code of Ethics to include a new article on the ethical treatment of animals by the tourism industry? A response to the opinion piece by David Fennell

This opinion piece reviews and critiques the opinion piece by David Fennell which presents a proposal for a new article about the ethical treatment of animals to be added to the UNWTO Global Code of Ethics for the tourism industry. The case presented here rests on a detailed examination of the use of the concepts of speciesism and anthropocentrism in the original opinion piece. It finds that, while speciesism is currently a fashionable way to draw parallels between animals and humans, it is dependent on the evidence around the questions of sentience, cognition and consciousness. While there is increasing evidence for animal sentience and cognition, human consciousness is wholly different from that of even the most advanced animals. And, although anthropocentrism is a dominant idea in many forms of political decision making in general, it cannot be used as a stick with which to beat tourism scholarship: many writers on tourism adopt distinctly ecocentric lines of argument, including the concepts of ecotourism and sustainable tourism. The paper also notes that only ca. 30% of UNWTO's national members had given legal recognition to the existing code of ethics nearly 10 years after its ratification by the UN.     

Reading history: comment on Chenoweth and Feitelson

While Chenoweth and Feitelson have done a service to the futures community by comparing the Global 2000 Report with The Resourceful Earth-two important books of the late 1970s/early 1980s—their comparison is flawed in three dimensions: (1) they treat the books as though they were intended to be accurate predictions of the future. Their intention, instead, was to influence public policy in certain, often contrasting, directions; (2) by using in 2000 the same data sources the two books used in the 1970s (rather than better data sources available now, but not then), the authors' comparative conclusions are often flawed; and (3) in spite of this, their own conclusions often do not seem to follow from the comparative data they present: using only the data the two authors present, The Resourceful Earth does not appear to have been more ‘accurate’ in ‘predicting’ the year 2000 than was the Global 2000 report.     

A Review of New Evaluation Models for Strategic Communication: Progress and Gaps

After identification of “stasis” in evaluation of strategic communication including public relations and corporate communication despite intensive focus for more than 40 years, recent initiatives in measurement and evaluation on three continents highlight a number of important advances in theory and practice. Although studies have identified a lack of standards and a narrow focus on “activities” and “outputs” in traditional evaluation models and literature, a two-year international study, which examined a number of recently developed evaluation frameworks and models and accompanying implementation guidelines, identifies several new concepts and dimensions in evaluation, along with some remaining gaps for further research. Based on content analysis of evaluation literature, interviews, and ethnography, this article reports four key findings of recent research and explains how these can contribute to theory-building and practice to transform the planning, implementation, and evaluation of public relations and corporate, government, organizational and marketing communication.     

Nonlinear stochastic effects of substitution — an evolutionary approach

Technological innovations have been investigated by means of substitution and diffusion as well as evolution models, each of them dealing with different aspects of the innovation problem. In this paper we follow the well known research traditions on self-organisation models of complex systems. For the first time in the literature we show the existence of a specific niche effect, which may occur in the first stage of establishment of a new technology. Using a stochastic Master equation approach, we obtain analytical expressions for the survival probabilities of a new technology in smaller or larger ensembles. As a main result we demonstrate how a hyperselection situation might be removed in a stochastic picture and thresholds against the prevailing of a new technology in a step-by-step process can be overcome.