Tracking urban sprawl: Using spatial data to inform farmland preservation policy

The development of state farmland preservation policies has primarily relied upon results of the Census of Agriculture that is updated every 5 years by the USDA National Agriculture Statistics Service. Questions about the suitability of the Census of Agriculture center on the measures of total farmland and total cropland as reported by agricultural producers. The reliance on these variables fails to distinguish between conversion to developed uses and other fluctuations in the total availability of farmland. This inability to directly measure farmland conversion to developed uses has been shown to influence state level farmland preservation policies. The policies of Illinois and Indiana highlight the disparate approaches, with Illinois pursuing an intensive policy to protect farmland and Indiana choosing to not address farmland preservation at a state level. In order to assess the suitability of the different approaches to farmland preservation policy it is critical to evaluate the Census of Agriculture data used to justify the policies of Illinois and Indiana.     

Uncertainty perception in bidding for Product-Service Systems under competition

This research investigates what impact of uncertainty perception arising from the existence of competition has on the pricing decision for Product-Service Systems (PSS) under uncertainty. PSS provision is an increasingly important area for many businesses and competition increases cognitive pressures on providers even further. We present an experimental study with industrial costing and bidding experts from the defence and aerospace sector. The study consisted of an experimental set-up via two questionnaires which differed in the existence of competition in the bidding scenario. The findings showed that bidding decision makers changed their evaluation of the cost estimate due to the introduction of competition but kept their evaluations of the profit margin and price bids constant. Furthermore, the participants listed the relevant sources of uncertainty that influenced their decision-making process. This research contributes to the literature in two ways. First, our findings showed that predictions from current theory regarding decision-making of cost estimation and pricing are not confirmed when competitively bidding for PSS. Second, we show uncertainty sources that influenced the decision makers and identified p the importance of internal processes of the PSS provider and environmental uncertainty.     

Incorporating risk in a positive mathematical programming framework: a dual approach

In this study we develop a new methodological proposal to incorporate risk into a farm‐level positive mathematical programming (PMP) model. We estimate simultaneously the farm nonlinear cost function and a farmer‐specific coefficient of absolute risk aversion as well as the resource shadow prices. The model is applied to a sample of representative arable crop farms from the Emilia‐Romagna region in Italy. The estimation results confirm the calibration ability of the model and reveal the values of the individual risk aversion coefficients. We use the model to simulate different scenarios of crop price volatility, in order to explore the potential risk management role of an agri‐environmental scheme.     

Editorial: Special Issue on the Impact of Business Ethics on Public Life

Even though management scholars have offered several views on the process of corporate sustainability, these efforts have focused mainly on the technical aspects of sustainability while omitting the fundamental role played by individual moral competences. Therefore, previous work offers an incomplete and somewhat reductionist view of corporate sustainability. In this article, we develop a holistic framework of corporate sustainability in which both the moral and technical aspects of sustainability are considered. We do so by integrating the ethical, normative perspective of the Catholic social teaching (CST) with the competitive view of the natural resource-based view. This framework highlights the importance of CST principles and ideas in developing executive moral competences such as moral sensitivity and awareness, and moral cognition and motivation. Moral competences, in turn, influence the organizational selection of environmental strategies, giving leaders the intrinsic motivation to promote both a longer-term stance on corporate sustainability efforts and a relentless search for greener business models. Such strategies move the firm closer towards achieving environmental sustainability. Hence, by bridging the individual, normative-ethical with the organizational, implementational levels of corporate sustainability, our framework provides a more realistic, coherent, and complete perspective on the complex process of achieving corporate sustainability.     

The major determinants of logistic performance in a global perspective: evidence from panel data analysis

The global logistics industry has grown significantly and logistics has become an important sector of the business economic system and a major global economic activity in recent years. Logistics activities accelerate economic and productivity growth. Efficient logistics is also important to a country’s competitiveness and source of employment. The purpose of this paper is to uncover and understand the major determinants of logistics performance (LP) to further lift the LP of countries. Using unbalanced panel data of 93 selected countries from 2007 to 2014, the present research attempts to critically investigate the major determinants of LP. In estimating the model, this study prefers to use static panel data approach owing to limited data. The findings of the present study reveal that (a) countries with low level of corruption and stable political environment are likely to yield a high level of LP; (b) improvement in resources supply such as infrastructure, technology, labour, and education also have a significant positive effect on LP. Therefore, institutional reforms and upgrading resources will effectively accelerate LP.     

Supplier Development Practices for Sustainability: A Multi‐Stakeholder Perspective

Supplier development for sustainability is a critical element of sustainable supply chain management and requires extensive multi‐stakeholder collaboration. This article establishes a conceptual four‐stage framework to analyse the collaborative mechanisms of supplier development practices, and presents an exploratory, qualitative analysis to identify the major contributors of sustainable supplier development practices, such as NGOs, industrial associations, consulting firms etc. Based on semi‐structured interviews about 63 organizations from different regions and industries, this article identifies three types of contributor: drivers, facilitators and inspectors. Instead of traditional stakeholder engagement processes, these contributors actively collaborate with buying firms and suppliers to design, implement and evaluate sustainable supplier development programs. The article then provides a matrix to describe the supply chain coverage and supplier performance of supplier development practices, given the absence or positive involvement of facilitators and inspectors. We conclude our study by suggesting future research directions as well as discussing managerial implications. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Segmenting and Understanding Publics in a Social Media Information Sharing Network: An Interactional and Dynamic Approach

This study segments social media publics and analyzes their informational behaviors during organizational crises. With a public-centric perspective, our study highlights how social media publics interact with each other (i.e., interdependence) and share different information through crisis stages (i.e., dynamics). Following the situational approach to segmentation, we identify different types of social media publics (i.e., influentials, broadcasters, and followers) based on their informational behaviors and their positions in an information sharing network. Crisis managers are recommended to pay more attention to publics with higher influence, namely key influentials and broadcasters. In addition, we try to understand social media publics’ changing concerns by analyzing whether and how publics share messages of different themes and forms in different stages of a crisis. Crisis managers are recommended to customize crisis communication content to fit publics’ needs, prioritize organizational resources, and maximize positive communication effect. With big data from Chipotle’s E. coli crisis, we analyzed the Twitter activities surrounding this crisis over a 6-month period. Our segmentation receives initial support from the network analysis and content analysis on the Twitter data, which lays the foundation for effective social media crisis management.     

Short Sales and Price Discovery in the Hong Kong Real Estate Market

Indirect real estate (IRE) returns are often shown to lead direct real estate (DRE) returns. Apart from differences in liquidity, transaction costs, and management skills, the DRE market is also less complete than the IRE market—when negative shocks arrive, one can only short IRE (e.g., real estate stocks or REITs), but not DRE. This study investigates if short sales in the IRE market convey any information to the DRE market. Based on high‐frequency (weekly) property price data in Hong Kong from 2000 to 2012, we find that short sales in the IRE market led DRE returns, even after controlling for the lagged IRE returns in a VAR model. This supports an information spillover mechanism in which the DRE market learns private information that is not reflected in IRE returns. The spillover effect, however, weakened after the recent global financial crisis because the increased uncertainty over the credibility of individual firms made short sales more reflective of firm‐specific information than real estate market fundamentals.     

Understanding the leadership perceptions of staff in China's hotel industry: Integrating the macro- and micro-aspects of leadership contexts

The objective of this paper is to understand the leadership perceptions of staff in China's hotel industry. This study integrates the macro- and micro-aspects of leadership contexts by identifying the contextual variables that affect leadership perceptions. In leadership research, industry setting, the hierarchical levels of an organization, and national culture are recognized as the contextual constraints that affect leadership perceptions, and these constraints were used in this empirical study. Four factors emerged from the factor analysis of a survey study: professionalism; integrity; masculinity or yang; and femininity or yin. A key finding indicates that both the industry setting and the hierarchical levels of an organization affect professionalism. Implications for the training and development of future international hospitality leaders and local staff are considered.     

Understanding organizational citizenship behavior from a cultural perspective: An empirical study within the context of hotels in Mainland China

Scholarly concerns in organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) have increased dramatically over the past two decades. Nevertheless, there are significant issues yet to be addressed and resolved, one of which relates to the influences of cultural values on such voluntary behaviors. In view of the importance of OCB in meliorating hotel service and cultivating customer loyalty, the current study seeks to investigate a possible mechanism through which Chinese values (CVs) may function on employee citizenship behaviors within the hotels in Mainland China. The research questions focus on whether CVs have a direct impact on OCB and its verified antecedents, leader–member exchange (LMX) and employee organizational commitment (OC). Eventually, the research findings have verified the conceptual model and confirmed all the postulated linkages among the constructs under study.