Volunteer tourism impacts in Ghana: a practice approach

Relatively little empirical research has been conducted on impacts of volunteer tourism in local communities. This paper therefore focuses on the local consequences of volunteer tourism for two projects in Tamale, Ghana: Zion Primary School and Tamale Children's Home. A practice approach provides a useful theoretical framework to investigate how volunteers and local actors interact in these projects. In a practice approach, interactions become central to the analysis, highlighting the ways in which volunteers, local people and the local context mutually influence one another. Observations and interviews with volunteers and local actors were used to identify positive and negative consequences of their interactions, which are strongly interlinked and depend on routines, backgrounds and positions of the actors, and contextual conditions. The consequences of volunteer practices are also linked to other current and future practices. A practice approach provides insights into complex situations and may be more suited to analysing the impacts of volunteer tourism than a traditional mono-disciplinary focus.     

Service-learning: an innovative approach to teaching accounting: a teaching note

Service-learning allows students to enhance their learning through real-world applications of accounting concepts. This Teaching Note describes the service-learning process and the benefits to students, faculty, the university, the community, and the accounting profession. Quotations from students' reflective journals are used as illustrations regarding how students develop communication, leadership, strategic, and critical thinking skills. Practical issues for implementing and supervising service-learning projects are also given.     

Forecasting systemic impact in financial networks

We propose a methodology for forecasting the systemic impact of financial institutions in interconnected systems. Utilizing a five-year sample including the 2008/9 financial crisis, we demonstrate how the approach can be used for the timely systemic risk monitoring of large European banks and insurance companies. We predict firms’ systemic relevance as the marginal impact of individual downside risks on systemic distress. So-called systemic risk betas account for a company’s position within the network of financial interdependencies, in addition to its balance sheet characteristics and its exposure to general market conditions. Relying only on publicly available daily market data, we determine time-varying systemic risk networks, and forecast the systemic relevance on a quarterly basis. Our empirical findings reveal time-varying risk channels and firms’ specific roles as risk transmitters and/or risk recipients.     

Tourism and grey seals in south Devon: management strategies,voluntary controls and tourists’ perceptions of disturbance

Although grey seals are relatively common in Britain, their numbers elsewhere are believed to be decreasing, and some populations in Europe are listed as endangered by the IUCN. This case study focuses on the impacts of seal tourism on a colony of seals on the South Devon coast in the United Kingdom, the effectiveness of current management policies and tourists’ perceptions of the voluntary controls adhered to by tour operators. To monitor impacts, covert observations of the site were undertaken on 60 designated survey days in the summer of 2006, while a survey of tourists taking part in wildlife cruises to the site was conducted during the same period. The observations found that the voluntary codes had reduced disturbance from operators; however, there were still disturbances, mainly from private vessels. The results of the survey showed that tourists were aware of their potential impacts upon the wildlife, and were generally supportive of the voluntary codes in place. Therefore if an honest explanation and interpretation of the potential impacts of seal tourism are provided, it may encourage a protectionist predisposition in wildlife tourists and render the compliance of voluntary codes a highly satisfactory tourist experience rather than a negative one.     

The Control of Invasive Species on Private Property with Neighbor-to-Neighbor Spillovers

Invasive pests cross property boundaries. Property managers may have private incentives to control invasive species despite not having sufficient incentive to fully internalize the external costs of their role in spreading the invasion. Each property manager has a right to future use of his own property, but his property may abut others’ properties enabling spread of an invasive species. The incentives for a foresighted property manager to control invasive species have received little attention. We consider the efforts of a foresighted property manager who has rights to future use of a property and has the ability to engage in repeated, discrete control activities. We find that higher rates of dispersal, associated with proximity to neighboring properties, reduce the private incentives for control. Controlling species at one location provides incentives to control at a neighboring location. Control at neighboring locations are strategic complements and coupled with spatial heterogeneity lead to a weaker-link public good problem, in which each property owner is unable to fully appropriate the benefits of his own control activity. Future-use rights and private costs suggest that there is scope for a series of Coase-like exchanges to internalize much of the costs associated with species invasion. Pigouvian taxes on invasive species potentially have qualitatively perverse behavioral effects. A tax with a strong income effect (e.g., failure of effective revenue recycling) can reduce the value of property assets and diminish the incentive to manage insects on one’s own property.     

Working Together: Critical Perspectives on Six Cross-Sector Partnerships in Southern Africa

Early strategy scholars have pointed to the importance of reflecting on moral issues within the scope of strategic management. Although strategy content and context have been discussed in relation to ethical reflection, the third aspect, strategy process, has found only little or no attention with regard to ethics. We argue that by emphasizing the process perspective one can understand the related character of strategic management and ethical reflection. We discuss this relatedness along formal, functional, and procedural similarities. Whereas formal aspects refer to the conditions under which both processes occur, functional aspects look at the role that strategy process and ethical reflection fulfill. Procedural aspects account for similarities in the nature of both processes insofar as the activities that are conducted within each process phase share common characteristics. We claim that ethical reflection can be thought of as an integrative part of strategic management – either explicitly or implicitly. Michael Behnam received his PhD from the University of Frankfurt, Germany. He is an Associate Professor of Management at the Sawyer Business School, Suffolk University, Boston, USA. Prior to this he was the Head of the Department of International Management at the European Business School, Germany. His research has been published in Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of International Business and Economy as well as in German top-tier outlets. He authored or co-authored numerous book chapters as well as three books, most recently the 7th edition of a textbook on Strategic Management. His research areas are Strategic Management, International Management and Business Ethics. Andreas Rasche received his PhD from European Business School, Germany and is currently Assistant Professor for Business Ethics at Helmut-Schmidt-University, University of the Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg, Germany. He has published articles in the Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics Quarterly and authored numerous book chapters on international accountability standards. He has gained working experience at the United Nations in Washington D.C. and New York and works closely with the United Nations Global Compact Office. His research interests and publications focus on the process of standardization in the field of CSR and the adoption of standards by corporations. More information is available under: http://www.arasche.com     

Werte und Normen als Sollensvorstellungen in der KommunikationswissenschaftValues and norms as ought-statements in communication studies

Values and norms as research topics are central theoretical and empirical constructs in communication studies and are also used to substantiate research questions or to interpret results. Despite the relevance of values and norms, a respective debate within the discipline has been neglected so far. It is a challenge to discuss the values and norms of our discipline and to initiate an exchange of the societal relevance of one’s own research. The network “Values and norms as research objects and guiding principles in communication research”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), makes a contribution to this by systematically analyzing values and norms in communication studies and by critically reflecting them. Therefore, the paper proposes to operationalize values and norms as “ought-statements”. Ought-statements either describe a situational state that is explicitly evaluated or address a desirable state. Three elements of an ought-statement are identified, which are coded in a multistage content analysis. The operationalization of norms and values as ought-statements allows not only to examine already known values and norms, but also to assess all possible values and norms, to assess the change of values and norms more validly in long-term studies, and to assess those constructs that are labeled as norms or values by the researchers themselves.     

New Maize Variety Adoption in Mozambique: A Spatial Approach

Farmers in developing countries can dramatically improve their productivity by adopting new plant varieties. Yet, informational barriers often mean adoption rates remain low. In this study, we focus on how learning from others represents one means of removing informational barriers. We capture the effect of social learning through an explicitly spatial econometric model applied to farm‐level maize adoption rates in Mozambique. We find that social learning is significant and can help explain the apparent clustering of adoption among farmers. Agencies interested in promoting variety adoption, therefore, would be well served to leverage the strength of existing information networks, rather than imposing solutions that work against interfarmer information flow.