Institutional industry herding

We examine whether institutional investors follow each other into and out of the same industries. Our empirical results reveal strong evidence of institutional industry herding. The cross-sectional correlation between the fraction of institutional traders buying an industry this quarter and the fraction buying last quarter, for example, averages 40%. Additional tests suggest that correlated signals primarily drive institutional industry herding. Our results also provide empirical support for “style investing” models.     

Social entrepreneurship as an essentially contested concept: Opening a new avenue for systematic future research

Social entrepreneurship has emerged as an active area of practice and research within the last three decades. Nevertheless, in spite of its growing popularity, scholars and practitioners are far from reaching a consensus as to what social entrepreneurship actually means. This has resulted in a number of different definitions and approaches within the field of social entrepreneurship. The purpose of this article is to shed light on the ongoing contestation of social entrepreneurship and to offer a novel conceptual understanding of the concept that can facilitate the development of systematic and structured future research. To this end, we analyze social entrepreneurship on the basis of the theory of essentially contested concepts, which was proposed by Walter Bryce Gallie in 1956. Building upon this theory, this article shows that social entrepreneurship can be regarded as an essentially contested concept and that a universal definition that would be accepted among contestant parties is hardly possible. Responding to this recognition, the article proposes the conceptualization of social entrepreneurship as a cluster concept, which can serve as a conceptual tool to help advancing social entrepreneurship as a coherent field of research despite its contested nature.     

Frontline service employees’ customer-related social stressors, emotional exhaustion, and service recovery performance: customer orientation as a moderator

This study investigates the structural relationships among customer-related social stressors (disproportionate customer expectation, ambiguous customer expectation, disliked customers, and customers?? verbal aggression), emotional exhaustion, and service recovery performance, with customer orientation (CO) serving as a moderator between customer-related social stressors and emotional exhaustion as well as emotional exhaustion and service recovery performance. The study uses data collected from a survey of 1,014 frontline service employees in Korea??s tourism service sectors. The results indicate that customer-related social stressors positively influence emotional exhaustion; emotional exhaustion negatively influences service recovery performance; and CO acts as a moderator. CO moderates both the effects of customer-related social stressors on emotional exhaustion and those of emotional exhaustion on service recovery performance, by weakening the effects for higher CO employees. This study contributes to both theory and practice by combining the four constructs of customer-related social stressors, emotional exhaustion, service recovery performance, and CO in addition to examining their relationships while focusing on customer-related factors.     

Business Groups and Corporate Social Responsibility

We present an analysis of over 400 comments about complying with tax obligations extracted from online discussion forums for freelancers. While the topics investigated by much of the literature on taxpayer behaviour are theory driven, we aimed to explore the universe of online discussions about tax in order to extract those topics that are most relevant to taxpayers. The forum discussions were subjected to a qualitative thematic analysis, and we present a model of the ‘universe’ of tax as reflected in taxpayer discussions. The model comprises several main actors (tax laws, tax authority, tax practitioners, and the taxpayer’s social network) and describes the multiple ways in which they relate to taxpayers’ behaviour. We also conduct a more focused analysis to show that the majority of taxpayers seem unconcerned with many of the variables that have been the focus of tax behaviour research (e.g. audits, penalties, etc.), and that most people are motivated to be compliant and are more concerned with how to comply than whether to comply. Moreover, we discuss how these ‘real-world’ tax discussions question common assumptions in the study of tax behaviour and how they inform our understanding of business ethics more generally.     

Reputation and product tampering in service industries

This theoretical paper aims to identify the role of trust and reputation between consumers and firms when there is product tampering or other types of product liability. When product tampering occurs, trust implicitly built towards brand or corporation by consumers or customers can be dissipated. This article assesses the impact of quality uncertainty and measurement costs on the trust relationship between consumers and corporations. The ideas are also applied to the case of bank runs. Preliminary findings indicate that in cases where the trust between consumer and firms is strong, and there are high measurement costs and uncertainty, the reputational relationship between customers and firms can experience strong repercussions.     

Ethical Commitment,Financial Performance,and Valuation: An Empirical Investigation of Korean Companies

A variety of stakeholders including investors, corporate managers, customers, suppliers, employees, researchers, and government policy makers have long been interested in the relationship between the financial performance of a corporation and its commitment to business ethics. As a subject of research, the relations between business ethics and corporate valuation has yet to be thoroughly quantified and investigated. This article is an effort to amend this inadequacy by demonstrating a statistically significant association between ethical commitment and corporate valuation measures. Consistent with anecdotal evidence, we have found a significant association between the ethical commitment of Korean companies and their valuation on the Korean stock market. However, the result reveals that the association between ethical commitment and financial performance is not significantly supported. Tae Hee Choi received Ph.D. from the Ohio State University, Ohio, USA. Presently working as Assistant Professor in accounting at the KDI School of Public Policy and Management. Research interests are business ethics, capital market, financial accounting, managerial accounting, and valuation. Jinchul Jung received Ph.D. from Kent State University, Ohio, USA. Presently working as Assistant Professor of Business Administration Department in the College of Business at Chosun University. Research interests are business ethics, family-supportive program, and organizational commitment.