THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS AND SUPPLY‐SIDE ECONOMICS

The coalition has given the Liberal Democrats the opportunity to demonstrate their support for – or opposition to – supply‐side economics. The person who has done most on the supply side is Ed Davey, in the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. In a remarkable legislative achievement for a Parliamentary Under Secretary in under two years in office, Davey ensured that the privatisation of Royal Mail reached the statute books, liberalised the terms and conditions for Post Office counters, and liberalised employment and retirement laws.     

Are Environmental Social Movements Socially Exclusive? An Historical Study from Thailand

Environmental social movements in developing countries are often portrayed as democratizing but may contain important social divisions. This paper presents a new methodology to analyze the social composition and underlying political messages of movements. Nearly 5 000 newspaper reports during 1968–2000 in Thailand are analyzed to indicate the participation of middle and lower classes, and their association with “green” (conservationist) and “red-green” (livelihoods-oriented) environmental values. Results show middle-class “green” activism has dominated forests activism, but lower-class “red-green” activism has grown for forests and pollution. Newspapers, however, portray all environmentalism as “democratization,” suggesting that the possible exclusiveness of some environmental norms is unacknowledged.     

Formative versus reflective measurement models: Two applications of formative measurement

This paper presents a framework that helps researchers to design and validate both formative and reflective measurement models. The framework draws from the existing literature and includes both theoretical and empirical considerations. Two important examples, one from international business and one from marketing, illustrate the use of the framework. Both examples concern constructs that are fundamental to theory-building in these disciplines, and constructs that most scholars measure reflectively. In contrast, applying the framework suggests that a formative measurement model may be more appropriate. These results reinforce the need for all researchers to justify, both theoretically and empirically, their choice of measurement model. Use of an incorrect measurement model undermines the content validity of constructs, misrepresents the structural relationships between them, and ultimately lowers the usefulness of management theories for business researchers and practitioners. The main contribution of this paper is to question the unthinking assumption of reflective measurement seen in much of the business literature.     

Deutsche Mark–Dollar Volatility: Intraday Activity Patterns, Macroeconomic Announcements, and Longer Run Dependencies

This paper provides a detailed characterization of the volatility in the deutsche mark–dollar foreign exchange market using an annual sample of five-minute returns. The approach captures the intraday activity patterns, the macroeconomic announcements, and the volatility persistence (ARCH) known from daily returns. The different features are separately quantified and shown to account for a substantial fraction of return variability, both at the intraday and daily level. The implications of the results for the interpretation of the fundamental "driving forces" behind the volatility process is also discussed.     

Moral Disengagement in Processes of Organizational Corruption

This paper explores Albert Bandura's concept of moral disengagement in the context of organizational corruption. First, the construct of moral disengagement is defined and elaborated. Moral disengagement is then hypothesized to play a role in the initiation of corruption by both easing and expediting individual unethical decision-making that advances organizational interests. It is hypothesized to be a factor in the facilitation of organizational corruption through dampening individuals’ awareness of the ethical content of the decisions they make. Finally, it is hypothesized to contribute to the perpetuation of corruption in organizations, because if individuals who have a greater propensity to morally disengage are more likely to make decisions that advance organizational interests regardless of the ethicality of those decisions, they may also be rewarded for those decisions in terms of organizational advancement. Together these studies form an argument that moral disengagement plays an important role in processes of organizational corruption.