Self-regulation,Co-regulation and the Audio-Visual Media Services Directive

This paper criticises the use of the concepts of self-regulation and command and control regulation as simplistic and often having a political function. They neglect the fact that there is a continuum of different types of regulation; they represent extremes rarely found in the real world. Moreover, regulatory regimes will be comprised of a cocktail of different regulatory approaches. The developing concept of co-regulation is likely to be more productive. It is unhelpful to attempt to draw up restrictive definitions of different types of regulation; it is much more important to assess them through the application of normative principles, including those relating to procedures, accountability, and enforcement of rights. The drafting of the Audio-Visual Media Services Directive initially made the mistake of using the narrow definitions of co- and self-regulation contained in the Interinstitutional Agreement on Better Law-Making, but amendments during the Parliamentary process have resulted in a more flexible approach better adopted to the recognition of existing co-regulatory regimes.

Access to imported intermediates and intra‐firm wage inequality

We use Chinese firm‐level data from the World Bank Investment Climate Survey to examine the link between importing intermediates and intra‐firm wage inequality. Our results show that intermediate input importers not only have a significant wage premium but also have a greater intra‐firm wage dispersion than non‐importing firms. This pattern is robust when we control for productivity and use trade costs as the instruments. We further investigate the mechanism of how importing intermediates might contribute to both inter‐firm and intra‐firm wage inequality. Our evidence is consistent with three important channels. First, imported intermediate inputs complement skilled labour. Second, intermediates importers are more likely to use performance pay. Third, imported inputs complement innovation and employee training.     

Uncertainty,Learning and Error Elimination: Taiwanese Entrepreneurs in Mainland China

This article presents a dynamic model of the entrepreneurial process based on Weber's and Schutz's theories of human agency. It argues that human agents accumulate experience as they make sense out of their everyday business life. Experiences from everyday life are assembled into a stock of knowledge that can be used to interpret incoming events as well as problem solving. If incoming events are repeated and familiar, the entrepreneur can utilize the rule of thumb to solve problems without difficulties. If incoming events are novel, the entrepreneur's interpretative framework will fail to give an adequate account of the new situation. Encountering this situation, some agents may continue to use old methods to solve new problems. This response does not catch up with market's expectation and is doomed to fail. Most entrepreneurs will devise new methods to solve new problems by trial and error, and experimentation. They will cope with their knowledge deficiency by creating temporary expectations. This knowledge surrogate will be later tested in the market. If a new strategy works, then it will be adopted and further routinized as a rule of thumb. This theoretical framework is applied to Taiwanese entrepreneurs investing in mainland China. Two case studies in the food and catering industries are conducted. This article concludes that the theory of entrepreneurial process in terms of learning, experimentation, and revision of plans provides us with useful understanding of survival, growth, expansion of an enterprise.     

Culture Comes First: Introduction to the Special Issue

The Special Issue “Culture Comes First” attracted fifty five submissions offering a diverse collection of contributions from scholars within the domain. The Editorial team reviewed many interesting papers and the result of the process of review and revision by the team is nine papers and one commentary. The papers in this special topic issue include a wide variety of topics with application to scholars and management practitioners and aspects of these papers are summarized in this introduction. The introduction offers some thoughts about the process of scholarly publication and briefly discusses some cultural facets of current business training and the practice of management.     

Key account management: Theory,practice and challenges

Key account management is a natural development of customer focus and relationship marketing in business‐to‐business markets. It offers critical benefits and opportunities for profit enhancement to both sides of the seller/buyer dyad.

This paper describes a framework for understanding the development of key account relationships. It has also incorporated a comprehensive guide to the current practice of key account management and comments on the challenges for the future of key account management practice. The paper is based on research involving in‐depth interviews with key account managers, their managers and their main contacts in the customer organisation.

The scope of key account management is widening and becoming more complex. The skills of professionab involved in it at strategic and operational levels need to be constantly updated and developed. This paper demonstrates how key account management can be implemented and points decision‐makers in the right direction for better practice in the long term.     

Behavioral Integrity: Examining the Effects of Trust Velocity and Psychological Contract Breach

Journal of Business Ethics - Moral reasoning among media professionals varies. Historically, advertising professionals score lower on the Defining Issues Test (DIT) than their media colleagues in...     

Thomas Piketty,the Future of Capitalism and the Theory of Distribution: A Review Essay

This essay reviews Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty‐First Century. The focus is upon the conceptual framework and theoretical interpretation of the empirical findings assembled in the book, rather than those empirical findings themselves (which are, in any case, broadly incontestable). The core theoretical logic of the distributional dynamics is explained and subjected to scrutiny with respect to the theory of distribution in particular, but also the theory of growth.     

Different ways of knowing: a communicative turn toward sustainability

Despite the urgency of the ecological crisis the steady continuation of environmental degradation suggests that new ways of interpreting problems and acting with environmental integrity may need to be considered. This paper draws on a broad range of contemporary theory to argue that the conventional conceptualization of environmental problems has remained a largely disciplinary-based exercise that has relied on abstracting the environmental issues from their real-world complexity. A practical articulation of the main environmental narratives reveals self-referential discourses whose disciplinary-based practices have insulated these approaches from a broad range of contemporary theorising and different ways of knowing. The dominance of these approaches in environmental policy development has led to the continued acceleration of environmental degradation despite widespread political and social interest in its abatement. This paper provides a critique of methodologies derived from the assumptions of instrumental rationalism, and contemplates the potential for alternative ‘communicative’ approaches and strategies for dealing with environmental policy development and implementation. It is argued that a communicative approach to planning for sustainability represents a more appropriate strategy for mobilising a currently impotent environmental movement. A communicative approach by explicitly dealing with the assumptions and motivations of contested positions in the sustainability debate, it is argued, offers the most pragmatic way of developing change strategies to deal with the complex issues surrounding environmental policy development and implementation.