Shifting risk to the frontline: case studies in different contract working environments

An extensive body of safety literature and research discusses the integral role of rules and procedures in managing workplace hazards, ensuring worker safety, and safeguarding the environment. Nevertheless, organizational accidents and workplace injuries continue to occur, and individual employees often bear the brunt of responsibility. This paper examines how risk becomes shifted to individuals at the bottom of supply chains, focusing on two different groups of contract workers. Specifically, it draws on case studies conducted in Australia – one on civil contractors working around hazardous infrastructure and one on athletes who are subject to anti-doping requirements. A comparison of the two cases and their distinctive elements illuminates the ways in which structural pressures, organizational dynamics, and context-specific conditions influence the risks shouldered by individuals. Our analysis shows that, in both cases, adverse outcomes are widely seen as the responsibility of contract workers, prompting other actors to judge them as blameworthy. In doing so, risk in various forms (e.g. safety, financial, reputational) becomes shifted onto workers who are constrained by contracts and away from away from higher level actors and organizations that are generally in more powerful positions than frontline workers. This finding suggests that the burden of accountability and potentially liability is borne primarily by frontline workers. Because of this focus, it is easy to lose sight of organizational and structural conditions that contribute to the risks revealed at the individual level. Through an analysis of 57 interviews across both sectors, complemented by participant observations and a media review, this paper underscores the importance of critically considering not only individual worker actions, but also how regulation can support the diversion of risk, responsibility, and liability onto frontline workers.     

Google in China: A Manager-Friendly Heuristic Model for Resolving Cross-Cultural Ethical Conflicts

Management practitioners and scholars have worked diligently to identify methods for ethical decision making in international contexts. Theoretical frameworks such as Integrative Social Contracts Theory (Donaldson and Dunfee, 1994, Academy of Management Review 19, 252–284) and more recently the Global Business Citizenship Approach [Wood et al., 2006, Global Business Citizenship: A Transformative Framework for Ethics and Sustainable Capitalism. (M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY)] have produced innovations in practice. Despite these advances, many managers have difficulty implementing these theoretical concepts in daily practice. Using the example of recent decisions by internet service providers Google, Yahoo, and MSN regarding censorship requirements in China, we offer six heuristic questions to help managers to resolve cross-cultural ethical conflicts in which the firm’s way of doing business differs from the practice in the host country. Recognizing that companies can take different approaches to law and ethics (Paine, 1994, Harvard Business Review 72(2), 107–117), our aim is to provide a management decision process to deal with demands or opportunities for engaging in questionable business practices in a host country.     

Hierarchical Motive Structures and Their Role in Moral Choices

Leader-managers face a myriad of competing values when they engage in ethical decision-making. Few studies help us understand why certain reasons for action are justified, taking precedence over others when people choose to respond to an ethical dilemma. To help address this matter we began with a qualitative approach to disclose leader-managers’ moral motives when they decide to address a work-related ethical dilemma. One hundred and nine military officers were asked to provide their reasons for taking action, justifications of their reasons, and to explain these justifications. We used network analysis techniques to identify a hierarchical motive structure. The motive structure is a cognitive map that identifies ethical motives and perceptions of how these ethical motives relate to each other. The motives identified represent classic conceptualizations of moral behavior; namely, virtue theories, consequentialism, and deontological theories, along with another category that expressed the emotional significance of the moral judgment, which we refer to as emotional empiricism.     

Asian Entrepreneurship in the International Business World

This review will focus on the role of Asian entrepreneurship in the international business world. As we are now considered to be in the Asian century, it is important to see how business grows, develops, and changes based on entrepreneurship. Asian entrepreneurship is unique to the geographic area but also encompasses people, business, and government that has a focus on Asia and is part of the global community. The continuing rapid evolution of Asian economies over the next decade will require a focus on entrepreneurship as it incorporates technology and innovation change. More countries in Asia need to focus on entrepreneurship as a way to achieve global best practice and to make breakthroughs in science and technology. A focus on the role of entrepreneurship in Asia in order to meet social and sustainable needs is a particular key concern of many governments and trade organizations around the world. This article will focus on the book Asian Entrepreneurship as a key reference for understanding and improving the social, environmental, and economic conditions for international business. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

One‐Stop Shopping Behavior,Buyer Power and Upstream Merger Incentives

We analyze how consumer preferences for one‐stop shopping affect the (Nash) bargaining relationships between a retailer and its suppliers. One‐stop shopping preferences create ‘demand complementarities’ among otherwise independent products which lead to two opposing effects on upstream merger incentives: first a standard double mark‐up problem and second a bargaining effect. The former creates merger incentives while the later induces suppliers to bargain separately. When buyer power becomes large enough, then suppliers stay separated which raises final good prices. We also show that our result can be obtained when wholesale prices are determined in a non‐cooperative game and under two‐part tariffs.     

Risk,learning, and technology adoption

This article explores how decision makers learn and use information, with an application to the adoption of biotechnology in agriculture. The empirical analysis relies on experimental and survey data measuring risk preferences, learning processes, and the adoption of genetically modified (GM) seeds among U.S. grain farmers. While controlling for risk aversion, we link individual learning rules with the cognitive abilities of each decision maker and their actual GM adoption decisions. We find evidence that very few individuals are Bayesian learners, and that the population of farmers is quite heterogeneous in terms of learning rules. This suggests that Bayesian learning (as commonly assumed in the analysis of agricultural technology adoption) is not an appropriate characterization. In addition, we do not find a strong relationship between observed learning styles and the timing of GM seed adoption. To the extent that learning is a key part of the process of technology adoption, this suggests the presence of much unobserved heterogeneity in learning among farmers.     

Flooding risk and housing values: An economic assessment of environmental hazard

Climate change, the ‘boom and bust’ cycles of rivers, and altered water resource management practice have caused significant changes in the spatial distribution of the risk of flooding. Hedonic pricing studies, predominantly for the US, have assessed the spatial incidence of risk and the associated implicit price of flood risk. Using these implicit price estimates and their associated standard errors, we perform a meta-analysis and find that an increase in the probability of flood risk of 0.01 in a year is associated to a difference in transaction price of an otherwise similar house of - 0.6%. The actual occurrence of a flooding event or increased stringency in disclosure rules causes ex-ante prices to differ from ex-post prices, but these effects are small. The marginal willingness to pay for reduced risk exposure has increased over time, and it is slightly lower for areas with a higher per capita income. We show that obfuscating amenity effects and risk exposure associated with proximity to water causes systematic bias in the implicit price of flood risk.