How Do European SME Owner–Managers Make Sense of ‘Stakeholder Management’?: Insights from a Cross-National Study

The vast majority of empirical research on stakeholder management has traditionally focused on multinational corporations. Only in recent years, scholars have begun to pay attention to the stakeholder management concept in relation to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The few existing studies in this area, however, discuss SMEs as a context free category or remain focused on single country analysis. This cross-national empirical research investigates SME owner?Cmanagers?? perceptions of stakeholder management in six European countries. The comparative analysis is followed by a discussion of how institutional, cultural and linguistic contexts can influence owner?Cmanagers?? sensemaking of stakeholder management. Our study questions the universality of specific management terms and proposes that more attention should be paid to the institutional, cultural and linguistic environments that shape economic activity in different parts of Europe.     

Impact of website characteristics on relationship quality: a comparison of banks financial cooperatives

This study seeks to investigate differences exhibited by bank customers and members of financial cooperatives respecting website characteristics (website design, convenience, information quality, ease of use and security/confidentiality) and their impact on online relationship quality (composed of trust, commitment and satisfaction). An online survey was conducted with 476 banking sector customers (banks and financial cooperatives), followed by a confirmatory factors analysis and multigroup analysis using EQS 6.2 software. Results evidence a significant difference in terms of website design and security/confidentiality. The impact of these variables on relationship quality proves significantly higher in the case of banks. This study submits that web strategies used by banks and financial cooperatives to develop online relationship quality may vary based on the type of organization.     

Tax‐Aided Financial Services Companies and the Cost of Capital

Over the past two decades, the governments of several European countries have implemented special tax devices to attract the finance centres of multinational companies. This paper determines how the cost of capital for investments made by multinationals is affected by the tax regimes, bringing into play the Irish financial services company, the Belgian co‐ordination centre, the Dutch finance company and the Luxemburg company coupled with a Swiss finance branch. It gives evidence that intermediation of a tax‐aided services company in the financing scheme of a foreign subsidiary provides an important tax saving. However, the home and source countries' tax regimes influence the hierarchy of the less heavily taxed treasury and finance centres. The methodology relies on the marginal effective tax rates theory and consists of an extension of Alworth's (1988) model to include treasury centres.     

Cooperative bargaining foundations of the Shapley–Shubik index

In a recent paper, we provide an interpretation of the Shapley–Shubik index as a measure of the ‘bargaining power’ that a voting rule gives to each member of a committee negotiating in search of consensus. It is assumed that negotiation takes place under the condition that every winning coalition can impose any agreement. In this paper we further investigate the axiomatic foundations of this interpretation of the Shapley–Shubik index. To this end a wider framework admitting random voting rules is considered.     

Noncooperative foundations of bargaining power in committees and the Shapley–Shubik index

In this paper we explore the noncooperative foundations of the bargaining power that a voting rule gives to each member of a committee that bargains in search of consensus over a set of feasible agreements under a voting rule. Assuming complete information, we model a variety of bargaining protocols and investigate their stationary subgame perfect equilibria. We show how the Shapley–Shubik index and other power indices can be interpreted as measures of ‘bargaining power’ that appear in this light as limit cases.     

Living With Stigma: Spatial and Social Divisions in a Danish City

Inspired by Bourdieu's theory of homology between social, mental and spatial structures, this essay dissects the relationship between spatial and social divisions in the Danish city of Aalborg using varied data from official statistics, surveys, qualitative interviews and field observations. Spatial divisions reflect differences in the objective distribution of economic and cultural capital, and are accompanied by symbolic divisions in residents’ minds. Some nuances are, however, added to Bourdieu's homology argument, as there are discrepancies between objective distributions and mental schemes, such that the latter exaggerate and dramatize the former. The neighbourhood of Aalborg East is subjected to this symbolic exaggeration in the form of spatial stigma or territorial stigmatization. An analysis of residents’ strategies for coping with spatial stigma furthermore provides an illustration of Wacquant's claim that this stigmatization can be met with a range of socially patterned responses ranging from acceptance or indifference to recalcitrance.