Discussion of “Are Related Party Transactions Red Flags?”

Kohlbeck and Mayhew ( 2017 ) create a new data set featuring two types of related party transactions. They use empirical‐archival methods to investigate the effect of such transactions on the likelihood of restatements and on audit fees. Their findings suggest that related party transactions related to directors, officers and major shareholders are associated with poor “tone at the top” and that this leads management to negotiate for lower‐quality audits to minimize monitoring costs. To offer avenues for future research, we focus our discussion on three aspects of their paper related to causality, definitions of variables, and generalizability to non‐U.S. jurisdictions.     

Villages where China's ethnic minorities live

This paper investigates how ethnic minorities in rural China are faring compared with the ethnic majority. The village is the unit of analysis and large surveys for 2002 are used. Minority villages in northeast China are found to have a somewhat better economic situation than the average majority village, but minority villages in the southwest are clearly faring worse. Industrialisation, inputs in agricultural production, stock of human capital of the labour force, wage level on the local labour market as well as indicators of path dependency are all found to affect the economic situation of a village. Location is the single most important circumstance working against a favourable economic situation for minority villages in the northwest and particularly the southwest. Low village income results in long-distance migration for many ethnic minorities, but for some minorities their ethnicity hinders migration.     

More reforms,less innovation? The impact of structural reform histories on innovation-oriented cultures in public organizations

The environments of public organizations have become substantially volatile due to economic and societal changes, requiring organizations to continuously adapt and to develop an innovation-oriented culture. In response to the multitude of challenges posed by this volatile environment, politicians in inter alia the executive and parliament impose structural reforms upon public organizations, implying that these organizations might be confronted with a series of structural reforms over their lifetime. This paper advances that a history of repeated and frequent structural reforms, irrespective of the underlying drivers of these reforms, has a negative effect on the innovation-orientedness of the organizational culture. We explore the link between an organization’s history of structural reforms and the degree to which the culture within these organizations is innovation-oriented. Results indicate that organizational turmoil generated by repeated structural reforms reduces innovativeness and suggest that too many structural reforms imposed in a too short time span will have detrimental side effects.     

Empowering by de-depowering: towards an HR strategy for realizing the power of empowerment

Empowerment is still on the agenda as a management concept. The rhetoric around it is very much in line with good old human relations values, and it put forward as a recipe for coping with increasingly rough waters. This paper argues that these recipes are often of the type 'the solution is the problem'. Rather than expose themselves dubious empowering tools, organizations should seek to identify what 'de-powers' their employees. Genuine empowerment is nourished by an empowering organization. Six, fairly general de-powering tendencies are provided as illustration. It is suggested that empowerment efforts should be directed towards creating better grounds for empowerment. A strategy for doing this could be aimed at de-powering the organization. Guidelines for such a strategy are suggested.     

GROWTH OF RURAL US NON‐FARM PROPRIETORS WITH A FOCUS ON AMENITIES

In this research we explore how local amenities relate to proprietorship growth by merging two lines of work: amenities and rural growth and the drivers of proprietorship and small business growth. We do so to examine what role, if any, different types of amenties play in promoting the growth of small businesses in rural USA. Using data for rural US counties we explore the role of natural and built amenities in the growth of rural non‐farm proprietorships between 2000 and 2008 by employing a spatial Durbin model to account for both spatial dependency in the data and to explicitly model spatial spillover effects. The results offer evidence that proprietorship growth is spatially clustered, spatial spillover effects matter, and proprietorship growth is higher in those areas with particular climate attributes. That is, the effect of climate on quality of life may be enough to attract individuals who wish to start new firms.     

Strategy as guided evolution

In this paper, we build on a detailed case study and the theories of evolution in social and cultural systems and intraorganizational ecology to develop a model of strategy as guided evolution. Its primary distinctions from earlier models of organizational and intraorganizational ecology lie in (i) the incorporation of an important—yet realistic—role of top management in shaping the direction and outcomes of the evolutionary processes within firms, and (ii) the incorporation of human and social capital as a critical unit of selection within such processes. We describe the model and discuss the evolutionary and ecological processes associated with it. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Time,space and technology in the working‐home: an unsettled nexus

The research reported here draws upon four homes in Melbourne, Australia, where variable practices and strategies in the use of information and communication technologies are adopted in negotiating the temporal and spatial dynamics of the working‐home. Informed by theories from Science and Technology Studies, we argue that these strategies arise in concernful relation with others—both human and non‐human—that enable and constrain the possibilities for action.     

COMPARATIVE FISCAL RESPONSE EFFECTS OF DEBT RELIEF: AN APPLICATION TO AFRICAN HIPCS

As part of the efforts of the international donor community to scale up aid to Africa, substantial debt relief has been granted in recent years through the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative and its successor, the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative. This paper tries to assess, for a sample of 24 African countries that have at least reached decision point status in the HIPC Initiative, to what extent this debt relief has created fiscal space in recipient country budgets, and what, on average, the actual fiscal response effects have been, relative to other types of aid. Inspired by the fiscal response literature, we model public finance behaviour as a system of structural equations and estimate the reduced form parameters in a Vector Autoregressive framework. In general, we are unable to find evidence that debt relief might provoke no or even perverse fiscal responses. On average, debt relief affects public finance behaviour in a desired way, with effects being most similar to those of its most direct substitute, programme grants.     

The Managerial Law Firm and the Globalization of Legal Ethics

The processes of economic integration induced by globalization have brought about a certain type of legal practice that challenges the core values of legal ethics. Law firms seeking to represent the interests of internationally active corporate clients must embrace and systematically apply concepts of strategic management and planning and install corporate business structures to sustain competition for lucrative clients. These measures bear a high conflict potential with the core values of legal ethics. However, we observe in parallel a global consolidation of these core values through an enhanced cooperation of national professional bodies, the use of international codes, and comparative legal ethics teaching and research. Furthermore, state regulation of the legal profession is concerned with preserving the core values of legal ethics to conserve the lawyer’s role in upholding the rule of law. This article defends that legal ethics is adapting to the pressures exerted by “managerial” approaches to legal practice without this altering core values that underlie legal ethics.