Supporting the Collaborative Construction of a Shared Understanding About Work with a Guided Conceptual Modeling Technique

The existence of a shared understanding about a collaborative work process among all involved actors is one prerequisite for its successful implementation. The development of a shared understanding is facilitated when the actors make explicit their individual views and create externalizations that can be used as subjects of discourse. Instruments supporting externalization and discourse about collaborative work need to provide adequate forms of representation and guide actors in implementing these reflection and alignment processes. Appropriate guidance can facilitate the construction of a shared understanding for actors not accustomed to such processes. This paper introduces a methodology that offers structural and procedural guidance by adopting diagrammatical conceptual modeling techniques. This methodology has been evaluated extensively in a multiple case study. A combination of interaction analysis of the modeling process and ex-post assessment of the actors’ perceptions has been used to evaluate the adequacy of the proposed methodology with respect to the pursued objectives. The results confirm that the modeling methodology and the proposed guidance measures appropriately support the process of constructing a shared understanding about collaborative work processes.     

The Justice Motive in East Asia’s Territorial Disputes

Many of the most active and most dangerous security challenges in the Asia-Pacific region are generally seen to involve a complex amalgam of material and ideational conflicts. There is surprisingly little consideration, however, of the role of the justice motive. This article explores the role of the justice motive in the context of three specific maritime and territorial disputes: Dokdo/Takeshima, the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, and the South China Sea. What explains its intensity? How does it affect political salience, tractability, and danger of conflict? What are the available mechanisms and prospects for resolving justice conflicts?     

Formation of Procedural Justice Judgments in Legal Negotiation

Research has indicated that procedural justice—fairness of decisionmaking processes—plays an important role in bilateral legal negotiation, encouraging the acceptance of negotiated agreements. Additionally, research has suggested that procedural justice leads to opportunities for increased integrative bargaining. However, procedural justice judgments are typically measured as subjective assessments by disputants. If procedural justice plays an important role in legal dispute negotiation, it is critical to understand how individuals form judgments about fairness of process. The study presented explores antecedents of procedural justice judgments in legal negotiation. Results suggest that although all potential identified antecedent variables—voice, courtesy/respect, trust, and neutrality—play a role in judgments about procedural justice, the primary component is courtesy/respect behavior by the speaker and her partner. Parties share some agreement about the presence of courtesy/respect behavior and trust behavior, and third-party coders can identify behavior that reliably relates to the parties’ procedural justice antecedent assessments. Additionally, results indicate that appeals to potential “neutral” benchmarks such as legal authority lead to lower assessments of procedural justice. These findings suggest that courtesy and respect are the primary drivers of negotiators’ procedural justice assessments, and that such courtesy/respect behavior is not merely a subjective artifact of the participant but can be observed by a third-party coder.     

A Representative Committee by Approval Balloting

A new voting rule for electing committees is described. Specifically, we use approval balloting and propose a new voting procedure that guarantees that if there is a committee that represents (with a given proportion of representatives) all of the existing voters, then the selected committee has to represent all of voters in at least the same proportion. This property is a way of selecting a committee that represents completely all of voters when such a committee exists. The usual voting rules in this context do not satisfy this condition.     

A tale of two civilizations in the era of Facebook and blockchain

Five billion people in the world do not have the kind of ledgers that provide the documented information that allows them to transfer, partition, and aggregate assets and talents in such a way that they can be scaled up, secure investment, guarantee credit, certify reputation, and capture abstract surplus value. The difficulty that most people have in making combinations is a major cause of global inequality and unnecessary poverty.     

When do unethical brand perceptions spill over to competitors?

We examine whether the unethical actions of marketplace brands (e.g., the Volkswagen emissions scandal) hurt the ethical perceptions of competing brands (e.g., Ford, BMW). Across two studies, we find evidence for this unethical spillover effect and show that it can negatively affect consumers’ liking and purchase intentions for a competing brand. The results show that the spillover effect (1) only occurs for similar competitors and (2) is moderated by construal level (CL). Specifically, the spillover effect is more likely to occur when consumers focus on the finer details of the unethical brand’s transgression (i.e., low CL) but not when they focus on the bigger picture of the transgression (i.e., high CL). Thus, while it is intuitively appealing to assume that brands may benefit from a competitor’s foible, this research indicates that competitors may be hurt by a similar brand’s wrongdoing.     

Branding strategies,marketing communication,and perceived brand meaning: The transfer of purposive,goal-oriented brand meaning to brand extensions

This article develops and tests a conceptual model of the transfer process whereby perceived similarity organized around shared goals facilitates the transfer of knowledge and affect from a parent brand to an extension of that brand. Empirical results, based on two well-known brands and two hypothetical product extensions for each brand, demonstrate that the availability of well-formed, goal-derived categories associated with a parent brand establishes an organizing framework for consumers' assessments of similarity thatfacilitates the transfer of consumer knowledge and attitude from the parent brand to a brand extension in another product category. This facilitating effect of similarity does not occur in the absence of goal-derived categories. The results also reveal how marketing communication can be used to facilitate the transfer process by framing similarity in terms of common goals. Implications are discussed for the organization of consumer knowledge and affect across product categories and for understanding prior research findings on brand extension. Ingrid M. Martin (imartin@csulb.edu) is an associate professor of marketing at California State University at Long Beach. Her research has examined issues in the area of consumer goals as they guide structuring and processing marketing information, product choice and usage. Her research has been published in theJournal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Public Policy & Research, and five book chapters. David W. Stewart (david.stewart@marshall.usc.edu) is the Robert E. Brooker Professor of Marketing in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. He is the immediate past editor of theJournal of Marketing. Dr. Stewart has authored or co-authored more than 200 publications and seven books. Shashi Matta (matta@marshall.usc.edu) is a doctoral candidate in marketing at the Marshal School of Business, University of Southern California. His research interests include branding, and services marketing. Shashi’s research has been published in theJournal of Consumer Research.     

Ethical Transparency and Economic Medicalization

This article introduces the concept of economic medicalization where non-medical problems are transformed into medical problems in order to achieve the objective of corporate shareholder wealth maximization. Following an overview of the differences in ethical norms applicable to medical ethics and business ethics, the economic medicalization of medical research practice and publication is examined in some detail. This motivates a general discussion of the problems involved in the ethical approval process for medical research that balances the interests of both business and government in the market for medical products and services.     

Price Run-up in Housing Markets,Access to Bank Lending and House Prices in Korea

This paper studies the causal relationship between house prices and the access to bank lending in Kangnam, the hottest submarket in Seoul and four ‘cold’ markets which have shown relatively modest price increases. In response to the rapid escalation of house prices in Seoul, primarily in Kangnam in recent years, the Korean government implemented a number of policies to stabilize house prices. In particular, it introduced more strict limits on loan-to-value ratio and debt-to-income ratio as part of the mortgage loan qualification process in order to restrict the availability of bank lending for the housing market. The short-run influence of the bank lending on the apartment prices is clearly present in ‘cold’ markets, while it is not in Kangnam, the ‘hot’ market, even though the long-run influence is stronger in Kangnam than in the other markets. This result holds for the entire sample period (1999–2006) as well as for the subperiods before and after the introduction of lending restrictions in August, 2005. It also holds for Kangnam and Kangbuk for an extended period of 1988 to 2006. Our results suggest that in the short run the lending restriction may cause a disruption in untargeted housing markets while it has little influence on the apartment prices in the targeted market. We also find that banks have adjusted the bank lending in response to changes in the house prices in Kangnam as well as in the other markets.