Corporate Social Responsibility in SMEs: A Shift from Philanthropy to Institutional Works?

For Aristotle, virtues are neither transcendent nor universal, but socially interdependent; they need to be understood chronologically and with respect to character and context. This paper uses an Aristotelian lens to analyse an especially interesting context in which to study virtue—the state’s response when social order breaks down. During such periods, questions relating to right action by citizens, the state, and state agents are pronounced. To study this, we analyse data from interviews, observation, and documents gathered during a 3-year study of riot policing in the U.K. In doing so, we contribute by joining a number of other conversations within JBE, suggesting detailed empirical examination of this context is useful in opening up considerations relevant to ‘virtue’ elsewhere. This extreme context helps us raise interesting and empirically informed questions that can encourage future theoretical and empirical contributions to virtue in business ethics. One such question is on the role of habituation in virtue, which is not just the inculcation of a reflex or automaticity, but can also refer to a trained and developed tendency to behave in the right way, for the right reasons, at the right time. Whilst we stop short of a simplistic alignment of habituation and virtue, we show ways in which it can inform understanding of both courage and phronēsis.     

ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE AND PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE: AN APPLICATION TO GREEK MANUFACTURING

To comprehend the impact of public infrastructure on economic performance this paper provides a measure of productivity growth as derived from duality theory. This productivity growth is decomposed into the components of technical change, returns to scale and the effects of public infrastructure, the variable of our interest. In an application, we opt for Greek manufacturing so as to investigate whether the decline in its growth rate is partly explained by public infrastructure. Despite some variation in the estimation results of shadow shares across industries, public infrastructure asserts a cost saving effect in most industries, though it also appears that traditional labour‐intensive industries with lower level of technological advancement do not benefit from the provision of public infrastructure. The estimation results further demonstrate that while public infrastructure enhanced productivity growth over the sample period for most industries, low infrastructure investment in the 1970s and the 1980s undermined productivity growth.     

Do binding agreements solve the social dilemma?

We investigate experimentally whether “binding agreements” can provide a solution to the social dilemma that arises in the presence of pure public goods. Signing a binding agreement can prevent players from free riding on the contributions to the public good. However, a well known theoretical result is that the outcome of the endogenous formation of agreements is not necessarily efficient. Our setting is a bargaining game in which agreements form sequentially. The individual level of contribution to the public good increases with the size of the coalition reaching an agreement and the global agreement is always the socially optimal structure. There are two equilibrium outcomes, the global agreement and an asymmetric structure, which consists of two coalitions of different sizes, the small one free riding on the contributions of the larger one. We run an experiment which lends force to the theoretical result that outcomes may be inefficient. However, subjects do not play Nash and the experimental outcome is, on average, even more inefficient than the theory predicts. Our analysis leads to the conclusion that different types of behaviour co-exist.     

Vertical Contracts and Downstream Entry*

We study the implications of different contractual forms in a market with an incumbent upstream monopolist and free downstream entry. We show that traditional conclusions regarding the desirability of linear contracts radically change when entry in the downstream market is endogenous rather than exogenous. By triggering more entry than two-part tariffs, wholesale price contracts can generate higher aggregate output, consumer surplus, and welfare. In light of this, the upstream monopolist may prefer to trade with wholesale price contracts as well as to give up part of its bargaining power when it is high.     

Vertical integration in West Africa's cotton industry: are parastatals a second best solution?

This article provides a framework to compare market outcomes among vertically integrated monopsonies in the cotton sector of West Africa and alternative, more competitive market structures. Based on a principal agent framework, in the presence of factor market constraints, as well as capital market failure, efficiently operated cotton parastatals increase sector welfare and efficiency by providing input credits. In equilibrium, outcomes with the principal agent model suggest growers receive the reservation income to participate in cotton production while the principal (cotton company) extracts the surplus above the reservation income. Competitive markets entail more equitable distribution of benefits than with parastatal vertical integration, but credit and factor market constraints can still persist. Promotion of a competitive market system will not support cotton productivity growth unless stakeholders pursue complementary programs to develop credit markets and research and extension institutions. In the presence of current market failures, parastatals may be a second‐best solution.     

Optimal annuitization, uncertain survival probabilities, and maxmin preferences

We consider a life-cycle model with bequest motives, and assume that the individual does not know his/her survival probability and has maxmin utility preferences; we show that it is optimal not to annuitize but to purchase pure life insurance policies instead.     

Job demand stressors and employees’ creativity: a within-person approach to dealing with hindrance and challenge stressors at the airport environment

Given the competitiveness of twenty-first-century airport landscape, catalyzed by airports’ evolution toward multi-service, and market-driven firms, a thorough investigation into employees’ creativity and its antecedents at the airport environment is warranted. Adopting the two-dimensional job demand stressors – outcome relationships framework and the cognitive-relational theory of stress, the current study interrogated the challenge (i.e. workload and time pressure)/ hindrance (i.e. role conflict and role ambiguity) stressors – creativity curvilinear relationships, and the buffering effects of within-person resources – dispositional mindfulness, and core self-evaluation. Using multi-sourced, cross-sectional data from employees in three airports in Ghana, the research findings showed creativity to have a U-shaped relationship with role ambiguity and role conflict, but with time pressure the relationship was an inverted U-shape. Employees’ workload showed a near-linear relationship with creativity, flattening at high levels of workload. Core self-evaluation displayed itself as an effective buffering component on role ambiguity – and time pressure – creativity relations but not role conflict and workload. Dispositional mindfulness interacted with role ambiguity, role conflict and time pressure – creativity relations, but not workload. To optimize employees’ creative performance, the study findings make a strong case for attending to individual-level factors necessary for stressors management. Further implications and recommendations are discussed.     

A social networks approach for strengthening participation in technology innovation: lessons learnt from the Mount Elgon region of Kenya and Uganda

Participatory approaches to agricultural technology development have not yet fully lived up to their promise to incorporate farmer knowledge. This paper introduces a social networks approach (SNA) to improve participatory research processes for co-innovation. Drawing upon findings from a collaborative project developing conservation agricultural production systems for smallholders in western Kenya and eastern Uganda, the paper explores farmer support networks to improve participation in technological innovation and development. Key research themes include: identifying farmers’ agricultural production networks; the local articulation of agricultural production networks and mindsets; using networks to facilitate meaningful participation in technology development; and disadvantages and advantages of using a social network approach. The introduction of SNA improved participatory research by building external and internal legitimacy for determining who participates, discouraging participatory attrition, and providing a meaningful forum for participation of all stakeholders. As a result, the introduction of SNA is demonstrated to show strong promise for improving processes of participatory technology development in agriculture.     

Asymptotic and bootstrap inference for inequality and poverty measures

A random sample drawn from a population would appear to offer an ideal opportunity to use the bootstrap in order to perform accurate inference, since the observations of the sample are IID. In this paper, Monte Carlo results suggest that bootstrapping a commonly used index of inequality leads to inference that is not accurate even in very large samples, although inference with poverty indices is satisfactory. We find that the major cause is the extreme sensitivity of many inequality indices to the exact nature of the upper tail of the income distribution. This leads us to study two non-standard bootstraps, the m out of n bootstrap, which is valid in some situations where the standard bootstrap fails, and a bootstrap in which the upper tail is modelled parametrically. Monte Carlo results suggest that accurate inference can be achieved with this last method in moderately large samples.     

Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility Activities and Corporate Governance in Imperfectly Competitive Markets

We investigate the incentives of firms' owners to commit voluntarily to corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities in an oligopolistic market. The socially responsible attributes attached to products are considered as credence goods, with consumers forming expectations about their existence and level. We show that hiring an ‘individually’ socially responsible CEO and delegating to him the CSR effort and market decisions acts as a commitment device for the firm's owners and credibly signals to consumers that the firm will undertake the ‘missioned’ CSR activities. We also find that CSR activities are welfare enhancing for consumers and firms and thus, they should be encouraged. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.