Collective self-governance in a marine community: expedition cruise tourism at Svalbard

Collective self-governance is gaining attention in the literature for maintaining the quality of key attractions and promoting sustainable tourism. The long-term success of collective self-governance is dependent on both its internal organization and its embeddedness in external state and non-state regulations. This paper presents the marine community concept, consisting of a policy and a user community, as a framework for investigating the internal and external dynamics of collective self-governance and its ability to steer toward sustainable cruise tourism. As methodology, a case study design was chosen which was primarily studied by means of interviews with a spectrum of relevant actors concerning expedition cruise tourism at Svalbard. By applying the marine community to Svalbard expedition cruise tourism governance, we draw the following conclusions: (1) collective self-governance complements governmental regulation through access to knowledge, conflict resolution and rule-compliance based on disclosure, traceability and trust; (2) collective self-governance's increasing role in the policy community alienates the expedition crew from the user community; and (3) informational overflow by co-existence of collective self-governance and state-governance challenges sustainable cruise tourism. Collective self-governance would, therefore, benefit from reflection, especially regarding the role of the user community that functions as an intermediary between state and self-governance regulations.     

The Distributional and Allocative Impacts of Virtual Labor Mobility across Time Zones through Communication Networks

Using a specific‐factors' model, with two goods (a shift‐working good and a non‐shift‐working good), three factors (capital specific to shift‐working, land specific to non‐shift‐working and labor) and two countries (Home and Foreign), which are located in different time zones, we highlight the impact of trade in labor services via communication networks on factor prices and production patterns. If two countries are identical in size, then under free trade in labor services, all workers work only in their local daytime, and night shift in each country is performed by imported labor services supplied by residents of the other country in their local daytime. Night‐time wage becomes the same as daytime wage (a wage equalization result). Other factor prices are also equalized. In both countries, capital rental rate increases, while land rent decreases. However, if two countries are different in size, trade in labor services does not equalize wages: in the large country, wages for night‐shift workers are higher than daytime wages and some residents work at night; in the small country, daytime wages become higher than night‐time wages and no one works at night, and night‐shift work is done by imported labor services from the large country. Land rent in the small country decreases. Land rent in the large country may or may not decrease, but it is always higher than in the small country. Capital rental rates in both countries are equalized and increase.     

Knowledge management through the development of knowledge repositories: towards work degradation

This paper questions the consequences of the use of electronic knowledge repositories for work and employment. Drawing on critical research suggesting that knowledge management associated with such tools presents similarities to scientific management principles, it proposes to examine the following key research question: how do employees experience the transformation of the employment relationship when a knowledge repository is introduced to the workplace? The inquiry is grounded in an exploratory qualitative case study of a knowledge management system designed to foster knowledge‐sharing in a Belgian public administration. The findings illustrate two complementary outcomes: this system resulted in employees experiencing deskilling and work degradation, and was met with resistance. Significantly, this paper considers work degradation as a reflexive phenomenon in the context studied, where knowledge‐sharing systems produced deskilling and resistance as part of a specific re‐regulation process.     

Toward a Typology of Family Firm Corporate Entrepreneurship

Family involvement in business creates idiosyncrasies in firm behavior that promote long‐term, often transgenerational, strategic logics that ostensibly align with the motivations and outcomes of corporate entrepreneurship. Interestingly, extant research provides only minimal insight into the heterogeneous nature of corporate entrepreneurship orientations pursued by family firms. To better understand this heterogeneity, we develop a typology of corporate entrepreneurship in family firms providing a reconciliatory approach to this literary diversity and suggest that the varied corporate entrepreneurship orientations of family firms are impacted by the duality of a family's distinct intention to pursue transgenerational succession and capabilities to acquire external knowledge.     

Employment Protection and SME Capital Structure Decisions

This study examines the effect of employment protection (EP) on the capital structure of SMEs. We argue that EP is linked to both the level of leverage and leverage adjustments because of its impact on financial distress costs and a firm's operational leverage. Data on employment contract types allow us to compose company specific measures of exposure to EP using a panel data set of 14,858 Belgian SMEs between 2000 and 2012. Our results show that the leverage ratio of firms is higher and that firms are more likely to adjust leverage levels when they are subject to fewer EP obligations.     

Does foreign investment benefit the exporting activities of Vietnamese firms?

Using firm-level data, this paper examines the effects of foreign investment on the exporting behaviour of domestic firms in the Vietnamese manufacturing and service sectors. Applying the Heckman selection model on panel data and following the Wooldridge approach, we find that investment by foreign firms has a significant positive effect on the decision of domestic firms in the same and upstream sectors to export. The proportion of exports of domestic firms declines through horizontal and forward linkages, but increases through backward linkages in the manufacturing sector. However, there is only weak evidence in support of export spillovers on domestic firms in the service sector. We also find that the presence of foreign firms has differing effects on the exporting activities of low- versus high-tech firms in the manufacturing sector.     

Modern Slavery Disclosure Regulation and Global Supply Chains: Insights from Stakeholder Narratives on the UK Modern Slavery Act

Journal of Business Ethics - The purpose of this article is to problematise a particular social transparency and disclosure regulation in the UK, that transcend national boundaries in order to...