Principled moral reasoning: Is it a viable approach to promote ethical integrity?

In response to recent recommendations for the teaching of principled moral reasoning in business school curricula, this paper assesses the viability of such an approach. The results indicate that, while business students' level of moral reasoning in this sample are like most 18- to 21-year-olds, they may be incapable of grasping the concepts embodied in principled moral reasoning. Implications of these findings are discussed. James Weber is currently an Assistant Professor of Management at Marquette University. He has published articles on managerial values and moral reasoning and the teaching of business ethics in Research in Corporate Social Performance and Policy: Empirical Studies of Business Ethics and Values, International Journal of Value Based Management, Human Relations, and Journal of Business Ethics. Sharon Green is currently an Assistant Professor of Accounting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research emphasizes information processing aspects of decision making in governmental, auditing and educational contexts. Her publications have appeared in Accounting Review and Research in Governmental and Non-Profit Accounting.     

Geographies of wealth: real estate and personal property ownership in England and Wales, 1870–1902

This article explores the composition and geographies of individual wealth holding in England and Wales in the late nineteenth century. It draws on various forms of death duty records to determine the individual ownership of wealth including both personal property and real estate. By combining information on these different kinds of property, it is possible to explore how different strata of wealth holders accumulated specific forms of wealth at the time of their death. The article then examines how the composition of that wealth varied according to the wealth holder's location in the urban hierarchy and distance from London. It points out important geographical differences in both the scale and nature of wealth holding and raises questions about the implications of these findings.     

The failure of ‘nationalization by attraction’: Britain's cross‐class alliance against earnings‐related pensions in the 1950s1

In 1957, the Labour Party published radical proposals for a state earnings‐related pension scheme (‘national superannuation’) whose funds were to be invested in stock markets to generate high returns, and to help modernize and dynamize the British economy. This article explores a sophisticated campaign against the proposal by the insurance industry, and the resistance of the unions. In doing so, it considers the implications of this cross‐class alliance, not least in terms of a possible missed opportunity to build a ‘developmental state’ in the UK, but also in terms of the country's increasingly inadequate and inequitable system of pension provision.     

How to prevent the division of the free-enterprise world

Two issues will need to be addressed constructively by the enlarged European Community if the multilateral trade negotiations foreshadowed to begin next year are not to founder. They relate, first, to the division of the free-enterprise world into economic spheres of influence and, secondly, to the isolation of commercial markets for temperate-zone farm commodities.     

Performance signals in the public sector: the case of health care

Although there are no traditional markets and money prices inthe public sector, consumers and providers may respond to signalsof organisational performance. We present a simple dynamic modelof the demand and supply for elective surgery in the UK NationalHealth Service in which waiting time acts as the prime indicatorof performance. The model is tested using a panel of quarterlydata for 123 English health authorities over an eight-year period.We find that supply is increasing and demand is decreasing inmeasures of the previous period waiting time. The results implythat health care systems which are rationed by waiting do respondto indicators of waiting times. The paper adds to the smallbut consistent body of research which demonstrates that publicsector systems respond to important aspects of reported performance.     

The Impact of Labour Markets on Specialist Manpower

ABSTRACT A major problem to be faced in the coming decade is ensuring an adequate supply of trained staff to innovate and exploit new technologies. Historically this has often been defined as a macroeconomic supply-demand issue, to do with generating people from the educational sector with the appropriate mix of expertise in the numbers required to meet demand in the industrial sector. In this paper the author makes the case that the concept of 'expertise' is not as simple as a supply-demand view assumes. The definition of what is appropriate expertise for given jobs—technical and managerial—seems to be heavily influenced by who is trying to gain control over whom, a phenomenon that can also be seen at work in situations as diverse as shopfloor demarcations and the behaviour of professional bodies. If this is the case, the solution to the supply-demand problem may well lie in the hands of the individual firm and its manpower policies, rather than in the overhaul of national systems of education.