A new equilibrium in health and rewards strategy--prospering in a post-health care reform world

To prosper in the coming years, companies will need to reassess current strategies and approaches related to talent management, total rewards and health benefits in light of the market-driven equilibrium emerging from U.S. health reform. This new equilibrium will be shaped by demographic and employment dynamics, U.S. tax policy, continued globalization and new challenges and opportunities in the health care system. Each company's assessment of the most beneficial balance will reflect its unique business dynamics, industry challenges, geography and size. While in some ways companies' approaches will build on the lessons learned and successes over the past few decades, they will also leverage the new opportunities presented in a postreform world.     

Together and Apart: Exploring Structure of the Corporate–NPO Relationship

Financially significant relationships between corporations and non-profit organizations (NPOs) have increased in recent years. NPOs offer access to interests and ideologies that are lacking within most for-profit organizations. These partnerships form a unique bridge between for-profit and non-profit goals and offer significant potential to produce innovative ways of “doing business by doing good.” Exploration of the structural implications of these relationships, however, has been limited. The potential for ideological imbalance in these relationships, particularly for the NPO, has been poorly described. We explore the structure of Corporate–NPO relationships from the NPO's perspective under high pressure conditions such as large relational investments or negative pressure from stakeholders. Using data collected from 20 NPOs in Australia, we identified the use by NPOs of both formal and informal governance mechanisms within their partnerships. These mechanisms acted to align and defend important goals of the NPO. They allowed the NPO and their corporate partners to be simultaneously “together and apart.” Our study offers important insight toward the study of cross-sector relationships and the role of governance mechanisms.     

The Effects of Exposure to Practice Risk on Tax Professionals' Judgements and Recommendations*

Tax professionals are responsible for objectively evaluating tax authorities and evidence relevant to their application and for serving as client advocates. We predict that practice risk — that is, exposure to monetary and nonmonetary costs of making inappropriate recommendations — will affect tax professionals' ability to meet these responsibilities by influencing the manner in which they process information about a tax situation as well as their resulting recommendations for clients. We conduct an experiment in which we manipulate practice risk through client characteristics. We also manipulate provision and nature of outcome information. We find that tax professionals process information differently for clients of different risk levels. Specifically, tax professionals weight negative outcome information more heavily when forming likelihood assessments underlying recommendations for a high‐risk client, relative to a low‐risk client. Further, risk directly affects recommendations in that tax professionals more strongly recommend an aggressive position for a low‐risk client. Differential processing of information for clients with identical transactions but different risk levels may protect the tax professional from the higher expected costs of making inappropriate recommendations to high‐risk clients. However, it indicates that tax professionals do not evaluate evidence objectively for all types of clients.     

(Re)figuring accounting and maternal bodies: The gendered embodiment of accounting professionals

This paper examines the relationship between the body and the self for women accounting professionals. It explores how they come to embody the identity of accountant and what happens when forms of organizational and professional embodiment coincide with other forms of gendered embodied self, such as that experienced during pregnancy and in early motherhood. These forms of embodiment can be seen simultaneously both as a mechanism of social control, and as a form of self-expression and empowerment for women.     

Process versus product: which determines consumer demand for genetically modified apples?*

One debate in the literature regarding consumers' reactions to genetically modified food (GMF) centres on whether consumers react to the process of gene technology or to the specific GMF products. Results from a choice experiment survey in New Zealand indicate that consumers are heterogeneous with regard to GMF and that some modifications are viewed more positively than others. These findings suggest that for some consumers the process of gene technology is the decisive factor in evaluating GMF, while for others the different potential GMF products are valued according to their enhanced attributes.     

Getting the picture: programme awareness amongst film festival customers

• This study explores how film festival customers become aware of a festival programme compared to general release films. The purpose of this research is to understand the decision-making process in the context of cultural offerings consumption, and the role that customer relationship marketing (CRM) plays. An in-depth interview was conducted with the marketing manager of the festival and three focus groups were conducted amongst infrequent, mid-range and frequent attendees. Findings show that customers value and desire direct communication and that as attendance frequency increases the range of information sources used decreases. The implications for CRM are that greater use should be made of virtual and physical direct communication and that there are opportunities for targeting communications.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Experiences of Presence as a Key Factor Toward Sustainability Leadership

In the current article, we describe how individual experiences of presence may be a key factor in giving birth to the kind of leadership that enables deep sustainability. The empirical data come from two studies of the same theme: (a) an international action research project about Waking Up Moments at Work and (b) a Finnish phenomenographical study about experiences of presence. Both studies address the generative qualities of waking up or presence, suggest the value of such experiences as catalysts for inner shifts in human consciousness, and begin to explore how this may be a core component of developing leaders' potential for contributing to sustainability.     

An Extreme Value Analysis Of Advanced Age Mortality Data

Abstract

Extreme value theory describes the behavior of random variables at extremely high or low levels. The application of extreme value theory to statistics allows us to fit models to data from the upper tail of a distribution. This paper presents a statistical analysis of advanced age mortality data, using extreme value models to quantify the upper tail of the distribution of human life spans.

Our analysis focuses on mortality data from two sources. Statistics Canada publishes the annual number of deaths in Canada, broken down by angender and age. We use the deaths data from 1949 to 1997 in our analysis. The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare also publishes detailed annual mortality data, including the 10 oldest reported ages at death in each year. We analyze the Japanese data over the period from 1980 to 2000.

Using the r-largest and peaks-over-threshold approaches to extreme value modeling, we fit generalized extreme value and generalized Pareto distributions to the life span data. Changes in distribution by birth cohort or over time are modeled through the use of covariates. We then evaluate the appropriateness of the fitted models and discuss reasons for their shortcomings. Finally, we use our findings to address the existence of a finite upper bound on the life span distribution and the behavior of the force of mortality at advanced ages.