Ethics,gratuities, and professionalization of the purchasing function

This study investigated (1) whether potential future purchasing agents were predisposed to accept gratuities or whether the practice of gratuity acceptance is a manifestation of the job itself, (2) whether the existence of a code of ethics forbidding gratuity acceptance curtails the occurrence, and (3) whether disparities in ethics policies between the sales and purchasing functions affect gratuity acceptance. Hypotheses based upon the concepts of organizational concern and institutionalized ethics are developed and empirically tested. Results suggest that future purchasing agents are predisposed to accept gratuities and that formal written ethics policies decrease the acceptance of gratuities. Disparities in ethics policies between the sales and purchasing functions concerning gratuities failed to affect gratuity acceptance significantly.Gregory B. Turner is assistant professor of marketing at Livingston University. He has published inThe International Journal of Logistics Management and theTransportation Journal.G. Stephen Taylor is Associate Professor of management at Mississippi State University. His research interests include ethics in computer usage, performance appraisal, and turnover control.Mark F. Hartley is Assistant Professor and National Association of Purchasing Management/Carolinas-Virginia chair of Purchasing at the College of Charleston. His research interests include ethics and professionalization of the purchasing function.     

Modeling Conditional Yield Densities

Given the increasing interest in agricultural risk, many have sought improved methods to characterize conditional crop-yield densities. While most have postulated the Beta as a flexible alternative to the Normal, others have chosen nonparametric methods. Unfortunately, yield data tends not to be sufficiently abundant to invalidate many reasonable parametric models. This is problematic because conclusions from economic analyses, which require estimated conditional yield densities, tend not to be invariant to the modeling assumption. We propose a semiparametric estimator that, because of its theoretical properties and our simulation results, enables one to empirically proceed with a higher degree of confidence.     

Decentralization and Pay Reform in Central Government: a Study of Three Countries

Over the past decade central governments of the UK, Sweden and Australia have been engaged in significant reforms in the way they pay their employees. These reforms have generally taken the form of the decentralization of pay bargaining and the individualization of pay. This paper details the policies that have been implemented in central government in these countries and presents some preliminary results on the effects of these. While the actual implementation has varied quite substantially across the countries and the analysis of the outcomes must be regarded as preliminary, there is some evidence that the reforms have led to an increase in earnings dispersion.     

RECEIPT OF INFORMATION AND INFLUENCE OVER DECISIONS IN HOSPITALS BY THE BOARD, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER AND MEDICAL STAFF

This article examines relationships between receipt of internal administrative information in hospitals, influence over general management decisions, and the extent to which certain organizational characteristics predict the receipt of information by each of the three major groups in hospitals: the board, the CEO, and the medical staff. Using a US national sample of 287 non-profit community hospitals, CEOs were found to receive the greatest amount of information and had highest influence while medical staffs were lowest on both measures. of five major organizational characteristics, hospital size emerged as the single strongest predictor of receipt of information for both boards (beta =?0.28, p 0.001) and medical staffs (beta =?0.42, p 0.001). Overall, the five dependent variables explained 18 per cent of the variance in receipt of information by boards and 28 percent of the variance for medical staffs.     

AN EXAMINATION OF THE UNDERLYING DYNAMICS OF STRATEGIC DECISIONS SUBJECT TO UPWARD INFLUENCE ACTIVITY

This study examines the underlying dynamics of strategic decisions that are subject to upward influence activity. The results suggest that the strategymaking process deviates considerably from typical rational comprehensive approaches in that strategies are affected by: initial sense-making activity, perceptions of risk and return, and power and negotiation skills. Differences due to functional area of the manager involved in the influence activity are discussed.     

Discriminating Among Alternative Theories of the Multinational Enterprise

Recent theoretical developments have incorporated endogenous multinational firms into the general–equilibrium model of trade. One simple taxonomy separates the theory into "vertical" models, in which firms geographically separate activities by stages of production, and "horizontal" models, in which multiplant firms duplicate roughly the same activities in many countries. The authors nest a horizontal and a vertical model within a hybrid (unrestricted) "knowledge–capital model" and estimate the specifications with data on US foreign direct investment activity. In the nested econometric tests, the data sample cannot distinguish statistically between the unrestricted model and the restricted horizontal model, indicating that the latter captures virtually all of the determinants of FDI. The tests overwhelmingly reject the vertical model.     

Immigration and the Trade of Provinces

A link between immigration, imports, and exports has been found by a number of papers that have used the gravity equation to analyze bilateral trade patterns. We discuss what this research implies about the mechanisms through which immigrants expand trade and identify strengths and weakness of the various approaches. This paper also contributes to this literature by estimating immigrant effects for Canada using cross‐province variation in international trade and immigration patterns. We derive an alternative functional form capturing the relationship between immigration and trade based on the proposition that immigrants use their connections and superior 'market intelligence' to exploit trade opportunities that non‐immigrants do not access. We find that the average new immigrant expands exports to his/her native country by $312 and expands imports by $944.     

Using replication research for just-in-time purchasing construct development

Using replication research, the validity of the just-in-time purchasing (JITP) construct is established. Although empirical researchers have examined JITP over the last two decades, a consistent set of valid, reliable factors has not been used. The lack of valid construct is a barrier to hypotheses testing and meta-analyses on JITP. This study confirmed the validity of six JITP factors: top management commitment, employee relations, training, supplier quality management, transportation, and quantities delivered using two different data sets and testing the first- and second-order structure of the JITP construct. Content validity, reliability, unidimensionality, convergent validity, discriminant validity, criterion-related validity, and an invariant factorial structure of the JITP construct were empirically established.     

The effect of defense program uncertainty on cost,schedule, and capital investment

Program instability, low levels of capital investment and uneconomical production rates have been recognized as significant problems in defense acquisition programs. In this paper, we use a dynamic programming model under uncertainty to investigate the relations among these problems. We show that capital investment and production rates that appear to be too low may be the result of cost minimizing responses by contractors to program instability. Attempts to change the level of capital investment or production rate on defense programs without regard to the nature of program instability may hinder efficient resource allocation.The refereeing process of this paper was handled through J.F. Muth.