Commonality in Codes of Ethics

We create a database of company codes of ethics from firms listed on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and, separately, a sample of small firms. The SEC believes that “ethics codes do, and should, vary from company to company.” Using textual analysis techniques, we measure the extent of commonality across the documents. We find substantial levels of common sentences used by the firms, including a few cases where the codes of ethics are essentially identical. We consider these results in the context of legal statements versus value statements. While legal writing often mandates duplication, we argue that value-based statements should be held to a higher standard of originality. Our evidence is consistent with isomorphic pressures on smaller firms to conform.     

Caterpillar’s Interactions with Piracicaba,Brazil: A Community-based Analysis of CSR

This study examines how Caterpillar Brasil Limitada, located in the city of Piracicaba, Brazil, expanded its concept of social responsibility over a 30-year period. It first provides a contextual overview of Piracicaba within the agro-industrialized interior region of São Paulo State. It then traces the history of the firm from its initial installation in the city. While Caterpillar maintained a distant relationship with the Piracicaba community for many years, it later realized the importance of becoming involved in city development. The community-based effort led by Caterpillar to elaborate and carry out a sustainable development plan for the city is a notable example of how a firm can encourage civil participation and offer strategic planning know-how to civil-society organizations. Finally, the study analyses some of the problems Caterpillar encountered and stresses the importance of developing open democratic channels and continued civil participation in joint partnerships between business and civil society.     

An investigation of the impact of internal labour markets in the hotel industry

Maintaining a stable and competitive workforce is a key element of the role of management, and there has emerged a barrage of ‘recipes’ to achieve this. All too frequently, however, these new concepts replace the old, with little justification other than being innovative. This article investigates the concept of an internal labour market [ILM] as a strategic management tool. Past studies by labour market researchers have confirmed the value of the components of an ILM, yet none has investigated the concept of an ILM as a coherent whole. This paper investigates the impact of the components of an ILM – training, promotional opportunity and job security – on the key employee attitudes of job satisfaction, organisational commitment and employee intention to leave. It then examines the impact of this concept as a single variable on the employee attitudes. The study is conducted in the service industry, in particular, the hotel sector, and examines the responses of 297 non-supervisory hotel employees. The findings suggest that the use of a holistic ILM strategy could provide a new means for management to retain and develop a stable and satisfied workforce.     

Social Capital Initiatives: Employees and Communication Managers Leading the Way?

Organizations’ development of social capital and their decision to give back to society are becoming increasingly important to the business of managing organizations as much more than profit-driven entities. This article focuses on the rationale for an Australian–Canadian study on employees’ involvement in social capital initiatives and the communication management of these initiatives. As employees are key stakeholders, they play a vital part in achieving organizational goals. This study, a work in progress, highlights an in-depth, qualitative analysis of two organizations—one in Canada and one in Australia—committed to funding community projects as part of their corporate social responsibility development and commitment. The importance of a qualitative study that focuses on subjective components of social capital is that it develops understanding of employees’ attitudes, feelings, and viewpoints. It also begins to investigate why employees might/might not be committed, to organizations’ social capital initiatives. Using an interpretative analysis lens, an understanding of the moral, relational, and communication dynamics is explored. Questions surrounding concepts such as the moral fiber of social capital are highlighted and critiqued in the context of community engagement and what organizations’ social capital investments mean as part of their responsibility to society.     

Managing Organizational Change in Higher Education: Lessons From the University of Botswana

ABSTRACT

Utilizing data collected from a randomly selected sample of 360 academic and managerial staff, regression analysis was performed to identify the determinants of acceptance of change among employees at the University of Botswana. The results showed moderate levels of employee acceptance of innovations and revealed that, of the four categories of substantive factors analyzed, managerial features were the most important determinants of acceptance of organizational change. It was concluded that management action is needed to boost the levels of acceptance of change and that a more participative approach to the management of the change process is necessary to guarantee the involvement of all stakeholders from the decision-making to the implementation and administration stages of the process.     

Relationship, Contribution, and Resource Constrains: Determinants of Distributive Justice in Individual Preferences and Negotiated Agreements

This laboratory study investigated the impact of relationship, relative levels of perceived contribution, and resource constraints on individuals' allocation preferences and dyads' negotiated allocations. Dyads of female undergraduates – either strangers or roommates – were given performance feedback that one member produced the majority of the resources available to the dyad; the members of the dyad faced relatively scarce or abundant resources. Subjects indicated their individual allocation preferences and then negotiated the distribution of resources as a pair. Results indicate that all three factors are important predictors of the norms of distributive justice met by the individually preferred and dyadically negotiated allocations. Results also suggest that the degree of agreement between the norms implied by individually preferred allocations and dyadic agreements affect strangers' satisfaction with outcomes to a greater extent than roommates'.     

Supporters’ Perceptions of Benefits Delivered by Different Charity Activities

Donating time and money are traditional ways individuals support charities. Other support activities include buying charity products, attending events, or sponsoring others. The proliferation of activities means that charity marketers often face difficult decisions when designing a portfolio of support-generating activities. This research draws on the social exchange theory to examine 11 charity-support activities from the supporter’s perspective. Drawing on Australian data from a survey of 248 supporters of a wide range of charities, we use correspondence analysis to map each activity against four benefit dimensions (material, social, expressive, and personal commitment). We quantify overall supporter perceptions of benefits delivered by engaging in each activity and use multinomial logistic regression to identify how past experience can shape perceptions of activities. We discuss academic and managerial implications, including whether or not specific attributes are more useful to recruit or to retain supporters.     

“Economic Policies Are the Best Social Policies”: West German Neoliberalism and the Housing Question After 1945

This article challenges the widespread view that neoliberalism had become hegemonic in the late 20^th century by zooming into a less well‐known variant of neoliberalism, German ordoliberalism, whose political ascendency dates back to the 1940s and 1950s. Through the lens of post‐WWII housing policies—a central field of political intervention after 1945—this article focuses on the remaking of social policies as neoliberal policies in West Germany, a remake that rendered the market economy a key source of political legitimacy of the newly emerging, liberal democracy.     

Static profitability as a measure of deviations from the competitive norm

Recently, several industrial-organization economists have claimed that the rate of return on sales (II/S) is superior to the rate or return on assets (II/K) as a measure of monopoly power. This paper argues that there is no reason to prefer one index over the other. To make the point, an oligopoly model of optimizing agents is derived that yields II/K as a performance measure. The derivation leads to natural interpretations of the two indices and therefore to clarification of the circumstances under which each might be preferred.     

The impact of employment equity regulations on psychological contracts in South Africa

This article will show the impact of employment equity legislation on the psychological employment contracts of the three main employee groupings in South African society. This study is important in that it fills the gap in the literature that identifies labour market regulations as an important shaping influence on the psychological contract. More than 500 managers from across South African industry and from all ethnic groups were surveyed to identify differences in psychological contracts and attitudes towards the social transformation regulations. We found that the legislation has impacted differentially on the three groupings mainly in terms of their loyalty to stay with their organizations, the focus on their career development in terms of the external labour market and the degree to which they felt they had been affected by the legislation. Additionally we find that the perceived linkage between job satisfaction and labour turnover is significantly weakened by labour market legislation in the case of the beneficiaries of the legislation, but that this may not be the case for those negatively affected by the legislation. The findings have significant implications for the HRM practices of multinationals operating in societies with significant labour market regulatory interventions.