The costs of job redesign: a preliminary analysis

John Kelly examines and rejects the claim that job redesign satisfies the mutual interests of workers and employers through its provision of improved job satisfaction and performance. He investigates the costs to the parties involved which have been almost invariably neglected.     

James M. Buchanan and the Political Economy of Desegregation

Were 1986 Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan's formative contributions to political economy inspired in significant part by hostility to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision? Nancy MacLean's 2017 Democracy in Chains argues that public choice economics emerged from an opportunistic alliance with Virginia's “Massive Resistance” to school integration and should thus be situated within the racially tinged tradition of southern conservatism. While Buchanan wrote very little on the economics of race, archival evidence and his published works do not support this thesis. Buchanan's work is better understood with reference to his Chicago school mentor Frank Knight and the Italian public finance tradition rather than southern conservatism. To the contrary, we suggest Buchanan believed the competitive processes generated by an educational voucher system would likely undermine rather than rescue the racially segregated status quo. Furthermore, Buchanan's associations and activities suggest that racial hierarchy was not part of his normative vision.     

Consumer boycotts: The impact of the Iraq war on French wine sales in the U.S.

The French opposition to the war in Iraq in early 2003 prompted calls for a boycott of French wine in the US. We measure the magnitude of consumers’ participation in the boycott, and look at basic evidence of who participates. Conservative estimates indicate that the boycott resulted in 26% lower weekly sales at its peak, and 13% lower sales over the 6 months period that we estimate the boycott lasted. Although theory suggests consumers would not participate in boycotts due to a free-rider problem, these findings indicate that businesses should be concerned that consumers may boycott their products. We also find that neither political preferences nor media attention are important determinants of boycott participation.

The national healthcare crisis: Is eHealth a key solution?

Healthcare, the largest industry in the United States, is in crisis, and threatens to bankrupt the nation's economy. Medical errors kill an estimated 98,000 people per year, and accessibility to adequate healthcare is an increasing problem for much of the country's citizenry. Despite being one of the most important keys to resolving this crisis, a national electronic healthcare network (eHealth) is under-appreciated and under-exploited, and faces several formidable barriers to implementation. Current and prospective national political leadership has focused narrowly on a subset of issues, in the belief that the crisis cannot be addressed holistically due to political interests. Yet the barriers that greatly impede eHealth's potential to help solve the crisis can only be removed in a timely manner by a comprehensive, national framework that reshapes the legal, operational, and economic landscape for eHealth. Only a greater public awareness that encourages national legislative action can enhance eHealth's potential to improve the quality and accessibility of healthcare while reducing its cost.     

Code of Ethics: A Stratified Vehicle for Compliance

When a business owner approaches a bank for a loan for their business they might hope that a well-established bureaucratic procedure would ensure that their application was processed with stipulated rules and impersonal criteria. They might expect that two bank officials, evaluating the same proposal for a loan, would reach the same decision. However, research shows that both quantifiable data and “gut feelings” are used in the decision. In this research, analysis of interviews with senior managers, and both individual and focus group interviews with bank loan officers, reveals that there are no set criteria or stipulated rules. The interviews demonstrate how and why nonquantifiable data is used, and why different bank officials can reach different conclusions on the same loan proposal. While these bank loan officers do not appear to be discriminatory against female business owners, the lending criteria and process allows significant room for discrimination. It appears questionable whether bank lending is seen as an ethical and fair process.     

Agency Theory and Japanese Corporate Governance

Agency theory has been used to predict managerial strategic behavior in the past. However, critics have commented that this theory, in its applications, has been too Anglo-American specific. Research in non-Anglo-American settings has been scarce. Recent changes in the Japan Commercial Code and moves by Japanese corporations to access global equity markets allow us to test the veracity of this criticism by examining how Japanese firms respond strategically to the increased requirement for disclosure and transparency; whether they behave in ways congruent with agency theory predictions. Agency theory states that managers who are held accountable for their use of corporate resources will deploy them in ways to enhance stockholder value rather than increase their shares of the economic residual. Thus, we would expect to observe a difference in Japanese managerial behavior accompanying an increased exposure to global capital markets. Using data from Japanese firms, we found some support for the usefulness of agency theory to non-Anglo-American settings when the rules of capital market discipline are allowed to operate.     

The winding paths of peripheral proletarianization: Local labour,world hegemonies,and crisis in rural Colombia

This paper analyses the spatial and temporal patterning of Colombia's rural coffee, banana, and coca‐producing labour regimes. The violent labour repression and endemic crises of labour control characterizing these regimes challenge the market despotism paradigm that predominates in scholarly analysis of 21st century labour and agrarian struggles. Instead, I draw from early and later writings of Giovanni Arrighi and his collaborators to develop a new labour regime framework that is sensitive to the experiences of capitalist development in “hostile environments” (i.e., peripheral market conditions) and “hostile times” (periods of world hegemonic decline). In doing so, I highlight the deep social contradictions—crises, violence, and labour militancy—that result from processes of peripheral proletarianization and the ways that these contradictions were mitigated and/or exacerbated by the rise of U.S. global hegemony, Colombian developmental policy, and local agrarian struggle.     

Exploring sources of value destruction in international acquisitions: A synthesized theoretical lens

By synthesizing two complementary theoretical perspectives ? resource dependence theory (RDT) and the resource-based view (RBV) ? this study explores why acquirers destroy the acquisition value in international acquisitions in high-technology industries. Using a multiple case study approach, we develop a two by three matrix to present the sources of value destruction from two dimensions: environment dynamics and strategic resources, which are drawn from the RDT and RBV, respectively. Our study contributes to the acquisition literature in three respects. First, it answers the call to integrate several theoretical perspectives to examine sources of value destruction, particularly in international acquisitions. Second, it attempts to unlock the black box of why value destruction exists in post-acquisition integration. Third, it advances understanding of the basis of value destruction in terms of non-financial measures.     

Obedience and Evil: From Milgram and Kampuchea to Normal Organizations

Obedience: a simple term. Stanley Milgram, the famous experimental social psychologist, shocked the world with theory about it. Another man, Pol Pot, the infamous leader of the Khmer Rouge, showed how far the desire for obedience could go in human societies. Milgram conducted his experiments in the controlled environment of the US psychology laboratory of the 1960s. Pol Pot experimented with Utopia in the totalitarian Kampuchea of the 1970s. In this article, we discuss the process through which the Khmer Rouge regime created an army of unquestioningly obedient soldiers – including child soldiers. Based on these two cases, we advance a framework on how obedience can be grown or countered.     

Macroeconomic shocks, unionized labour markets and central bank disclosure policy: How beneficial is increased transparency?

The paper investigates the implications of disclosure by the central bank to the private sector of information relating to the current realizations of macroeconomic disturbances. In the context of an economy in which the goods market is monopolistically competitive and where wages are set by atomistic unions, we find that greater precision of information provided to wage setters in respect of supply shocks has ambiguous welfare effects, both from the perspective of the social loss function and from the viewpoint of unions who act on the information. An important feature of the model is an externality in union wage setting which implies the outcome of the wage determination process is collectively inefficient.