Moving toward crisis preparedness: Factors that motivate organizations

This article proposes that factors such as the experience of a crisis, new members on the top management team, regulation, expectations of the industry association, and the potential threat of media scrutiny motivate organizations to make changes in their crisis preparation practices and move toward greater preparedness. It describes how each of these factors motivate organizations to make changes, and explains specific characteristics that are critical in creating fundamental versus superficial changes.     

Are your employees minding their behavior?

Self-managed, "tailored" behavioral change programs cross both wellness and disease management issues and can impact the bottom line on health care costs of both employer and employee. For example, a back pain program can help change employee behavior to prevent the incidence and upflow of a condition to more severe and debilitating situations.     

Increasing Charitable Giving: What Can We Learn from Economics?*

There is growing policy interest in charitable giving in the UK. As part of its Big Society agenda, the current government is keen to encourage a higher level of donations, highlighting new technologies, new social norms and tax incentives as potential mechanisms for raising giving. In the 2012 Budget, however, the Chancellor also proposed limiting tax relief on donations to £50,000, sparking an intense discussion about the effectiveness and desirability of tax incentives for major donors. This paper brings together recent evidence relevant to the ongoing policy debates.     

Correlates of Drug Testing Attitudes in a Sample of Blue Collar Workers

Using responses from 1429 workers employed in the wood products industry, we examine the relationship between drug testing (DT) attitudes and several demographic, organizational, job attitude, and job outcome variables. After controlling for age and marital status, analyses revealed moderate correlations between DT attitudes and alcohol and drug variables, DT program characteristics, organizational, and work attitude variables. DT attitudes were weakly but significantly related to absences, late work arrivals, accidents, and injuries. Implications of the findings and future research suggestions are discussed.     

Property rights as a complex adaptive system: how entrepreneurship transforms intellectual property structures

This article aims to provide some elements of an evolutionary theory of property rights. It applies a systems-based capital-theoretic perspective to explain the formation and transformation of property rights structures. The approach emphasizes how entrepreneurs create capital combinations by connecting capital goods—defined widely to include property rights, such as patents—in their production plans. Their actions change complementarity relations between property rights as used in production. We treat the property rights structure as a complex adaptive system that exhibits increasing structural complexity as it evolves. Entrepreneurs discover gaps in the property rights system. As they organize production to exploit profit opportunities, entrepreneurs regroup existing intellectual property rights (IPR) into new modules, such as patent pools, that encapsulate more complex combinations of basic building blocks of intellectual property. A patent pool constitutes an interpolation of a new meso level within the macro IPR structure. We apply our framework to the first of the patent pools for digital video compression technology used in digital television and DVDs.     

Nile perch and the hungry of Lake Victoria: Gender,status and food in an East African fishery

Lake Victoria supports Africa’s largest inland fishery, and its most valuable product is the Nile perch, much of which is exported. This has given rise to arguments claiming a direct linear relationship between perch exports and disturbingly high rates of malnutrition along the lake’s shores. In this paper, we argue that this argument is seriously flawed for it is unable to explain how it is that the income from the Nile perch fishery fails to translate into a well-fed riparian population. We draw on field work carried out in 2001 that (a) set out to establish exactly how much malnutrition there was on the lake’s shores; and (b) sought to identify what happened to the income the fishery generates. We argue that because men control much of the fishery, and women are held responsible for the upkeep of their families, little of this income makes its way back into the households of the region, giving rise to the levels of malnutrition we observed.     

The Relationship Between Corporate Social Performance, and Organizational Size, Financial Performance, and Environmental Performance: An Empirical Examination

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the corporate social performance of an organization and three variables: the size of the organization, the financial performance of the organization, and the environmental performance of the organization. By empirically testing data from 1987 to 1992, the results of the study show that a firm's corporate social performance is indeed impacted by the size of the firm, the level of profitability of the firm, and the amount of pollution emissions released by the firm.     

Recognising Uniqueness in the Technology Key Learning Area: The Search for Meaning

The purpose of this study was to investigate areas of significance which were related to the understanding of technology and technology education, identified by teachers introducing the key learning area, technology, into their primary school classrooms for the first time. Working from Australia's national document on technology education, A Statement on Technology for Australian Schools (Curriculum Corporation, 1994), two teachers wrestled with how to fit this new curriculum area into their current classroom programs, their understandings of technology as a phenomenon and with their beliefs about teaching and learning in general. The study showed that the teachers made sense of technology education as it related to, from their perspectives, ideas about and aspects of primary school classrooms with which they felt comfortable. Implications for professional development include the need to acknowledge and value the prior experiences and understandings of primary teachers. The challenge for teachers in implementing technology education is gaining a conceptualisation of the learning area, which in some respects, is very like other more familiar learning areas in the primary curriculum, but in many other respects, unique.