Temporariness made interminable: Pacific Islander farmworkers in Australia and the enduring crises of global agricultural production

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) workers in south-east Australia, I reflect in this paper on the experience of interminable temporariness and on its implications for the structural conditions underpinning contemporary horticultural labour in Australia. Although in many ways reflective of the specificities of a unique historical moment, the interminable temporariness experienced through the COVID-19 pandemic also speaks to broader, enduring conditions produced within contemporary Australian agriculture. Here, the restructuring of the agri-industry produces for many what Lauren Berlant describes as the “impasse” or “crisis ordinariness” of life under neoliberalism. At the same time, logics of development—including racialized imaginaries and border regimes—articulate with agricultural guest worker schemes in ways that seek to fix whole populations and regions in relations of suspended hope. In this context, I argue, the pandemic exposed and intensified structural vulnerabilities and unequal distributions of risk, which are encoded in the political economy of farm work in Australia, while also cleaving open new, if tentative, possibilities for agency and solidarity.     

A Crisis Transmission Channel for Reserve Currency Countries: A Cautionary Tale

World financial markets have been in turmoil as investors grapple with the possibility that Greece and perhaps Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Spain will default on their debts. The 2011 downgrade of the S&P outlook for US debt to “negative” suggests that there may eventually be concerns that the US will go the way of Europe. The paper studies possible transmission effects of a crisis for reserve-currency debt which may occur via central bank holdings of reserve-currency debt.     

The participatory approach: Contradiction and co-option in Burkina Faso

“Participation” has become overwhelmingly popular in recent years without sufficient attention paid to its ambiguities. This paper critically examines participatory development, first by presenting an overview of types and degrees of participation and then through the analysis of a case study of a non-formal education project in Burkina Faso. The intention is to articulate the difficulties in implementing the “genuine” participation which is espoused at academic and policy levels by presenting a case in which different stakeholders employ participation to their advantage and the realities of the field act as barriers to participatory development.     

Incentives and Female Entrepreneurial Activity: Evidence from Panel Firm Level Data

The goal of this paper is to investigate entrepreneurial activity and to analyze the incentives of female participation in the labor market. Female entrepreneurial activity is closely related to social and economic issues. They represent a driving force, active and effective members of economic, political, professional and managerial societies. On the other hand, they have families with serious maternal responsibilities and inelastic household obligations, roles which they are trying to balance effectively. To that reason, specific actions and carefully designed measures are essential in encouraging and promoting them to engage into entrepreneurial activity. To investigate the issue of entrepreneurial activity, personal characteristics and various motivation incentives are examined in order to determine the major factors that may influence female entrepreneurial spirit in Greece. Obtaining data from 1600 industrial firms located in the prefecture of Piraeus over the period 1999–2009, this study makes use of the panel methodology approach to provide evidence about the main determinants of female entrepreneurship. What is found is that a combination of pull and push motives and effective mentoring framework, in addition to a set of personal characteristics such as risk of failure, educational level, creativity, innovativeness, ambitiousness and marital status, seem important for the encouragement of women entrepreneurship in Greece to start up a new business. The implications seem very substantial for the formulation and implementation of effective support policies and measures for female entrepreneurs’ vital start up and early stage period.     

Analytics of sovereign debt restructuring

This paper develops a simple theoretical model to analyse recent proposals on restructuring of sovereign bonds. We find that collective action clauses (CACs) inserted in bonds resolve the inefficiencies caused by intra-creditor coordination problems providing that all parties have complete information about each other's preferences. In such a world, statutory mechanisms, such as international bankruptcy courts, are unnecessary. This is no longer the case when the benefits from reaching a restructuring agreement are private information to the debtor and its creditors due to inefficiencies caused by the debtor-creditor bargaining problem.     

Reconciling Rules and Principles: An Ethics-Based Approach to Corporate Governance

In this paper, we consider the nature of recent corporate abuses both in the U.S. and in Europe, and how globalization has had an impact on amplifying their consequences. We discuss the rules-based and principles-based remedies that have been proposed in each region, respectively. With a focus on the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOA), we examine the principles forwarded by this act, and how it addresses those principles with specific rules and governance mechanisms. Invoking Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT), we conclude with a reconciliation of the principles and rules-based approaches to corporate governance as suggested by theory.     

Trajectories of Russian manufacturing firms’ growth after the global financial crisis of 2008–2009: the role of restructuring efforts and regional institutional environment

The aim of this article is to conduct an empirical investigation and reveal which types of modernisation strategies and characteristics of regional institutional environment are likely to be associated with patterns of the performance of Russian manufacturing firms in 2007–2012. In addition to estimating the impact of ex-ante behaviour on the rate of sales growth, we use hierarchical cluster analysis to reveal the typical trajectories of firms’ sales growth. We find that the dynamic of sales for more than 90% of firms can be described by just two types of performance curve: (a) crisis decline with recovery and growth; and (b) crisis decline with weak recovery and stagnation. Firms that invested more prior to the crisis and implemented active restructuring were more likely to have positive post-crisis dynamics of sales. We find evidence that firms in the regions with lower levels of corruption (both administrative and everyday) were more likely to recover successfully after the crisis.     

The cheating culture: A global societal phenomenon

Today's future business leaders are confronted early in their academic careers with history-making events which have a profound impact on the global economic system. These students of business are being exposed to behaviors as they unfold and, as such, are possibly living in an age of the “cheating culture” whereby everybody cheats because everyone else does it. Business students from around the world completed a cheating culture scale as part of a much larger investigation examining college students’ attitudes toward capitalism and business ethics. Findings suggest that the cheating culture is not just a capitalistic phenomenon and that attitudinal differences are driven by gender, country corruption, and socioeconomic environment. Future business leaders worldwide, who are being shaped by news reports of scandal, are also being taught the fundamentals of operating in the business world. Unfortunately, they may be learning to inextricably combine the cheating culture with best business practices.     

Managing culturally diverse buyer-seller relationships: The role of intercultural disposition and adaptive selling in developing intercultural communication competence

Given the increase in cultural diversity within marketing organizations as well as within current and potential customer bases, possessing the appropriate communication skills becomes crucial to success in managing culturally diverse relationships. Although marketing researchers have recognized the importance of adaptive selling behavior for successful buyer-seller relationships, the exploration of the intercultural aspects of these relationships has only recently begun. This article examines how adaptive selling behaviors and intercultural dispositions of marketing executives contribute to their perceived intercultural communication competence. Results show that in addition to being adaptive, the intercultural disposition of a marketer is of key importance in developing intercultural communication competence. Theoretical and practical implications for incorporating intercultural communication into the development of successful buyer-seller relationships are discussed. Victoria D. Bush (Ph.D., University of Memphis) is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Mississippi. Her research has appeared in such journals as theJournal of Advertising, theJournal of Advertising Research, Industrial Marketing Management, theJournal of Public Policy and Marketing, theJournal of Business Ethics, and theJournal of Services Marketing. Her research interests are in diversity, advertising, and ethics. Gregory M. Rose (Ph.D., University of Oregon) is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Mississippi. His research interests include consumer socialization and cross-cultural consumer behavior. He has published or has forthcoming articles in theJournal of Consumer Research, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theJournal of Business Research, theJournal of Consumer Psychology, theJournal of Advertising, theJournal of Marketing, and other journals and proceedings. Faye Gilbert (Ph.D., University of North Texas) is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Mississippi. She has published in theJournal of Business Research, Psychology and Marketing, theJournal of Health Care Marketing, theJournal of Research in Pharmaceutical Economics, theJournal of Applied Business Research, theJournal of Marketing Management, theJournal of Marketing Theory and Practice, and theJournal of Marketing Education, among others. Her work emphasizes the application of consumer behavior theory to health care and to channel relationships. Thomas N. Ingram (Ph.D., Georgia State University) is a professor of marketing at Colorado State University. He has been honored as the Marketing Educator of the Year by Sales and Marketing Executives International (SMEI) and as a recipient of the Mu Kappa Tau National Marketing Honor Society Recognition Award for Outstanding Scholarly Contributions to the Sales Discipline. He has served as the editor of theJournal of Personal Selling and Sales Management and is the current editor of theJournal of Marketing Theory and Practice. His primary research is in personal selling and sales management. His work has appeared in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, and theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, among others. He is the coauthor of three textbooks:Professional Selling: A Trust-Based Approach, Sales Management: Analysis and Decision Making, andMarketing: Principles and Perspectives.     

Can Rich Countries Become Pollution Havens?*

This paper bridges the gap between two‐country Ricardian trade models where differences in environmental policies create pollution havens in a poorer region with weaker pollution regulations, and 2 × 2 Heckscher–Ohlin models that predict under certain conditions that pollution havens may occur in a richer region with tighter regulations. By relaxing the Heckscher–Ohlin assumptions of factor price equalization and no specialization, we show how creation of pollution havens in either region is possible, due to the interplay of policy and factor‐endowment motives. We also analyze the conditions for creating pollution havens in the cases of exogenous and endogenous environmental policy.