Reasoning about Responsibilities: Mining Company Managers on What Stakeholders are Owed

Stakeholder theories propose that managers are responsible not only for maximizing shareholder value, but also for taking into account the well being of other parties affected by corporate decisions. While the language of stakeholder theory has been taken up in industries like mining, controversy remains. Disagreements arise not only about the apportionment of costs and benefits among stakeholders, but about who counts as a stakeholder and about how "costs" and "benefits" are to be conceived. This paper investigates these questions empirically by examining how managers in one mining company talk about corporate responsibilities and by analysing the explicit and implicit values systems and moral logics which inform this talk. The investigations discovered that while some claims by stakeholder groups were readily accommodated by managers, others were not. Analysis of the value frameworks employed by the mangers confirms the views of leading stakeholder theorists that stakeholder theory is grounded in the realities of management practice and behaviour.     

Infrastructure Disruption in ‘Silicon Savannah’: Exploring the Idea of the Creative Class and their Relation to Quality of Place in Nairobi,Kenya

Debates around urbanization, infrastructure disruption and the creative class rarely appear alongside each other in research on African cities. This article connects these different narratives, which are currently exerting their influence on the future direction of these cities. The economic value of the creative class is that their work centres on innovation—a quality seen as essential to ‘new-economy’ urban growth. Quality of place (that which makes ‘New York New York’) is said to attract the creative class to certain cities, as lifestyle amenities are valued as much as employment opportunities. Nairobi is an example of an African city currently attracting both Kenyan and expatriate creative class workers, particularly in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector. In this article we take Richard Florida's creative class theory as a departure point to offer insights into why this group chooses to live in Nairobi and to describe Nairobi's quality of place, with a particular focus on infrastructure disruption. The case study reveals that Nairobi's quality of place differs fundamentally from the normative attributes prescribed by creative class theory and, in some instances, it is considered to be highly frustrating and unattractive.     

Downsizing and the hyper-effective manager: The shifting importance of managerial roles during organizational transformation

This article describes how managerial roles change in importance during periods of significant organizational transition. An interdisciplinary approach reveals that (1) the competing values framework is a useful framework for examining this question; (2) the transformational roles increase as expected during downsizing; (3) three of four transactional roles also increase during downsizing. This last counterintuitive finding is illuminated by the interdisciplinary model developed. Overall, managers show significant evidence of hyper-effectivity—a state of high performance that is likely to be unsustainable in the long term. Implications for human resource practitioners and researchers are discussed. © 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Charity brands: A qualitative study of current practice

A number of fundraising managers and directors of UK charities were interviewed with the objective of understanding to what extent branding was used in the sector, what development possibilities exist for commercial techniques in charities, and what the constraints may be on such practices. It was found that many charities already use day-to-day brand techniques, (without describing them as ‘branding’), but brand development work was scarce. Charities have a number of objectives competing with fundraising when considering their brand content. They must also satisfy the need to respect issues about how the cause itself is communicated, and possible needs to re-educate the donor community or the public. One commercial practice in particular could be developed further in charity branding: this is the idea of using the personality of the charity itself as something with which donors could associate positively.     

The role of miniatures in computable general equilibrium modelling : Experience from ORANI

ORANI is a large general equilibrium model of the Australian economy used by policy analysts and university research workers. This paper describes the role of miniature models in the development and application of ORANI. Miniature versions of ORANI have been useful in (a) explaining results; (b) detecting errors; (c) conducting sensitivity analyses; (d) experimenting with new specifications; and (e) teaching. The present paper concentrates mainly on (a) and (b). A miniature model is developed to explain ORANI results for the effects of increases in protection, reductions in the real costs of labour, increases in oil prices and increases in real aggregate demand.     

International merger activity and the national regulation of mergers: A UK perspective

This paper traces out recent changes in the globalisation of merger activity and considers its implications for national and international regulation of mergers and joint ventures. It argues that a large proportion of mergers involve small firms which may have an important effect on the competitive process and that regulation of large mergers should be complemented by industrial and financial policies to encourage the growth of smaller independent firms.     

Anticipating the future high-tech competitiveness of nations: Indicators for twenty-eight countries

This article presents some of the major results obtained during the third phase of a continuing research effort to develop and implement national indicators of competitiveness in high technology industries. The first phase, begun in 1987, developed a conceptual model of the processes by which industrializing nations gain access to external technology and technical information, absorb that technology/information effectively, and institutionalize a science-based development and manufacturing capability leading to export-led growth in high technology products. Four “input” or leading indicators of a nation's future capacity (15-year time horizons) to compete in international markets in high technology products were developed, as were three “output” indicators of a nation's current international competitiveness. During this first phase, the seven indicators were applied to data for twenty countries representing a range of regions and extent of industrialization. The second phase used 1990 data on an expanded set of countries to examine in detail the indicators' reliability and validity. The third phase of indicators work (1992–1995): (1) developed seven indicators whose definitions were recommended in our 1991 final report to the Science Indicators Unit of the National Science Foundation, and (2) collected the necessary data (1993) and applied them to generate a set of indicators for 28 countries using these recommended formulations.This article focuses on the input indicators for the 28 countries and compares these 1993 results with those from 1990. We discuss the implications of these results for technology-based development theory and for development policy. A separate, companion article published elsewhere presents the output indicator results.     

The gender gap in early-career wage growth

In the UK the gender pay gap on entry to the labour market is approximately zero but ten years after labour market entry, there is a gender wage gap of almost 25 log points. This article explores the reason for this gender gap in early-career wage growth, considering three main hypotheses – human capital, job-shopping and 'psychological' theories. Human capital factors can explain about 11 log points, job-shopping about 1.5 log points and the psychological theories up to 4.5 log points depending on the specification. But a substantial unexplained gap remains: women who have continuous full-time employment, have had no children and express no desire to have them earn about 8 log points less than equivalent men after 10 years in the labour market.     

State-dependent preferences can explain the equity premium puzzle

We introduce state-dependent recursive preferences into the Mehra–Prescott economy. We show that such preferences can match the historical first two moments of the returns on equity and the risk-free rate. Other authors have reported similar results using state-dependent expected utility preferences. These authors have tended to emphasize the importance of countercyclical risk aversion in explaining the equity premium puzzle. We find that countercyclical risk aversion plays an important role but only when combined with modest cyclical variation in intertemporal substitution.     

Evaluating international financial integration under leverage constraints

The global financial crisis has undermined many economists' views about the benefits of open financial markets. Anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that financial linkages may propagate shocks during crises. This paper develops a simple two-country model in which financial liberalisation across countries takes place in the presence of credit market distortions within countries. Countries may be subject to macro risk coming from productivity shocks and direct shocks to the credit system (‘financial shocks’). Three different degrees of financial linkages between countries are examined. It is shown that the type of financial integration is critical for both macroeconomic outcomes and welfare. In particular, financial integration in bond markets alone may increase aggregate consumption volatility and reduce welfare. Financial integration in both bond and equity markets generates high positive co-movement across countries, but is welfare-improving.