Corporate Ethics in Norwegian Business and Industry

How can a confederation of business and industry influence companies and make them more aware of ethical issues? This article examines the work of Norwegian Business and Industry (NHO), and the results it has achieved. The author is Assistant Director of NHO, P.b. 5250, Majorstua, 0303 Oslo, and she has been responsible for its business ethics programme for the past three years. This article comes to us through the agency of our Associate Editor for Norway, Dr Heidi von Weltzien Høivik, of the Norwegian School of Management, who has recently been instrumental in founding a Norwegian Centre for Business Ethics.     

Identifying development blocks—a new methodology

The paper specifies a quantitative methodology for exploring development blocks. The concept of ‘development block’ was a major contribution to the historical analysis of industrial transformation by the late Erik Dahmén, but development blocks have mainly been analyzed by qualitative methods and indirect indicators and not statistically identified. In this paper, development blocks are identified by means of a combination of co-integration analysis and Granger causality. Using these techniques, we are able to identify two partially overlapping development blocks in the Swedish economy, formed around the electricity generating sector: one with metal, metal goods, machinery and railways; and another with pulp and paper, chemicals, and machinery.

Performance Payments for Groups: The Case of Carnivore Conservation in Northern Sweden

This paper presents a first empirical assessment of carnivore conservation under a performance payment scheme. In Sweden, reindeer herder villages are paid based on the number of lynx (lynx lynx) and wolverine (gulo gulo) offspring certified on their pastures. The villages decide on the internal payment distribution. It is generally assumed that benefit distribution rules are exogenous. We investigate them as an endogenous decision. The data reveals that villages’ group size has a direct negative effect on conservation outcomes and an indirect positive effect which impacts conservation outcomes through the benefit distribution rule. This result revises the collective action hypothesis on purely negative effects of group size.     

Beating the advertising drum for the employer: How legal context translates into good HRM practice

The legal context is constitutive for the legitimacy of HRM practices. In this paper, we use an institutional work approach to investigate how a legal mandate requiring employers to state the minimum pay in job advertisements in Austria was translated into a legitimate HRM practice over time. In this process, HR practitioners translated the law into an HRM practice going well beyond the legal requirements. In contrast to merely constraining HRM practice, we find HR practitioners actively engaging with the legal context. In the discursive struggle over a legitimate translation of the law into practice, actors speaking ‘for HRM’ were mostly HRM consultants and service providers building on an individualist and unitarist frame of reference for employment relations. Our findings contribute to a contextualized understanding of HRM practices by considering the interaction of HR practitioners and legal context.     

The disabling effects of enabling social policies on organisations’ human capital development practices for women

Paid parental leave and externally provided childcare are social policies designed to enhance parents' labour force participation. These policies influence not only men's and women's decisions regarding their labour market activity but also organisational decision makers' (ODMs) expectations about their employees' availability to work and thus, their willingness to invest in their employees' human capital. Using a sample of over 13,000 individuals from 19 countries, we investigate the interaction between gender and social policies on human capital development practices. In line with statistical discrimination theory, which suggests that ODMs hold different expectations about female and male productivity, we find that paid parental leave and externally provided childcare are negatively associated with the provision of human capital development for women but not for men.     

The ethical implications of collecting data in educational settings: discussion on the technology and engineering attitude scale (TEAS) and its psychometric validation for assessing a pre-engineering design program

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - K-12 Engineering Education has placed a lot of attention on students’ attitudes or predispositions towards science and technology....