Recognizing Business Ethics: Practical and Ethical Challenges in Awarding Prizes for Good Corporate Behaviour

There seems to be a proliferation of prizes and rankings for ethical business over the past decade. Our principal aims in this article are twofold: to initiate an academic discussion of the epistemic and normative stakes in business-ethics competitions; and to help organizers of such competitions to think through some of these issues and the design options for dealing with them. We have been able to find no substantive literature – academic or otherwise – that addresses either of these two broad topics and audiences. Our modest aim, therefore, is to suggest an agenda of issues, and to begin to explore and analyse some of the possible arguments for and against various philosophical or practical solutions. Part I explores the challenges facing a prize-organizing committee, including problems derived from what Rawls calls the “fact of pluralism” in democratic societies (reasonable people will always disagree over some basic values, including those relevant to evaluating business practices), and epistemic issues about how we can justify qualitative judgments on the basis of incomplete quantitative data. We also try to identify risks and opportunity costs for ethics-prize granters. In Part II we spell out (a) a range of design options and (b) some advice about how any particular prize-awarding committee might select among these options to best achieve its goals (which typically involve highlighting and publicizing best practices for ethical business).     

Common stock returns in the pre-WWI Berlin Stock Exchange

We provide new evidence on the efficiency of the Berlin Stock Exchange prior to World War I, when it ranked among the top few markets worldwide by market capitalization. Using a new set of monthly stock price data for a random sample of German companies between 1904 and 1910, we estimate a typical three-factor model and find that returns relate positively to risk (beta), but that book-to-market ratios enter as well (negatively). Firm size and earnings/price ratio relate positively but weakly to returns. The results indicate that the Berlin market did not suffer from unusually large pricing anomalies; thus, its performance was not substantially different from modern markets. Also supporting the conclusion of market efficiency, a momentum portfolio earns returns not different from zero, on average.     

U.S. trade remedy law and agriculture: trade diversion and investigation effects

Abstract .  We study U.S. agricultural antidumping and countervailing duty cases from 1980 to 2005, and gauge the effectiveness of trade remedy law as a form of protection. The purpose is to measure the resulting investigation and trade diversion effects. Previous research on trade in manufactured products has shown that the domestic protection offered by AD and CV duties is largely offset by trade diversion. In contrast, we find that for agriculture, trade diversion is relatively unimportant. So AD and CVD cases are very effective forms of protection for U.S. agriculture.     

Identifying Success Factors for Rapid Growth in SME E-commerce

With high unemployment rates and major companies downsizing, SME policy has started to move centre stage. The small business job-creation thesis can be traced to David Birch, who placed great emphasis on the job generation process of very rapidly growing businesses he termed Gazelles: "In fact most firms don't grow. Gazelles do. And that is only 3% of all small companies." This paper focuses on the baby gazelles of the Internet economy. It looks at critical success factors that fast growing E-commerce ventures need to take into account in the start-up phase. Based on the results of the EU project KITE, the article demonstrates links between critical success factors, and highlights the competitive advantage deriving from the application of a certain critical success factor. It will compare the critical success factors identified for high growth E-commerce ventures in the start-up phase in KITE with research into the success of high growth companies in general.     

Decentralization in the NHS: Prospects for Workplace Unionism

The substantial changes that are taking place in the organization of the UK public sector are transforming traditional patterns of industrial relations based on centralized and institutionalized collective bargaining. Whether the trade unions can successfully respond to this process will be of prime importance for the future development of industrial relations in the public sector. The paper considers recent evidence of the impact of decentralization on union organization in four hospital units. The research findings suggest that there is a growth in union activity as a result of the process of decentralization, but that the effectiveness of unions is likely to vary considerably between hospitals.     

Factors determining UK album success

This article uses a recently compiled dataset on the UK album sales to determine which factors contribute to best-selling album sales success. We control for factors including length of time since release, nationality of artist, artist type and album type, testing the increasing returns to information hypothesis. Information on general public online review scores for the albums in the dataset allows for a strong test of the accuracy of online reviews in predicting music sales, as online reviews are a relatively recent phenomenon, while the release of many of the albums predates the widespread use of Internet.     

Changing Trends in Palestinian Political Activism: The Second Intifada,the Wall Protests,and the Human Rights Turn

This paper asks where and why Palestinian protests take place and how particular manifestations of territorial dislocation affect the dynamics of Palestinian political activism. Political, social and territorial transformations over the Oslo period had resulted in the fragmentation of Palestinian resistance, a development that had become most evident during the second intifada through the absence of mass-based non-violent protest. Israel’s complex control over Palestinian territory and mobility has been a key factor in driving this fragmentation. In contrast to checkpoints, forbidden roads, and closures, the construction of the Separation Wall had a very different impact, and amid the continuation of a violent and fragmented uprising, it presented a focal point for cohesive organised non-violent local protest. This paper examines to what extent the construction of the Wall has engendered a different type of protest, conception of activism and new forms of cooperation, that break the trend of the second intifada.     

The coherence of inconsistencies: Attitude–behaviour gaps and new consumption communities

Abstract

Despite the growing success of well-marketed environmentally friendly products, there remains a gap between consumers' positive attitudes towards green issues and products, and their inconsistent and often conflicting consumption behaviour. Indeed, this is a challenge for social marketers seeking to advance the sustainability agenda. Therefore, this study problematises what has been conceptualised as attitude–behaviour gaps (Boulstridge & Carrigan, 2000 Boulstridge, E. and Carrigan, M. 2000. Do consumers really care about corporate responsibility? Highlighting the consumer attitude–behaviour gap. Journal of Communication Management, 4(4): 355–368. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), and explores how groups of consumers have re-construed such practices and their meanings through the formation of New Consumption Communities (Szmigin, Carrigan, & Bekin, 2007 Szmigin, I., Carrigan, M. and Bekin, C. 2007. “New consumption communities and the re-enabling of 21st century consumers”. In Consumer tribes, Edited by: Cova, B., Kozinets, R.V. and Shankar, A. 296–311. Oxford: Elsevier/Butterworth-Heinemann.  [Google Scholar]). Multi-sited ethnographic findings illustrate the social processes through which ethical and green forms of consumption are established and normalised. Findings also stress the importance of normative and habitual reframing through ‘ethical spaces’ (Barnett, Clarke et al., 2005 Barnett, C., Cafaro, P. and Newholm, T. 2005. “Philosophy and ethical consumption”. In The ethical consumer, Edited by: Harrison, R., Newholm, T. and Shaw, D. 11–24. London: Sage. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) in establishing and maintaining increased consistency in participants' consumption meanings, behaviours, and goals. Thus we re-frame attitude–behaviour gaps as coherent inconsistencies, which allows for a move away from solely trying to explain and change individual consumer behaviour, to identifying how suitable upstream and downstream (Verplanken & Wood, 2006 Verplanken, B. and Wood, W. 2006. Interventions to break and create consumer habits. Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, 25(1): 90–103. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) approaches and policies can be used to facilitate more sustainable forms of consumption.     

Processes for stocks capturing their statistical properties from one day to one year

A realistic ARCH process is set up so as to duplicate, for all practical purposes, the properties of stock time series from 1 day to 1 year. The process includes heteroskedasticity with long memory, leverage, fat-tail innovations, relative return, price granularity, and holidays. Its adequacy to describe empirical data is controlled over a broad panel of statistics, including (robust L-statistics) skew, (robust) kurtosis, shape factor for the volatility distribution, and lagged correlations between combinations of return and volatility. These statistics are computed for returns and volatilities with characteristic time intervals ranging from 1 day to 1 year. This wide cross-check between stock time series and simulations ensures that the most important features of the data are correctly captured by the process up to 1 year. The by-products of the statistical analyses and estimations are (1) a positive skew, (2) a cross-sectional relation between kurtosis and heteroskedasticity, (3) a very similar cross-sectional distribution for the statistics evaluated over the empirical data set or for the process with one set of parameters and (4) the heteroskedasticity is very close to an integrated volatility process.