The Limits of Strategic Rationality: Ethics, Enterprise Risk Management, and Governance

This article explores the links between strategic goals, enterprise risk management, and ethics. We offer a typology of managerial attitudes toward strategic goals and rationality and explore the interaction between strategic and ethical decision making. In so doing, we offer a practical framework for managers to approach ethical dilemmas in the highly complex, volatile, and risky economy that we currently find ourselves in.     

Injuries,inequalities and health in Europe

Injuries account for a significant burden of mortality, morbidity, disability and health care costs. They differentially affect age and sex groups and reveal massive inequalities in occurrence within and between countries in Europe. Within countries, the poor suffer most and have least ability to change their exposures to risk. Addressing inequalities in injury occurrence would play a valuable role in reducing the differential burden of ill-health between rich and poor. Despite the evidence for many effective injury-related interventions, limited attention has been devoted to addressing injuries as a public health priority. This paper questions why attention has been limited to date and suggests policy action to support injuries being addressed as a mainstream concern by national and international health policy-makers. The paper briefly highlights the public health burden of injuries and violence; illustrates the range of inequalities that characterise their occurrence; highlights the scope for public health action and considers the extent to which policies that reduce the overall burden of injuries may also reduce inequalities in their occurrence; and finally examines why there has been a limited policy response to date and suggests ways of advancing the agenda.     

The Virtues of Green Strategies: Some Empirical Support from the Alliance Context

Whilst strategic alliance performance has been extensively researched through the resource-based lens, it has yet to be examined under the natural-resource-based view (NRBV) of the firm. Building on the NRBV, this article argues that a firm’s level of environmental proactiveness affects its level of alliance satisfaction. The argument is tested by surveying Norwegian CEOs, and the results confirm a positive relationship. Moreover, the partner’s environmental proactiveness equally influences the focal firm’s satisfaction with the alliance, in consistent with related studies. In addition to providing new empirical evidence in support of the NRBV, and extending the alliance performance literature, the findings add to the corporate environmentalism literature by offering insights on the virtues of green strategies in an underexplored context.     

THE IMPACT OF INFLATION ON PRICES RECEIVED AND PAID BY GREEK FARMERS

This paper investigates empirically the impact of inflation on the terms of trade, prices received and paid, for Greek farmers in the period 1967–87. According to conventional theory, inflation can have a non-neutral effect if it is unanticipated and if prices received and paid by farmers exhibit different degrees of flexibility. However, in the case where prices are administered, inflation neutrality depends on government's policy objectives and ability to adjust prices of inputs and outputs to the rate of inflation. The empirical investigation undertaken in this study shows that pricing policies implemented by the Greek government have resulted in neutralising the impact of inflation on the terms of trade for Greek farmers. Furthermore, the observed significant variability of the terms of trade can be attributed solely to real demand and supply factors.     

Productivity in Chinese Provincial Agriculture

Technical change, technical efficiency and multifactor productivity indices are reported for a multiple-output, multiple-input production technology using Chinese provincial data for the 1979-95 period. Results show significant variation in productivity change from year to year and province to province. Using panel methods, we regress the three production indices on several factors important in explaining productivity changes. Decollectivisation in the early 1980s accounts for a significant expansion of the frontier, while rural industrialisation decreased agricultural productivity. Productivity is also sensitive to relative grain prices, to natural disasters such as flood and drought, and proximity of the provinces to coastal areas.     

Measuring the sustainability of a community safety promotion network: working from the inside out

Mackay Whitsunday Safe Communities (MWSC) was developed using a capacity building model that consciously attempted to design sustainability into the network. Our aim was to quantify the flow of resources used by MWSC to implement and sustain its injury control activities. Resource exchange among network members was quantified and analysed using social network analysis. In 2004, MWSC accessed an estimated 6.5 full-time staff equivalents and $0.9 million. However, these resources were largely accessed externally. The linking relationships that connected MWSC to its external support network, more than half of which were maintained by six broker network facilitators, were the critical social asset used to access resources and sustain network productivity. The sustainability of this network and arguably similar safety promotion networks is vulnerable to the changing priorities of external sponsoring agents and highly dependent on its leaders who facilitated access to the resources it required to remain productive.     

Knowledge complementarity and innovation

This paper uses an innovation production function to relate the presence of geographically-mediated complementary knowledge resources to the innovative activity of small and large firms. The empirical results suggest that small firm innovation appears to benefit from the presence of external institutions and resources. Although large firm innovative activity benefits from the presence of knowledge resources, location appears to be especially beneficial to small firm innovative activity.     

Building Societies and Strategic Sourcing: Criteria and Dynamics

In the literature of strategic management outsourcing has become recognised as a means to achieve a range of strategic benefits. This article examines the criteria employed by building societies to select and evaluate opportunities for outsourcing. The societies’ sourcing decisions are subject to multiple criteria that, together with a conservative culture, act to limit the use of outsourcing. Case material is used to develop a model of sourcing that relates the processes of evaluation, review and learning to changes in the technological, legal and market environment. Changes in the environment require the societies to retain the ability to monitor; review and possibly reverse sourcing decisions.