The Methodological and Ethical Issues of Conducting Management Research in the Voluntary Sector

This article discusses the methodological and ethical issues involved in conducting research in the voluntary sector. By outlining a proposed research strategy the authors highlight the challenges and issues that voluntary sector researchers face. The article concludes that the nature of the voluntary sector and the unique characteristics of voluntary organizations not only impact on the development of voluntary sector management theory but also on the research design, ethics and practices adopted for empirical studies into voluntary organizations.     

The origins of power in buyer–seller relationships

Who, or what, holds power in business-to-business buyer–seller relationships is a debate at the heart of power theory. Power in buyer–seller relationships is variously seen as the property of organizations, individuals or relationships yet to be theoretically valid and useful to management, integration of these schools of thought needs to be operationalized. This paper opens up future research avenues through identifying how buyers and sellers understand the origins of power and the nature of self perceived and countervailing power. The paper presents results from 10 focus groups of both buyers and sellers revealing the underlying origins of experienced power. The results support the proposition that power in buyer–seller relationships is a pluralistic concept and that extant theories focused on organizational, individual or relational elements of power are independently too narrow in their reflections of the power construct; rather, they are all part of the same broad construct.     

Migration transition or migration transformation in the Asian dragon economies?

There has been a marked tendency to interpret the recent transformation of international migration systems in Eastern Asia in terms of a ‘migration transition’ model. The transition in these countries from net emigration to net immigration, with major inflows from poorer adjacent countries, is seen as being driven by an intricate regional pattern of uneven development but growing economic integration. This paper challenges this view through an examination of the trade, investment and migration linkages of the region’s four dragon economies (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan). It argues that the key influences on their international migration streams reflect, above all, the functions of these states as second-order, global city regions. Their place in the global capitalist system creates a shared demand for very particular types of both highly skilled and unskilled labour, but the migration policies of the four states are independently, and therefore distinctively, socially constructed. — Il y a une tendance à utiliser un modèle de ‘transition de migration’ pour interpréter les transformations récentes des systèmes de migration internationaux en Asie de l’est. La transition de l’émigration nette à l’immigration nette dans ces pays, avec des arrivées massives des pays adjacents plus pauvres, est supposée être due à un modèle régional complexe de développement inégal mais d’intégration économique croissante. Cet article questionne ce modèle et examine les liens entre le commerce, l’investissement, et la migration dans les quatre économies dragons de la région (Hong Kong, Singapour, la Corée du sud et Taï?wan). Il soutient que les influences majeures sur leur flux de migration internationale reflète avant tout les fonctions de ces états en tant que régions urbaines globales de deuxième ordre. Leur place dans le système capitaliste global crée une demande pour un type très particulier de travailleurs qualifiés et non qualifiés, mais les politiques de migration des quatre états sont indépendemment, et donc distinctement, socialement construites.     

Correction to: The Inhibitory Effect of Political Conservatism on Consumption: The Case of Fair Trade

Journal of Business Ethics - A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04780-w     

Saad Al-barrak of international turnkey systems (ITS), kuwait

International Turnkey Systems (ITS) is a regional company operating in several countries in the Middle East. At the start of operations in Kuwait in 1981, the company faced many challenges, and did not reach a turning point until 1987. Thereafter, ITS realized the road to success. This report of an interview with Managing Director Saad Al-Barrak provides a profile of his management philosophy and vision, and the company's policies and success components. The ITS story is a valuable learning tool because it illustrates how an Arab firm can incorporate and benefit from a management philosophy apparently alien to the local culture. The interview was conducted in April 1998 during Saad Al-Barrak's visit to deliver a speech at Thunderbird, The American Graduate School of International Management. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Wealth Effects of Private Equity Placements: Evidence from Singapore

We examine institutional characteristics and the wealth effects of private equity placements in Singapore. Our findings show that private placements in Singapore generally result in a negative wealth effect and a reduction in ownership concentration. We find that at high levels of ownership concentration, the relation between abnormal returns and changes in ownership concentration is significantly negative. We also show that the market reacts less favorably to placements in which management ownership falls below 50%, but more favorably to issues to single investors. We do not find evidence suggesting that our results are due to an information effect.     

Increasing the Number of Women on Boards: The Role of Actors and Processes

In this article, we offer an approach of how participative stakeholder innovation can be evaluated in complex multistakeholder settings that address wicked issues. Based on the principle of mutual value creation, we present an evaluation framework that accounts for the social interaction process during which stakeholders integrate their resources and capabilities to develop innovative products and services. To assess this evaluation framework, we collected multiple data from the case study of the Swiss Cardiovascular Network, which represents a multistakeholder setting related to the prevention of cardiovascular disease. Our findings indicate that the evaluation dimensions of the stakeholders’ mindsets, the process and context of the stakeholder interactions, as well as the outcomes are useful concepts to account for a cooperative process of innovation in a multistakeholder setting. We discuss both the theoretical and practical insights of our analysis for participative stakeholder innovation.     

eWOM credibility on social networking sites: A framework

Social networking sites (SNS) offer brands the ability to spread positive electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) for the purposes of building awareness and acquiring new customers. However, the credibility of eWOM is threatened of late as marketers increasingly try to manipulate eWOM practices on SNS. A greater understanding of eWOM credibility is necessary to better enable marketers to leverage true consumer engagement by generating credible peer-to-peer communications. Yet, to date, there is no one framework synthesising which factors constitute eWOM credibility in the online environment. This paper revisits the word of mouth credibility literature and proposes a new credibility framework – the 4Cs of eWOM Credibility: Community, Competence, Content, and Consensus.     

Price and brand name as indicators of quality dimensions for consumer durables

Delivering quality products requires an understanding of the critical dimensions and cues that consumers use to judge quality. To that end, this article addresses two fundamental research issues. Using a qualitative study, the authors first develop a generalizable typology of quality dimensions for durable goods that includes ease of use, versatility, durability, serviceability, performance, and prestige. Second, the authors conduct a process-tracing laboratory experiment to examine how key marketing variables—price, brand name, and product attributes—affect consumers’ judgment processes and inferences about how products perform on the six quality dimensions. Results of the experiment indicate that consumers use price and brand name differently to judge the quality dimensions, searching for price and brand name much more frequently when evaluating prestige than when evaluating any other quality dimension. Results suggest that managers must determine the relevant quality dimensions for a product category and the cues that are salient for judging those dimensions. Merrie Brucks is a professor of marketing at the University of Arizona, where she also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology. She received her Ph. D. in marketing from Carnegie Mellon University. Her research first received scholarly recognition in 1984, when she won the Robert Ferber Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of consumer behavior. Since that time, she has published extensively in consumer psychology, focusing on memory, information search, judgment, and decision-making processes. In other research she has examined a variety of public policy issues related to advertising. Valarie A. Zeithaml is a professor and area chair at the Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is also a Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Scholar at that institution. She obtained an MBA and doctorate from the University of Maryland and has devoted the past 20 years to researching and teaching the topics of service quality and services management. She is the author ofDelivery Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations and ofServices Marketing, a textbook now in its second edition. She has won numerous teaching and research awards, including the Ferber Award from theJournal of Consumer Research, the Maynard Award from theJournal of Marketing, the Jagdish Sheth Award from theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and the O’Dell Award from theJournal of Marketing Research. Gillian Naylor is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. She obtained a doctorate from the University of Arizona in 1996. Her research interests are within the consumer judgment and decision-making domain, with specific interest in postpurchase processes and services marketing.