Exporting status and success in innovation: evidence from CIS micro data for EU countries

Using a large sample of micro data from four waves of Community Innovation Survey for EU member states, we investigate the relationship between firms’ export status and different sorts of innovation activities. We find systematically positive relationship between the two, whereby the strongest correlation is found in case of product innovation and the weakest in case of organizational innovations. While aggregate data show that innovation success is increasing in firm size, we find that exporting has the strongest effect on innovation in the medium-sized firms. We also explore cross-country differences in the impact of export status on innovation. Countries with a higher share of exports in GDP and greater share of spending on research and development generally display a stronger correlation between exporting status and innovation.     

The empirical link between export dispersion and export performance: A contingency-based approach

Practitioners and scholars point out that firms are increasingly dispersing their capabilities across organizational functions. However, it is not clear whether all forms of dispersion, of any function, result in the same consequences. This study initiates investigation into the link between the cross-functional dispersion of influence on export marketing decisions (export dispersion) and export performance. Drawing on data from a sample of 225 UK exporters, the findings support the argument that active participation of non-export functions in export-marketing decisions affects export success. However, those performance consequences are dependent on internal and external contingencies. Export dispersion is beneficial for export performance when the export customer environment is more turbulent and, simultaneously, the export technological environment is more stable and the firm has lower levels of export information sharing. In all other scenarios examined in this study, greater levels of concentration of export decision-making (i.e. lower levels of export dispersion) appear to be more beneficial for export performance. Our findings imply that the management of the firm’s level of export dispersion is a complex task, whereby the degree of export dispersion pursued needs to match external environmental and internal firm factors.     

Workforce Diversity and Religiosity

Journal of Business Ethics - Workforce diversity has received increasing amounts of attention from academics and practitioners alike. In this article, we examine the empirical association between a...     

Business Groups and Corporate Social Responsibility

We present an analysis of over 400 comments about complying with tax obligations extracted from online discussion forums for freelancers. While the topics investigated by much of the literature on taxpayer behaviour are theory driven, we aimed to explore the universe of online discussions about tax in order to extract those topics that are most relevant to taxpayers. The forum discussions were subjected to a qualitative thematic analysis, and we present a model of the ‘universe’ of tax as reflected in taxpayer discussions. The model comprises several main actors (tax laws, tax authority, tax practitioners, and the taxpayer’s social network) and describes the multiple ways in which they relate to taxpayers’ behaviour. We also conduct a more focused analysis to show that the majority of taxpayers seem unconcerned with many of the variables that have been the focus of tax behaviour research (e.g. audits, penalties, etc.), and that most people are motivated to be compliant and are more concerned with how to comply than whether to comply. Moreover, we discuss how these ‘real-world’ tax discussions question common assumptions in the study of tax behaviour and how they inform our understanding of business ethics more generally.     

Enterprise Web Accessibility Levels Amongst the Forbes 250: Where Art Thou O Virtuous Leader?

The research team measured the enterprise web accessibility levels of the Forbes 250 largest enterprises using the fully automatic accessibility evaluation tool Sortsite, and presented the compliance of the evaluated websites to WCAG 1.0, WCAG 2.0 and Section 508 accessibility levels. Given the recent attention to organizational leaders having ethical duties towards their dedicated employees, we propose that ‘societal citizenship behaviour’ concerns ethical duties of organizational leaders towards society in general and in particular to those who have less means to assert their needs. In effect, we found enterprise website accessibility levels to be in need of significant improvement. An interpretation of a positive path forward to better enterprise website accessibility levels is put forth based on a focus-group interaction and using BNML—a novel Business Narrative Modelling Language.