Moral rules and moral ideals: A useful distinction in business and professional practice

The distinction between moral rules and moral ideals is presented and explained in various ways. The authors propose that people in business are required to obey the moral rules and have a choice with respect to ideals. Thus, they are not in a different position from that of anyone else in society.Four case studies are presented and discussed. The analytical approaches used by the authors' students are summarized and evaluated. The moral rules/ideals paradigm is described as helping discussants of the cases to establish congruence between business ethics and their personal set of values. Other values of the classroom discussion of ethics cases are considered.John W. Hennessey, Jr., is Jones Professor of Management at the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, Dartmouth College. Previously he was Dean of this school and President of the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business. Bernard Gert is Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at the Dartmouth College. From 1971 until 1974 and from 1979 until 1981 he was Chairman of the Philosophy Department and he was awarded the NEH-NSF Sustained Development Award 1980–1984. His most important publications are: The Moral Rules: A New Rational Foundation for Morality, Harper and Row, 1970, Harper Torchbook 1973, 2nd edition 1975, and Philosophy in Medicine: Conceptual and Ethical Issues in Medicine and Psychiatry, Oxford University Press, 1982 (co-authored with Charles M. Culver).Prof. Gert acknowledges support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Grant RII-8018088 A03.     

Farm demand for quality potato seed in Indonesia

Seed is the one of the most costly components of potato production in developing countries. Since potato is a vegetatively reproduced crop, diseases such as viruses build up and yield declines as tubers are saved from one harvest for use as seed the next season. Replacing farm‐saved seed with clean seed is one means to increase yield, but information asymmetry between buyers and sellers on seed quality may restrict market supply of this input. In this article we develop a model of the seed market in which clean seed is treated as a capital good providing benefits over several seasons. To determine farm demand for clean seed, we conducted a survey of 182 potato farmers in the major potato growing areas of Indonesia to elicit their perceptions of seed quality from different sources, and derive farmers' “willingness‐to‐pay” for quality potato seed. Results indicate that the effects of information asymmetry on seed supply may be partially offset by the “reputation” of specialized seed producers. Nevertheless, marginal returns to disease‐free seed appear to significantly exceed marginal costs, indicating that improving supply of quality seed will contribute strongly to productivity growth in potato. We discuss several policy options to encourage supply and utilization of quality potato seed.     

Drainwater Management for Salinity Mitigation in Irrigated Agriculture

Salinity and drainage management options include source control, reuse, and evaporation ponds. This article identifies efficient strategies to maintain hydrologic balance in closed drainage basins and evaluates their impact on regional agricultural profits. Theoretical analysis suggests that economic efficiency requires acknowledgment of the nonseparability between water use and land value. Empirically, our solution involves a modest amount of source control, a substantial amount of reuse, and the elimination of evaporation ponds often associated with large environmental damages, while maintaining grower income. Various policy instruments and options are introduced and discussed, including a system of drainwater charges, marketable permits, and land retirement.     

Reputation and corporate strategy: A review of recent theory and applications

A corporate reputation is a set of attributes ascribed to a firm, inferred from the firm's past actions. While the intuition behind reputation-building is hardly new, recent research has formalized the concept. We review this research and then, using examples, illustrate some of the strategic behavioral implications of these formal models.     

Comparative research in industrial relations: helping the survey cross frontiers

There has been a relative dearth of comparative, cross-national research which has followed a survey-based approach. This partly reflects the difficulty that researchers encounter in collecting such information, either via primary collection or the secondary matching of existing survey material. This paper addresses these difficulties and suggests ways in which their impact can be minimized. It notes that such difficulties are much more severe in the case of secondary matching and are thereby likely to constrain the scope of this approach. They are not totally absent in primary collection and it is suggested that there are limits to what can be achieved during data collection to promote the development of like data-sets across countries. This indicates that great care must be taken in interpreting data so obtained. Despite such limits and cautions, it is nevertheless concluded that the survey approach can be an important adjunct to the process of understanding why the world of work varies across frontiers.     

Education spending: A glimpse of the mechanics of central government control

With its efficiency currently under constant attack, the virtues of the national health service can easily be overlooked. International comparisons are always hazardous, not least in health. But what they suggest is that the NHS does give relatively good value for money.     

Multidimensional Screening in Insurance Markets with Adverse Selection

Bundled coverage of different losses and distinct perils, along with differential deductibles and policy limits, are common features of insurance contracts. We show that, through these practices, insurers can implement multidimensional screening of insurance applicants who possess hidden knowledge of their risks, and thereby reduce the externality cost of adverse selection. Competitive forces drive insurers to exploit multidimensional screening, enhancing the efficiency of insurance contracting. Moreover, multidimensional screening allows competitive insurance markets to attain pure strategy Nash equilibria over a wider range of applicant pools, resolving completely the Rothschild–Stiglitz nonexistence puzzle in markets where the perils space is sufficiently divisible.     

The logics of budgeting: Theorization and practice variation in the educational field

This paper examines the introduction of budgeting practices in situations where institutional logics are competing. The empirical cases, studied in two phases in the 1990s and in 2011, explore tensions that emerged between the new business logic, prevailing professional logic, and governance logic in the education field. We analyze the theorization of budgeting practices and their performative effect on cognition in organizations. We argue that competing logics in a field impact upon budgeting practices and theorization of the meanings attributed to budgetary outcomes. Our study contributes to the understanding of accounting in processes of institutional change, and the further development of neo-institutionalist theory by attending to the sources of practice variation and their relationship to competing logics. We advance four tentative theoretical propositions concerning the impact of multiple logics upon budgetary practices.     

The walrus, carpenter and oysters: Liberal reform, hypocrisy and expertocracy in Maori land loss in New Zealand 1885–1911

This paper considers the Liberal Governments’ reformist agenda and resultant hypocrisy surrounding wealth confiscation from Maori in New Zealand from 1885 to 1911. Through an analysis of official records, ledger accounts and other historical documents, it shows how the government compulsorily acquired land from Maori and resold it at considerable profit, thus supplying a means of increasing state revenues. Supplementing these revenues were exorbitant survey fees, government commissions from Native Reserves and local government rates in which accounting expertise made it possible to enclose, price and levy charges. The calculative process enabled parliamentarians to argue that given the poor returns to Maori, their assets should be put into the hands of land-selling councils. Maintaining a figurative distance from the mechanism of exploitation, all the while responsible for its enactment, successive Liberal administrations throughout the period made much of past injustices and expressed considerable sympathy for Maori. Maori were largely dispossessed of their land by the end of this period—a period of relative calm where public appeasement and niceties presented a more benign façade to the disproportionately heavy taxation burden on, and ultimate pillage of Maori.     

Assessing Student Perceptions of Real Estate Careers

In selecting a career, students seek to maximize expected satisfaction. Expected satisfaction is a function of perceptions of the relative level of critical attributes possessed by a career area. This paper uses multidimensional scaling to produce a perceptual space to analyze the perceived similarities and dissimilarities of eight business career areas for a group of students and identify the attributes critical to these perceptions. With respect to those attributes most critical to perceptions, real estate careers were perceived as providing relatively high economic potential, low prestige, low entry difficulty and little career predictability. Information such as in this study provides a baseline for career counseling as well as eliminating possible distortions in perceptions of real estate careers.