Are Women Less Capable in Managing Crops? Insights from Cotton Production in Northern China

Women’s performance in agriculture matters, as women are becoming increasingly involved in agricultural production worldwide. Many studies have demonstrated that women-led farms perform less well as a result of less access to production factors, but no studies focus on how women perform without this constraint. This study fills that gap by analyzing the case of cotton cropping, which is known for its high labor requirements, high production inputs, and need for technical knowledge. Using primary data collected in northern China over the 2006–9 period, it uses the concept of “Daily Crop Management” (DCM) and identifies DCM farms managed by women whose husbands were engaged in off-farm activities on a long-term basis. The study finds that one-third of all farms were female-DCM farms, that these were smaller than those of their male counterparts but had equal access to production factors and achieved equal if not better technical and economic performances.     

Scenario building: Uses and abuses

Scenarios hold little interest if they are not pertinent, coherent, and plausible. Although foresight requires a rigorous approach to address complex problems, the tools must also be simple enough to be easily used. Since the mid-1980s, the approach in strategic prospective workshops (a term that reminds us of the participatory nature of the French approach) has proven its effectiveness in meeting these criteria (simple, rigorous and appropriable; i.e., may be appropriated by participants). The authors try to reply to simple and important questions: What is a scenario? How to judge the quality of a scenario? Which strategies for which scenarios? These questions remind us that applications of strategic foresight tools are contingent and modular. They could also involve the stakeholders from upstream to downstream, as seen in the agro-food sector. Finally, they argue that the future still has to be built and that futurists produced too many scenarios and not enough projects.     

Ruin probabilities and optimal capital allocation for heterogeneous life annuity portfolios

A large part of the actuarial literature is devoted to the derivation of ruin probabilities in various non-life insurance risk models. On the contrary, very few papers deal with ruin probabilities for life insurance portfolios. The difficulties arise from the dependence and non-stationarity of the annual payments made by the insurance company. This paper shows that the ruin probability in case of life annuity portfolios can be computed from algorithms derived by De Pril (1989) and Dhaene & Vandebroek (1995). Approximations for ruin probabilities are discussed. The present article complements the works of Frostig et al. (2003) who considered whole life, endowment, and temporary assurances, and of Denuit & Frostig (2008) who considered homogeneous life annuities portfolios. Here, heterogeneous portfolios (with respect to age and/or face amounts) are studied. Particular attention is paid to the capital allocation problem. The total amount of reserve is shared among the risk classes in order to minimize the ruin probability. It is then fair to charge a higher margin to the risk classes requiring more capital.     

Epistemological and Pedagogical Challenges of Teaching International Business Ethics Courses

International business ethics courses imply four basic epistemological and pedagogical challenges: (a) understanding various perceptions of ethics and values/virtues; (b) identifying ethical maxims among religious/spiritual traditions; (c) designing international business ethics courses as dialogical experiences; and (d) deepening our personal contribution to others’ learning process. This article argues that those epistemological and pedagogical challenges could determine the design and the contents of international business ethics courses: facing up to compatible/incompatible ethical theories (philosophical questioning), identifying ethical maxims among religious/spiritual traditions (religious and spiritual questioning), and reading our actions/decisions as quasi-texts (literature-bound questioning). Business ethics teachers could take those challenges upon themselves and design their business ethics courses accordingly. For each of the four challenges, a specific ethical issue is described; advice for teachers as well as ethical questions for debate and personal development are provided.     

Career plateauing reactions: the moderating role of job scope,role ambiguity and participation among Canadian managers

The purpose of this study is to investigate the moderating effect and the interactive effect of job scope, role ambiguity and participation in decision-making on relationships between career plateauing and outcomes. A cross-sectional survey of 3,065 Canadian managers shows that these job characteristics can contribute to limiting the negative consequences associated with career plateauing. Moreover, in accordance with the theory of work–situation fit, some double moderating effects are found. The attitudes and behaviours of plateaued managers are significantly more positive when their job is richer and offers an opportunity to participate in decision-making. However, contrary to evidence in the literature, results show that reactions to career plateauing are more positive for managers who perceive that their job is richer and their role more ambiguous. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

The structure of bias in peer voting systems: lessons from the Eurovision Song Contest

This paper assesses whether and how common characteristics of jury members or peer voters affect the outcomes of voting systems. In particular, we analyze to what extent these common features result in voting bias. We take as a case study the Eurovision Song Contest for which an extensive amount of historical data is available. In contrast to earlier studies we analyze the impact of common factors on the bias individually for each country, which is necessary to substantiate the publicly debated accusations of regional block voting by certain groups of countries. We establish strong evidence for voting bias in the song contest on the basis of geography, even after correction for culture, language, religion and ethnicity. However, these effects do generally not correspond to the usual accusations. We believe that our findings extend to all instances where groups of jury members or peer voters share certain common factors, which may cause voting bias. It is important to identify such structures explicitly, as it can help avoiding bias in the first place. The authors are grateful to Marieke van Dijk for excellent research assistance and to Laurens Swinkels, Ieva Pudane, Gijsbert van Lomwel, Jelena Stefanovic, and Bas van den Heuvel for useful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Is there really an Asian connection? Professional service quality perceptions and customer satisfaction

Scenarios involving dental services investigate whether Asian cultures are similar enough to allow standardization of service offerings. The authors control and manipulate levels of service quality and performance to yield a 2 × 2 experimental design, with Japanese, Chinese, and Korean subjects (N = 637) selected to test the invariance of the measures. The findings yield significant cultural differences with the Chinese respondents perceiving significantly higher service quality and expressing greater customer satisfaction when performance is high and expressing less customer satisfaction when performance is low than do the Japanese and Korean respondents. Thus, even though all three countries are considered high-context cultures, having their roots in Confucianism, differences in national culture lead to the conclusion that “one size does not fit all” in terms of service offerings.     

Inside Agency: The Rise and Fall of Nortel

By employing the theoretical template provided by agency theory, this article contributes a detailed clinical analysis of a large multinational Canada-headquartered telecommunications company, Nortel. Our analysis reveals a twenty-first century norm of usual suspects: a CEO whose compensation is well above those of his peers, a dysfunctional board of directors, acts of income smoothing to preserve the confidence of volatile investors, and revelations of financial irregularities followed by a downfall. In many ways, the spectacular rise and – sudden – fall of Nortel illustrates excesses of actors within, and contradictions of the system of corporate governance implied by the agency model. Furthermore, this case illustrates limitations of the agency framework in complex situations with short-term oriented investors.     

Challenges and opportunities in high-dimensional choice data analyses

Modern businesses routinely capture data on millions of observations across subjects, brand SKUs, time periods, predictor variables, and store locations, thereby generating massive high-dimensional datasets. For example, Netflix has choice data on billions of movies selected, user ratings, and geodemographic characteristics. Similar datasets emerge in retailing with potential use of RFIDs, online auctions (e.g., eBay), social networking sites (e.g., mySpace), product reviews (e.g., ePinion), customer relationship marketing, internet commerce, and mobile marketing. We envision massive databases as four-way VAST matrix arrays of Variables?×?Alternatives?×?Subjects?×?Time where at least one dimension is very large. Predictive choice modeling of such massive databases poses novel computational and modeling issues, and the negligence of academic research to address them will result in a disconnect from the marketing practice and an impoverishment of marketing theory. To address these issues, we discuss and identify the challenges and opportunities for both practicing and academic marketers. Thus, we offer an impetus for advancing research in this nascent area and fostering collaboration across scientific disciplines to improve the practice of marketing in information-rich environment.