Development and validation of an Integrated Organizational Safety Climate Questionnaire with multilevel confirmatory factor analysis

Meta-analytic and traditional reviews on safety climate reveal theoretical and methodological safety climate issues still open. The main aim of this study is to propose a questionnaire which combines recent and different approaches to safety climate, trying to give a contribute about these issues. The present research led to the development of a new questionnaire to measure safety climate, suitable for blue-collar workers, and to the evaluation of its psychometric properties, and usefulness to measure safety climate in the industrial sector. Multilevel confirmatory factor analysis (MCFA) was used to properly evaluate the factor structure underlying the safety climate questionnaire composed of three scales: organizational safety climate scale, supervisor’s safety climate scale and co-workers’ safety climate scale. The clear distinction, made with the use of three different scales, among safety agents (organization, supervisor, co-workers), allows the assessment of workers’ perceptions focused on each level, and allows to deeply explore, for instance, lateral relationships of supervisor’s safety climate and co-workers’ safety climate, analysing the interactions between the roles of these two safety agents. A two-level design was used, considering the individual level and the work-group level. Data collection involved 1,617 blue-collars from eight Italian manufacturing companies. The MCFA results demonstrated the importance to use proper analysis to study the factor structure of a multilevel construct as safety climate, and confirmed the theoretical structure of safety climate purposed from Griffin and colleagues, using not only psychological climate (i.e., the individual level), but also the group level safety climate.     

Share the Fame or Share the Blame? The Reputational Implications of Partnerships

We use an adverse selection model to study the dynamics of firms' reputations when firms implement joint projects. We show that in the case of joint projects a firm's reputation does not necessarily increase following a success and does not necessarily decrease following a failure. We also study how reputation considerations affect firms' decisions to participate in joint projects. We show that a high‐reputation partner is not necessarily preferable to a low‐reputation partner and, when implementation of the joint project by a single firm is possible, a high‐quality partner may not be preferable to a low‐quality partner.     

Corporations and local economies in the Brazilian Amazon: the impacts of the mining sectors scheduled investments in Southeastern Pará (2004–2010)

Southeastern Pará is an extraordinarily dynamic region. There were large cattle ranching projects, financed in the 1960s. Expansion of peasant agriculture, mineral projects and gold prospecting followed the ranching projects. Also important structural transformations reinforced the role of the urban centres and the local rural bases in the logistics of new economic sectors conditioned by the presence of Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD), in the region since 1985. This article presents the results of an input–output analysis of the investment programme of CVRD from year 2004 up to 2010. The main findings are that the mineral sector has achieved a considerable influence over the economy of Southeastern Pará, so that during the cycle of investments each 1% in the growth of the mineral production creates growth possibilities of about 0.83% for the agricultural sector and about 0.86% for the local urban sectors. Considering just the production growth, a percentile point will imply growth at, respectively, 0.73% and 0.76% for those sectors. For the economy of the rest of the state of Pará, those elasticities would be, incorporating the investments, 0.80% and, without them, 0.68%. For the economy of the rest of Brazil they would be, respectively, 0.88% and 0.78%.     

Paradisal discourse: A critical analysis of marketing and consuming Hawaii

The marketing of certain tourist destinations can be analyzed as discourse that conveys meaning to the consumer and to the consumed. This discourse, which I refer to hereafter as paradisal discourse, is a combination of Orientalism, travel writing, discourse of the Primitive, and diverse forms of Otherness. This paper begins with an exploration of discourse as a tool of knowledge and of power, illustrated through a detailed assessment of Said's Orientalism and other relevant works and concepts. The discourses of “Orientalism,” “primitivism” and travel writing are likened to the paradisal discourse found in the marketing of certain types of tourist destinations. The second section of the paper presents an historical and cultural analysis of the concept of paradise in Western society, summarizing the elements which, over time, have come to form this distinctive discourse. The third section of the paper assesses the way in which this discourse forms the framework by which a specific tropical paradise, Hawaii, is marketed and consumed today.     

The competitive implications of the deployment of unique resources

The ‘resource‐based’ view focuses on unique resources as the fundamental sources of competitive advantage and superior profits. We use a game‐theoretic model to analyze the impact of the deployment of unique resources on product market competition, and the impact of unique resources and sustainable competitive advantages on profits when the competitive implications of resource deployment are taken into account. We find that some of the core propositions of the resource‐based view do not necessarily hold when the impact of resource deployment on product market competition is explicitly considered. Specifically, the accumulation and deployment of unique resources does not necessarily increase the firm's profit and the difference between its profit and competitors' profits. Furthermore, achieving a sustainable competitive advantage does not necessarily lead to higher profits. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Orthorexia Nervosa: Can Healthy Eating Food Trends Impact Food Companies Marketing Strategies?

The purpose of this article is to explore foods companies’ knowledge of food trends and assess how orthorexia nervosa may affect food companies’ marketing decisions. Data was gathered through a multiple case-study approach, and four semi-structured interviews to CEOs/CMOs of food companies from four distinct non-competing sectors of the food industry. The results show that although marketing managers are conscious of the existence of consumer behavior changes regarding food habits, they are not particularly concerned neither interested in micro-segments as they are not profitable. Despite the deficiencies on CMOs’ knowledge of particular food trends they declare to be attentive to the changes in consumer behavior and prepared to respond to competitors moves. This research adds to the existing knowledge on the food industry since it is the first study to explore the impact of food trends on food companies’ management marketing decisions from the company point of view.     

A Sorting Model for Group Decision Making: A Case Study of Water Losses in Brazil

Many water supply systems in Brazil have serious problems related to the high index of water losses, which provokes financial and environmental impacts. This is an immediate consequence of an inadequate maintenance plan, allied to natural and budgetary constraints. In addition, in these types of problems it is commonplace to consider the opinions of many managers, such as those from the operational, environmental and financial sectors of Water Companies. In view of this, a sorting multicriteria model to support group decision making is developed. We proposed an approach which sorts the areas of the system which are located in critical zones of water losses into categories, and which takes into account different points of view and considers uncertainty in criteria weights by using only ordinal information, so as to make it viable to manage the maintenance plan and to use the scant financial resources more efficiently. The SMAA-TRI method is used to tackle the group sorting problematic by categorizing the network into zones where losses are intense and thus to focus the managers’ effort on the most critical regions. A case study in Brazil is presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the approach proposed.     

Trade and the Effect of Public Investment on Regional Inequalities in Heterogeneously Integrated Areas

Regional integration, it is argued, challenges the distribution of economic activity among regions. However, the government role in shifting the patterns of regional inequalities is still under debate and has received small comprehensive empirical evidence. This paper examines the hypothesis of trade as channelling public investment and, thus, perpetuating regional inequalities. We argue that the interplay of public and private investment plays a key role in stimulating trade and economic activity. To avoid problems of cross‐country heterogeneity and comparability this study examines data for two countries; Mexico and Spain, both followers of trade integration arrangements. Findings indicate that regional inequalities in Mexico are significantly explained by differences in export capacity serving to boost private investment whereas inequalities in Spain are appreciably driven by previous endowments and private capital formation.