The impact of stakeholder orientation on sustainability and cost prevalence in supplier selection decisions

The stakeholder approach has taken a prominent role in the discussion of sustainability measures at varying strategic levels and corporate functions. Literature on sustainability suggests that firms have to cope with enhanced pressure from different stakeholder groups regarding their upstream supply management practices. At the same time purchasing managers face the trade-off between sustainability and cost prevalence in selecting new suppliers. Thus, it is of major concern for companies in general and purchasing organizations in particular to know and understand how purchasing managers react to the influence of specific stakeholder groups when it comes to supplier selection decisions. Following this notion we formulate six sets of hypotheses linking the adoption of ethical business culture to the prevalence of sustainability and cost criteria in supplier selection decisions to be tested in a path analytical model.Based on the results of an empirical study conducted with purchasing managers from multi-national firms located in Germany, this paper makes two major contributions: first, it sheds light on direct effects of shareholder, public, and customer orientation on the evaluation of the outlined-trade off; second, it investigates the indirect effects by introducing the formalization of ethical culture as a mediating variable to assess the impact of the three kinds of shareholder orientation on the propensity to select suppliers based on their performance in terms of social and environmental criteria as well as cost performance.     

Offshoring: Dimensions and diffusion of a new business concept

In order to leverage global cost differentials, companies are increasingly turning to offshoring. Nevertheless, discussions in research and practice on offshoring are characterized by the lack of a common definition as well as a theoretically grounded explanation for this phenomenon. This article presents an explicit definition in order to provide a stringent understanding of the term offshoring along the dimensions of contractual/legal arrangement and geographic location. Further, the driving forces of offshoring are analysed on the environmental and company levels. The article closes with a discussion of managerial implications and an outlook on aspects for further research.     

Agglomeration economies with consistent productivity estimates

This paper investigates the relative impact of microeconomic agglomeration mechanisms on plant's total factor productivity (TFP) using German establishment and employment-level data. Contrasting different strategies for estimating TFP from plant-level production functions reveals that unobserved output prices bias true productivity and lead to underestimated agglomeration economies. With the corrected TFP measure, the largest impact is found for labor market pooling, which is captured by the correlation of the occupational composition between one county-industry and the rest of the county. This main result is robust, even when the spatial units are resized from counties to larger labor market regions. Input linkages appear to be relevant only at this larger regional scale. Overall, agglomeration economies differ substantially across industries. Only for a subset of industries, some positive evidence is detected for knowledge spillovers.     

The perceived fairness of performance evaluation: The role of uncertainty

This paper investigates the relationship between performance evaluation procedures and managerial perceptions of procedural justice. We examine two metric and two process characteristics. Metric characteristics are the diversity of metrics used by superiors and their reliance on outcome vs. effort metrics. Regarding process characteristics, we analyse the amount of subordinate's voice in the performance evaluation process, and the extent of formalization of the process. Using uncertainty management theory, we argue that justice effects of performance evaluation procedures may not be direct but are instead conditional on the amount of task uncertainty managers face in the their job context as well as on managers’ tolerance for ambiguity. Using a sample of 178 managers from the banking industry, we find that all four performance evaluation characteristics are related to justice perceptions, yet their effect depends on the level of task uncertainty and tolerance for ambiguity. These findings explain some inconsistencies in extant studies on fairness of performance evaluation procedures.     

The impact of CSR performance and CSR disclosure readability on investors’ earnings estimates

We investigate how the valence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance and the readability of CSR disclosure impact investors’ earnings estimates. Ninety-seven part-time MBA students participate in an experiment, in which we manipulate the valence of CSR performance (positive versus neutral) and the readability of CSR reports (high versus low), while holding financial information constant. Our findings reveal that investors make more positive earnings estimates when CSR performance is positive. The readability level of CSR reports also influences investors’ decision-making process. Moreover, by using an eye-tracking device, we are able to observe investors’ different reading behaviours upon the different levels of readability.     

Top dogs have set the agenda for peace: international social position and peace attitudes

Everybody agrees that peace is good, but not on how to achieve it. The Y2K study contained many questions on peace proposals, as well as on prospects for East/West and North/South peace. It ranked these proposals by popularity and studied how the social positions of the 1967 respondents and their countries affected what proposals were preferred and their predictions on peace or war. It now turns out that, neither centre, nor periphery got it quite right. In the former East, the people set the agenda and removed the iron curtain. In the West, however, the top dogs set the agenda, with military intervention, even called ‘peace enforcement’, high on it. Recent political and military developments indicate that ‘peace’ is likely to remain ‘peace between top dogs’; there will be few advocates for putting severe conflicts and violations of human rights in the periphery (e.g. Burundi and Sudan) high on the peace agenda.     

Forecasting real estate prices in Germany: the role of consumer confidence

The aim of the paper is to analyse the forecasting ability of various potential predictors for real estate prices in Germany over the short term. In the wake of the financial crisis, real estate prices in Germany started to increase markedly and still did so by the end of 2013. Despite a number of fundamental reasons, e.g. favourable lending conditions and Germany’s rapid return to economic growth, this provoked a discussion on whether consumers have too gloomy expectations regarding real estate prices in future. To capture the role of expectations for predicting real estate prices, in our forecast evaluation, we put special emphasis on various components of consumer confidence. Using single indicator models, we find that households’ perceived financial situations as well as their intended consumption/saving plans serve as valuable real estate price predictors.     

Publikumsvorstellungen im Rezeptionsprozess

This article addresses the question of how individual media users, who are part of a mass media audience, perceive their co-audience. We approached this question from an empirical social scientific communication research perspective by introducing a theoretical model of (situational) audience conceptions that might arise in the context of an anonymous, imperceptible mass audience. According to the model, both subjective media theories held by people and cues from the media content influence the users’ impression formation about their anonymous co-audience during media consumption. Audience conceptions would include assumptions on size, simultaneity, social structure and the experience of other consumers. We assume that, as soon as conceptions of the co-audience are formulated, they could influence cognitive and affective aspects of a person’s reception experience. The model states that the more the conception of the audience is salient in a viewer’s mind the stronger its influence on subsequent experiences will be. Possible effects on reception phenomena including social comparison processes and feelings of embarrassment are discussed exemplarily to illustrate fields the model could be fruitfully applied to. Finally, the concept of audience conception is illustrated in a model and brought into context with existing research.