Multinational Firms and New Protectionisms

Recent initiatives to hold back cross-border mergers and acquisitions for ‘strategic’ reasons have made headline news. We discuss whether the initiatives may mark the start of a new protectionist era. We argue that standard globalization indicators show no such signs. However, an increasing divergence of incomes and increased insecurity might raise resistance against the globalization process. We discuss the benefits of globalization benefits in terms of lower prices for consumers, a greater variety of available products, lower risks, and higher economic growth. But we also outline the risks in terms of greater inequalities and greater need for flexibility. Protectionism is a double-edged sword. Many historic episodes show that the return to protectionism did significantly more harm in terms of reduced growth than generating benefits in terms of greater stability and smaller income differentials.

Activism in the global sports apparel industry

F. den Hond, F.G.A. de Bakker, P. de Haan (2010), The sequential patterning of tactics: Activism in the global sports apparel industry, 1988–2002, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy Vol.30, No.11, pp.648-66

Why Are Some Public Officials More Corrupt Than Others?

Using detailed Peruvian data measuring bribery, I assess which types of public official are most corrupt and why. I distinguish between the bribery rate and the size of bribes received, and seek to explain the variation in each across public institutions. The characteristics of officials’ clients explain most of the variation for bribery rates, but none for bribe amounts. A measure of the speed of honest service at the institution explains much of the remaining variation for both bribery rates and amounts. The results indicate that the bribery rate is higher at institutions with bribe-prone clients, and that bribery rates and bribe amounts are higher where clients are frustrated at slow service. Faster and better service would reduce corruption. Overall, the judiciary and the police are by far the most corrupt institutions.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40176/3/wp790.pd

Social Media’s impact on Intellectual Property Rights

This is a draft chapter. The final version is available in Handbook of Research on Counterfeiting and Illicit Trade, edited by Peggy E. Chaudhry, published in 2017 by Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785366451. This material is for private use only, and cannot be used for any other purpose without further permission of the publisher.Peer reviewe

DETERMINING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INNOVATION: EXPLORING A DYNAMIC MODEL OF CUSTOMER RESPONSES IN NEGATIVE SERVICE ENCOUNTERS

Given a volatile business environment, enhancing customer experience has become a key resource that has transformed service innovation for business growth. While recent studies have investigated customer value co-creation, there is less knowledge about potential value co-destruction which is that customers respond to negative service encounters in vindictive and aggressive ways. This study aims to examine key triggers of customer negative emotions and propose human needs threat (HNT) as antecedents. This study has two stages. Firstly, the critical incident technique was used as the preliminary study. Secondly, empirical research involved the survey using online panels. Data from 318 respondents of various service contexts were analyzed through structural equation modeling. Finally, this study finds that HNT is a trigger for customer rage in service recovery failure. The findings highlight the challenges for service organizations in managing standards of customer service and ensuring that their employees, especially frontline employees, can monitor customers’ responses based on HNT. This study focuses on social psychology studies and examines that customer rage arises when individuals feel alienated and excluded in service recovery context as do in groups or in their personal relationships

Post-scandal Organizational (Dis)order: A Grounded-Theory Approach Shifting from Murphy’s Law to Safer Regulatory Environments

The literature shows that, in the wake of negative media exposition, organizations’ self-regulation tends to be strengthened. We investigate such motivation from the perspective of the psychosocial consequences in executives’ and organizational self-confidence. A grounded-theory approach supports findings from 27 different events described by top-level executives from major publicly traded organizations. Their testimonies document that scandalous episodes, when they occur, leave a trauma footprint within the organizational and individual consciousness because of the perceived post-event humiliation, remorse, guilt, and fear. The paradigm of reliance and trust in the designed structures is severely altered. In turn, a climate of excessive self-regulation explains the recovery from the traumatic experience. New boundaries for regulatory balance, also called “the confidence zone,” exists until design changes coalesce with organizational blame to create the perception that reputational safety has been achieved. Fears of subsequent media scrutiny are mitigated by the perception of moral safety based on governance. Consequently, the over-regulatory response comprises the organizations’ healing process as they recover from the psychosocial trauma caused by media exposition

Gender essentialism and occupational segregation in insolvency practice

Advances towards egalitarianism in professional recruitment may be offset by processes of occupational re-segregation. Drawing on gender theory this paper investigates horizontal segregation in the UK insolvency profession, as revealed through the lived experiences of female and male practitioners. It is shown that horizontal segregation pervades at different levels of practice and is undergirded by various elements of gender essentialism. Physical essentialism explains why insolvency practice has been traditionally gendered male. Interactional essentialism combines with the management of work-life balance to define the subfields of corporate and personal insolvency as masculine and feminine respectively. Gender essentialist assumptions also pervade the distribution of roles and the allocation of work tasks. Networks are identified as arenas for the reproduction and perpetuation of occupational segregation. The findings indicate the continuing potency of gender in everyday professional life, the limitations of diversity-orientated policies and the complexities of formulating transformative agendas

Strategic responses to regulatory threat in the credit card market

In November 1991, federal lawmakers threatened to place a binding cap on credit card interest rates. I find that credit card rates declined following the regulatory threat, more so for larger and more politically visible credit card issuers. A set of stock market event studies reveals that interest rate cuts announced after the threat led to positive abnormal returns, both for announcing issuers and their rivals. This pattern does not exist for similar rate cuts made outside the period of regulatory threat. The results suggest that firms may experience private benefits to price-cutting when doing so mitigates regulatory threat, and spillover benefits when another firm cuts prices in order to ease regulatory threat.Credit cards ; Consumer credit - Law and legislation