Why New Corporate Law Arises: Implications for the 21st Century

The corporate governance landscape is much different than a generation ago. Independent directors now hold a great majority of all board seats, institutional shareholders hold a supermajority of all shares in public corporations, and activist shareholders have become a recurring player in entity governance. In turn, other corporate stakeholders express increasing concern about shareholders’ use of their power for selfish reasons and the perceived pernicious impact of shareholder wealth maximization as a guide for corporate law. This chapter, part of a book on “The Corporate Contract in Changing Times” asks: Why does corporate law change and how it might change now? Corporate law changed regularly in the first half of our country’s history. A series of innovations followed one after another during the nineteenth century—limited liability; general incorporation statutes; a strong shift to director-centric corporate governance; authorization of corporations holding stock in other corporations; and the disappearance of ultra vires and other limits on corporate behavior. By the arrival of the twentieth century all the key economic elements of the modern corporation were in view and corporate law settled into a stable pattern we still see today. State law abandoned its prior regulatory approach and its continual change in favor of a director-centric structure with expansive room for private ordering that has remained remarkably stable. Federal law stepped in to restrain economic concentration (antitrust law), to protect employees and consumers against corporate power (done by industry regulation, employment and consumer laws not corporate governance), to limit corporate political contributions, and to make recurring, if sporadic and non-comprehensive, efforts to enhance the role of shareholders against managers. This chapter examines this history of change in corporate law in America, the dramatic and abrupt shift in the focus of state corporate law visible in last decade or so of the nineteenth century, the interactive pattern of state and federal law that has grown up over the second half of the country’s history and prominent theories explaining what leads to corporate law change. Together these various strands suggest there will be no fundamental change in state corporate law even in this time of visible stress to the now classic structure. Changes that we see is more likely to come from federal law or, as has been most visible in recent times, because of market and technological-driven changes outside of law

A State of the Art of Self Help Groups in India

This paper considers the strategies of self help group for micro-enterprise development in rural areas. It seeks to answer the question of whether and under which conditions self help groups are an effective vehicle for organizing and representing local people in the development of community based micro-enterprises. Focusing particularly on examples from India in the context of food as a local resource, special attention is paid to success and failure factors of self help groups. While self help group strategies have been applied in the past as a blind replication of success models without considering the intricacies involved in group formation, success of self help groups is based on a thorough understanding of local conditions and possibilities to intervene

Zapping index: Using smile to measure advertisement zapping likelihood

In marketing and advertising research, 'zapping' is defined as the action when a viewer stops watching a commercial. Researchers analyze users' behavior in order to prevent zapping which helps advertisers to design effective commercials. Since emotions can be used to engage consumers, in this paper, we leverage automated facial expression analysis to understand consumers' zapping behavior. Firstly, we provide an accurate moment-to-moment smile detection algorithm. Secondly, we formulate a binary classification problem (zapping/non-zapping) based on real-world scenarios, and adopt smile response as the feature to predict zapping. Thirdly, to cope with the lack of a metric in advertising evaluation, we propose a new metric called Zapping Index (ZI). ZI is a moment-to-moment measurement of a user's zapping probability. It gauges not only the reaction of a user, but also the preference of a user to commercials. Finally, extensive experiments are performed to provide insights and we make recommendations that will be useful to both advertisers and advertisement publishers

'No research is insignificant': implementing a Students-as-Researchers Festival

There are increasing demands for Higher Education (HE) students to play a role in research-active communities and, similarly, for College Based Higher Education (CBHE) lecturers to develop their research practices. A cross-consortium Student Research Festival was designed to create a collaborative 'community of discovery' (Coffield and Williamson, 2011) and enable final year students to disseminate their research studies to a wider audience. The Festival drew on current HE pedagogies to build an open communicative space in which the three dimensions of practice architecture (Kemmis et.al., 2014) were embodied. The Festival was evaluated through a Collaborative Action Research project in order to establish how the sharing of research contributed to the participants' identity as researchers. Data were analysed using the a priori categories afforded by the practice architecture framework. Valuable insights emerged into the students' conception of research, as detached from the 'real' world and belonging to the privileged few. These views were challenged by the experience of the Festival, which narrowed the gap between student and researcher and unsettled existing roles. Recommendations include widening the scope of the Festival to include other stakeholders and embedding further research building opportunities in the undergraduate curriculum

An Analysis of Service Ontologies

Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have been profiting from advances in ICT, but the decentralization and heterogeneity of the involved service entities still pose engineering challenges. One of these challenges is to achieve semantic interoperability among these autonomous entities. Semantic web technology aims at addressing this challenge on a large scale, and has matured over the last years. This is evident from the various efforts reported in the literature in which service knowledge is represented in terms of ontologies developed either in individual research projects or in standardization bodies. This paper aims at analyzing the most relevant service ontologies available today for their suitability to cope with the service semantic interoperability challenge. We take the vision of the Internet of Services (IoS) as our motivation to identify the requirements for service ontologies. We adopt a formal approach to ontology design and evaluation in our analysis. We start by defining informal competency questions derived from a motivating scenario, and we identify relevant concepts and properties in service ontologies that match the formal ontological representation of these questions. We analyze the service ontologies with our concepts and questions, so that each ontology is positioned and evaluated according to its utility. The gaps we identify as the result of our analysis provide an indication of open challenges and future work

Using big data for customer centric marketing

This chapter deliberates on “big data” and provides a short overview of business intelligence and emerging analytics. It underlines the importance of data for customer-centricity in marketing. This contribution contends that businesses ought to engage in marketing automation tools and apply them to create relevant, targeted customer experiences. Today’s business increasingly rely on digital media and mobile technologies as on-demand, real-time marketing has become more personalised than ever. Therefore, companies and brands are striving to nurture fruitful and long lasting relationships with customers. In a nutshell, this chapter explains why companies should recognise the value of data analysis and mobile applications as tools that drive consumer insights and engagement. It suggests that a strategic approach to big data could drive consumer preferences and may also help to improve the organisational performance.peer-reviewe

Addressing the cyber safety challenge: from risk to resilience

Addressing the cyber safety challenge: from risk to resilience describes the cyber safety issues emerging from a range of technology trends, how different populations are using technologies and the risks they face, and how we can effectively respond to each group’s unique cyber safety needs. Written by the University of Western Sydney for Telstra Corporation Ltd, the report advocates for continuing to move cyber safety from a ‘risk and protection’ framework to one that focuses on building digital resilience, as well as fostering trust and confidence in the online environment. To do this we need to: Address the needs of populations often neglected by current policies and programs – including adults, seniors, parents, and small to medium enterprises Continue to build the digital literacy skills of all populations, because digital literacy strongly influences users’ ability to engage safely online – this is best achieved by a hands-on learning approach Keep risk in perspective – the risks and benefits of digital participation go hand in hand Broaden the focus from awareness-raising to long-term behaviour change. As digital technologies become further integrated into the everyday lives of Australians, users are potentially exposed to greater risks. However, the risks and benefits of digital participation go hand in hand. The challenge, therefore, is to support users to minimise the risks without limiting their digital participation and their capacity to derive the full benefits of connectivity. If Australians are to benefit as either consumers or providers of online services and products in the e-commerce environment, consumer safety and trust need to be improved. Cyber safety needs to be considered against a transforming backdrop of technology trends, products and practices. While the rise of social media has tended to dominate recent debate and developments in cyber safety, particularly in relation to young people, a range of other trends is also shaping how users engage online, the risks they potentially face in the new media landscape, and the strategies used to address them. These trends include the rise of user generated content and content sharing platforms; the uptake of mobile technologies and, in particular, the adoption of smartphones; cloud computing; platform integration and single sign-on mechanisms; and the rise of GPS and location based services

Three Essays on the Empowerment Role of Information Technology in Healthcare Services

Information technology (IT) is empowering consumers, service providers, and inventor teams with superior services. Various IT innovations are enabling diverse groups of people to search, exchange, and learn from information. In healthcare services, the context of the three essays of this dissertation, information resources are often not equally accessible to consumers, not transparent between patients and physicians, and hard to locate across technological domains that may be relevant to the development of breakthrough innovations. Focusing on empowering roles of IT in healthcare services, I develop a three-essay dissertation to study how IT can enable information access to (i) address health inequalities in developing regions of the world, (ii) strengthen the physician-patient relationship where patient trust in the physician has atrophied, and (iii) energize inventor teams in the development of medical device innovations. Essay 1 examines consumers’ awareness and use of mobile health that can empower consumers to access health advice information. Essay 2 investigates how online health consultation communities can empower physicians to build trust with patients, and gain social and economic advantages in competitive healthcare services. Essay 3 studies the role of digital capabilities to empower inventor teams in medical device companies by converting expertise of inventor teams into broad and deep knowledge capital and expanding knowledge production regarding medical device innovations. I adopt a pluralistic approach to collect data (surveys administered in multiple languages for Essay 1, scraping web data from online communities for Essay 2, and constructing a multisource archival panel dataset for Essay 3) and analyze data (multivariate analysis for Essay 1, multilevel modeling and econometrics for Essay 2 and Essay 3). The essays contribute to our understanding about the acceptance of empowering IT innovations, the empowering role of user-generated content in online communities for providers of credence services, and the empowering role of IT for inventor teams of healthcare innovations

Empowering email marketing

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore an empowering email marketing strategy that marketers can use for effective, modern email marketing. It describes the strategic transformation of email marketing from one-way persuasive communication to customized two-way interaction using Pettigrew´s (1987) context, content, process (CCP) framework. Consumer empowerment is used as the specific context in which email marketing takes place, and the content and process of email marketing are examined in relation to it. Changes in the business environment, accelerated by the Internet, have shifted the power dynamic between consumers and organizations, transforming their relationship from reactive transaction to proactive collaboration. This has created a need to move beyond persuasive marketing to more interactive and tailored communication. Compared to other interactive marketing practices, such as social media or mobile apps, email seems to be stuck in old, inefficient ways of implementation. Consumers view marketing emails as annoying and irrelevant, even though marketers have better opportunities than ever before to use consumer data to tailor and target messages according to consumer expectations. The research consists of three sub-studies: a systematic literature review using inductive qualitative analysis, and two online controlled experiments using different deductive quantitative analysis methods. It evaluates real-world consumer behavior and seeks to answer the main research question: What are the implications of an organization’s adoption of an empowering email marketing strategy? The dissertation proposes that adopting an empowering email marketing strategy requires advanced first-party data management that enables interaction. Email marketing should be based on permission, and the contents of emails should be tailored to the preferences of the individual recipients, but by directly asking about their preferences rather than inferring them from observed data. According to the study’s empirical findings, content matters: relevant content and active engagement improve behavioral email marketing results (open rates, click-to-open rates, and conversion rates). The study also recommends testing email content in the marketer's own operational environment.Voimaannuttava sähköpostimarkkinointi Väitöskirjassa tutkitaan voimaannuttavan sähköpostimarkkinoinnin strategiaa, jota markkinoijat voivat käyttää tehokkaaseen, nykyaikaiseen markkinointiviestintään. Tutkimus kuvaa sähköpostimarkkinoinnin muutosta yksisuuntaisesta massaviestinnästä räätälöidyksi kaksisuuntaiseksi vuorovaikutukseksi käyttäen viitekehyksenä Pettigrew'n (1987) organisaatiomuutoksen kontekstia, sisältöä ja prosessia kuvaavaa mallia. Kontekstina on kuluttajien voimaantuminen, jonka puitteissa tarkastellaan sähköpostimarkkinoinnin sisältöä ja prosessia. Internetin kiihdyttämät muutokset liiketoimintaympäristössä ovat muuttaneet kuluttajien ja organisaatioiden välisiä valtasuhteita ja tehneet reaktiivisesta vaihdannasta aktiivista yhteistyötä. Muutoksen myötä on tullut tarve siirtyä suostuttelevasta massamarkkinoinnista vuorovaikutteisempaan ja räätälöidympään viestintään. Muihin interaktiivisen markkinoinnin muotoihin, kuten sosiaaliseen mediaan tai mobiilisovelluksiin verrattuna, sähköposti näyttää kuitenkin juuttuneen vanhoihin, tehottomiin toteutustapoihin. Kuluttajat pitävät markkinointisähköposteja ärsyttävinä ja turhina, vaikka markkinoijilla olisi aiempaa paremmat mahdollisuudet käyttää kuluttajatietoja viestien räätälöimiseen ja kohdistamiseen. Tutkimus etenee kolmen osatutkimuksen kautta. Systemaattisessa kirjallisuuskatsauksessa käytetään induktiivista kvalitatiivista analyysiä ja kahdessa koeasetelmassa käytetään deduktiivisia kvantitatiivisia analyysimenetelmiä. Työ arvioi kuluttajien käyttäytymistä todellisessa päätöksentekotilanteessa ja etsii vastausta kysymykseen: Millaisia vaikutuksia voimaannuttavan sähköpostimarkkinointistrategian omaksumisesta on organisaatioille? Väitöskirja esittää, että voimaannuttavan sähköpostimarkkinointistrategian omaksuminen edellyttää kehittynyttä, vuorovaikutuksen mahdollistavaa ensimmäisen osapuolen tiedonhallintaa. Sähköpostimarkkinoinnin tulee perustua lupaan ja sisältöön, joka on räätälöity yksittäisten vastaanottajien mieltymysten mukaan kysymällä suoraan heidän mieltymyksistään havaitun datan hyödyntämisen sijaan. Empiiristen tulosten mukaan uutiskirjeen sisällöllä on väliä: relevantti sisältö ja vuorovaikutus parantavat käyttäytymiseen perustuvia sähköpostimarkkinoinnin tuloksia (avauksia, klikkauksia ja konversioita). Tutkimus suosittelee sähköpostin sisällön testaamista markkinoijan omassa toimintaympäristössä