Anatomy of a Reversed Foreign Divestment Decision: General Motors and Its European Subsidiary, Opel.

During this recent period of economic crisis andrising unemployment, General Motors, the US multinational,announced its decision to sell off Opel, its loss-making Europeanoperations. Foreign divestment (FD) decisions are notoriouslysecret, and often very controversial, arousing strong opposition.Whilst such decisions are difficult to make, they are an essentialaspect of corporate international business strategy. Plantclosures that involve substantial lay-offs attract scrutiny fromgovernments and policy-makers. This paper explores the recentmajor divestment proposals by these two global auto producersand the subsequent negotiations with governments in the homeand host nations

Brazil and Biofuels for Autos: A Model for Other Nations

This paper examines the evolution ofgovernment policies in Brazil to encourage the switch frompetrol to ethanol, and the response of auto producers. It isshown that the USA and other nations are encouraging theuse of ethanol as an energy source, and suggests that thesuccess of Brazil may be repeated in other key automarkets

Enhancing an international perspective in public health teaching through formalized university partnerships

Teaching in the field of public health needs to employ a global perspective to account for the fact that public health problems and solutions have global determinants and implications as well. International university partnerships can promote such a perspective through the strengthening of cooperation, exchange, and communication between academic institutions across national boundaries. As an example for such an academic network in the field of public health, we introduce the International Public Health Partnership - a collaboration between a university in Germany and universities in India, Turkey, and Nigeria. Formed in 2005, it facilitated the exchange of information, fostered discussion about the transferability of public health concepts, contributed to the structural development of the universities involved, and promoted an intercultural dialog through a combination of local and distance learning activities. Although well accepted by students and staff, different obstacles were encountered; these included limited external funding, scarce own financial, time and personnel resources, and diverging regulations and structures of degree programs at the partnership sites. In the present article, we share several lessons that we learned during our joint collaboration and provide recommendations for other universities that are involved in partnerships with institutions of higher education or are interested to initiate such collaborations

The Determinants of Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure: The Case of Malaysian Government-Linked Companies in Malaysia

The implementation of Government-Linked Company (GLC) Transformation Program 2005/06 by government is one effort to promote Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) disclosures among its government-linked companies (GLCs). CSR issues are being stressed in the Silver Book included in the GLC Transformation Manual under the GLC Transformation Program 2005/06. It is questionable as to whether the introduction of the Silver Book really reflects goods prospects for government-linked companies to disclose their CSR, and whether there are any other factors that will influence the GLCs in Malaysia to disclose their CSR. Thus, the objective of this study is to examine whether the introduction of the Silver Book affect the CSR disclosure among Malaysian GLCs as well as to examine the determinants of CSR disclosure, focusing on the profitability, board size and board independence. Multiple linear regression analysis is being used to examine the relationship between all the independent variables and dependent variable. Findings show that there is an increasing trend in CSR disclosure among Malaysian GLCs from year 2011 until 2015. Two variables i.e. board size and board independence has been found to have a significant positive relationship with the CSR disclosure. This study gives implications to various parties such as Malaysian Government, Bursa Malaysia, Security Commission and other relevant parties in to improve CSR awareness, practices, disclosures and quality in GLCs

Contextual issues in the diffusion of innovation : The interaction of social networks and organizational knowledge

This paper discusses the linkages between Social Network Theory (Granovetter 1973) and Organizational Knowledge Theory (Polanyi 1966, Nonaka 1994; Nonaka, Toyama and Byosiere 2001) as it relates to diffusion of organizational innovation within large organizations. The focus is on examining these theoretical interrelationships in three case studies delving into major change projects in three large telecommunications firms. Findings indicate that weak ties are vital when the focus is on explicit knowledge while strong ties are vital when the focus is on tacit knowledge. Further, a model is posed to expand this theoretical interrelationship to include a third dimension: knowledge source