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The study aims to examine students' actual ethical decision-making in response to business ethics education. In the post-Enron era, ethics frauds are continually a big concern for organizations. Both practitioners and scholars demand an ethics emphasis in business education. The literature heavily relies on the self-reported survey method to examine the quality of business ethics education. Such a research method can examine the education effect on students' perceptions about ethics issues. However, it does not provide strong evidence on how students act to respond the ethics education. It is important to study the behavior effect of business education because society is affected by actual behaviors rather than understanding any issues. The present study aims to answer the research question of how business ethics education affects students' ethical decision-making when monetary incentives for unethical behavior exist. I used a one-by-two controlled lab experiment to study the research question where students request production funds. Students can request an amount greater than actual need and keep the excessive amount as personal benefit. The higher excessive difference suggests a high level of unethical behavior. The result shows that students who have ethics education experience requested a greater amount than students who have no ethics education experience. The result suggests that students with ethics education are less ethical than students without such an education. The result suggests that the current business ethics education in school is not effective as it is supposed to be. Given the self-interest culture of modern society, the current ethics education helps students understand the theory and systems of business ethics, making it easier for students to identify the systems' loopholes. They can take advantage of such loopholes for gaining self-interests. The current ethics education system should not only focus on improving students' understanding about the ethics issues but influencing students' behaviors in ethical decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis probes the relationship between people's preferences for redistribution and their economic self-interest. We analyze personal finance and political opinion data from 30 countries included in the 2009 ISSP to analyze whether respondents' personal income, financial wealth, or housing wealth are related to their opinions about economic redistribution, poor aid, and unemployment support. Although we find some very modest evidence of a relationship between income and preferences in liberal welfare states, and between home equity, financial wealth, and preferences in Nordic countries, the limited evidence of broader patterns within our data and the small effect sizes of personal finance measures call into question the importance of these metrics for politics as they are portrayed in popular media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research question: Why do some people evaluate income inequality as too high whereas others do not? Aside from national context, self-interest, and party loyalty, does personality, specifically envy, matter? Key findings: (1) Envy has a moderately strong relationship with seeing the current income distribution as too unequal (total effect). (2) This effect persists unchanged after taking family background, demographics, and current social class/stratification position into account. (3) It persists when we also control perceived self-interest. (4) Part of the effect is indirect through political party preference, but the direct effect of envy remains moderately important even when party is taken into account. Data and methods: Internet survey using MTurk of the general population; descriptive statistics; factor analysis for scale construction; OLS regression analysis. Theoretical implications: Support for a multi-disciplinary approach to attitude formation theory emphasizing social-psychological as well as sociological and political roots of public opinion and policy-relevant attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Waze, a mobile navigation app, attracts user engagement by connecting its users with others while driving. In this context, user engagement crowdsources primary information, follow-up feedback, and collective confirmation. This paper addresses whether and how user contribution leads to the desirable effects on social welfare by relieving traffic jams around urban areas. Utilizing large-scale data on Waze users' behaviors and locations, we apply a spatial panel data approach to estimating the welfare value of user-crowdsourced content. Empirical results indicate that user contribution reduces the duration of traffic congestion in New York City. A welfare analysis estimates that user contribution saves 2.28% of annual total congestion cost per driver, $2,533, in the city. These social-welfare consequences are achieved by user contribution that is effective in saving social and economic costs and improving the mobility of urban transportation. We discuss implications for practice of mobile app design and policy on urban transportation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moving beyond literature's rather transactional approaches, emphasizing deterrence, self-interest, and rewards in exchange for employees' information security policy (ISP) compliance, we apply a meso level perspective encompassing a relational approach to understand why individuals engage in security in- and extra-role behaviors. Drawing on relational models theory, we examine how social relations affect ISP compliance and voicing behavior. We conducted a study, where employees responded to business emails tailored to the four elementary forms of social relations and that included requests for violating ISPs. Our results provide first empirical evidence that individuals organizing their social relationships according to market pricing and communal sharing are more likely to engage in ISP compliance and voicing than individuals in equality matching and authority ranking relationships. Additional findings include interesting behavioral security patterns, such as evasion and postponing, which provide interesting avenues for further research on individual security behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study that seeks to examine the impact of message source and content on audiences receiving messages that advocate or oppose workplace protection laws by comparing the levels of perceived self-interest and persuasiveness between heterosexual and gay advocates. It mentions about the impact of differences in sexual orientation on attitudes toward advocates and message content.

Research on political culture and civic engagement identifies individualistic cultural preferences and commitments as major impediments to widespread social and political change. Scholars have argued that cultural individualism reinforces explanations of social problems that focus on individual choice, dampening efforts to reform the structural and systemic conditions that produce and sustain inequalities. This study takes an alternative approach by demonstrating that individualism is central to diverse, multiissue social justice movements in the field of faith-based community organizing. Drawing upon two qualitative datasets, we illustrate how one movement organization uses a range of cultural practices to affirm, reorient, and ultimately co-opt members' individualistic cultural commitments and preferences. Through practices that link individuals' subjective self-interest to an overarching cultural framework that interrogates and condemns institutional racism, our case organization brings members to internalize a moral worldview that encourages multi-issue activism by situating the interests of individuals and families within a collective cultural framework. The coalition thus combats segmentation among progressive movements by unifying activists across racial and socioeconomic differences and linking discrete movements that protest systemic injustice in policing and sentencing, immigration, education, the labor market, and other institutional contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The self-interest behavior of managers has been an issue that has plagued corporations for years. Agency theory seeks to explain the problems related to managerial and ownership divergences. Two methods of regulating the agency problem are the monitoring function of board governance and distribution of incentives. The board monitors the agent's decision making by conducting audits and performance evaluations, as well as communicating objectives and interests to the agent on behalf of the principal. Incentives seek to align the objectives of the principal to those of the agent. These incentives may be performance-based, stock options, or bonuses. This study proposes to address the theory supporting the agency problem, examine the monitoring function of corporate governance limiting agency costs, analyze non-profit board structure, examine incentive mechanisms, and identify an empirical analysis of how incentives and board structure regulate agent decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While self-interest has traditionally been conceptualized as an individualistic function of homo economicus, work in sociology has begun to problematize this notion. To what degree is selfinterest collectively constructed? Is self-interest constituted using broader moral norms? This article uses semi-structured interviews to investigate the different conceptualizations of selfinterest employed by voters during their evaluation of direct democratic regulation of illegal immigrant labor in Arizona. I find that across income level and political party respondents who identify as voting out of self-interest are either unable to separate their self-interest from society's interest or constitute their self-interest using broader moral norms. This research is important because it finds that even during the pursuit of self-interest in market behavior, individuals attempt to contribute to the common good. Furthermore, my findings help shed light on processes through which self-interest is collectively constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In existing theories of human behavior the concept of self-interest is of immense significance. Debates over the self-interest in the economic theory have grown in scale as models of individual economic behavior within the rational choice theory and economic theory of welfare gained currency. The aim of the study is to explore modern concepts of self-interest and reveal trends in development of the self-interest theory as based on identification of preconditions, factors and criteria of rational behavior in hired personnel within an organization which is driven by the self-interest. The methods of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, analogy were employed in the study. Findings of the study: boundedly rational nature of the self-interest was revealed in the organization personnel; prescriptive nature of personal interest impact on behavior was revealed in the organization personnel; methodological aspects of self-interest identification in hired personnel were implemented based on analysis of their conscious rational behavior within the organization; practical prerequisites for economic behavior in personnel were identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here, I argue that because power increases goal orientation, leaders with self-focused goals (arising from, for instance, narcissism or individualism) or whose power is threatened (e.g., from self-doubt) will be especially likely to use their position for self-benefit, to the neglect of group and organizational needs. Supporting evidence is reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is basically an attempt at an original conceptual reconstruction of Hobbes' philosophy as set in Lehiathan, namely one in the view of which Hobbes was neither an atheist nor an absolutist, as the standard interpretation holds, but rather what we could call an agnostical pragmatist (fact which, quite surprisingly, places Hobbes in the company of Burke). More to the point, my basic claim within this paper is that Hobbes was not such an 'enemy of individual freedom' as we traditionally hold him to be and that his thought was just as attached to the notion of individual freedom as the later contractualist views. The difference however, arises from the fact that Hobbes, unlike Locke, Rousseau or Kant, was what we could call a voluntaristic determinist and consequently viewed human freedom not so much as 'unhindered action derived from reflective choice', but rather as what we could call 'reasonable fulfillment of the basic human inclinations' (self-interest). As such, I will analyze the three main focal points of Hobbes' thought, namely (i) human nature, (ii) the principle of association and (iii) the principle of authority. More specifically I will try to offer a perspective on the link between his voluntaristic determinism, his notion of legitimate absolute coercion (sovereignity) and his political theology (the view that any form of political authority rests on a religious legitimacy) in trying to demonstrate how all these were Hobbes' specific way of seeking to find individual freedom a place under the sun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some social benefits enjoy continuous and high support while other does not? Why is there a high and continuous support for spending on state pensions, while there is a widespread resistance to spending on social assistance? The literature on individual welfare attitudes offers three overall micro level explanations of this. One possible explanation is that attitudes are based calculations self-interest, that is, personal gains from the social benefits. Another explanation is that attitudes are rooted in norms of social justice, either created by deep rooted values or by deservingness cues. Finally, a third explanation describes how attitudes are shaped by feedback from policies. These explanations are explored using data on attitudes towards five social benefits in Denmark. The unique feature of the data is that it contains detailed selfreported usage and proximity to the social benefits, enabling the paper to go into further details on this, than previous studies. Furthermore, the interplay between being proximate to social benefit and the perceived deservingness of the target groups is theorized and tested. The hypothesis is that for social benefits in which the group of recipients is perceived as undeserving, the effect of being proximate is bigger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consider a matching problem on a graph where disjoint sets of vertices are privately owned by self-interested agents. An edge between a pair of vertices indicates compatibility and allows the vertices to match. We seek a mechanism to maximize the number of matches despite self-interest, with agents that each want to maximize the number of their own vertices that match. Each agent can choose to hide some of its vertices, and then privately match the hidden vertices with any of its own vertices that go unmatched by the mechanism. A prominent application of this model is to kidney exchange, where agents correspond to hospitals and vertices to donor-patient pairs. Here hospitals may game an exchange by holding back pairs and harm social welfare. In this paper we seek to design mechanisms that are strategy proof, in the sense that agents cannot benefit from hiding vertices, and approximately maximize efficiency, i.e., produce a matching that is close in cardinality to the maximum cardinality matching. Our main result is the design and analysis of the eponymous Mix-and-Match mechanism; we show that this randomized mechanism is strategyproof and provides a 2-approximation. Lower bounds establish that the mechanism is near optimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on projections of "peak oil," the imminent peak of the global oil supply, a community-building movement developed in the new millennium. This organizing has increasingly also incorporated the possibility of social disruption due to catastrophic climate change in its diagnosis. The best-known network that is part of this larger movement is the Transition Towns network, which began in the U.K. and has since spread to the U.S. and elsewhere. The persistence of the movement following the dramatic drop in the price of oil and the increase in the supply in natural gas based on fracking reveals its motivation to be more than immediate economic self-interest. In the context of worldsystem inequality and calls for climate justice, the movement is an important example of action in the North to reduce disproportionate consumption. This paper analyzes the movement focusing on movement intellectuals, mainly based on websites and books, in preparation for ethnographic research on local activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses organizational theory in the context of chief executive officers' identification with the firm and the effect of organizational commitment on agency costs. The hypothesis is that an executive whose self identity is strongly connected to the company's identity or corporate image are motivated to reduce agency costs for the firm and its stakeholders. Corporate governance, self-interest and motivation in chief executive officers, unrelated corporate diversification, and the use of management controls are also discussed.

Are humans motivated solely by self-interests? Or are they also driven by values concerning altruism and equality? Those are among the fundamental questions long under debate in social sciences. The observation that humans routinely perform acts that are cooperative or other-benefiting does not resolve the controversy easily, as such behaviors could just be strategies to maximize self-interest in the long run or in response to incentives in the social environment. It thus has been a challenge for researchers to demonstrate empirically that other motives, such as altruistic or prosocial values internalized by individuals, exert non-negligible influence on actual behavior, net of any long-term self-interested strategic calculation. This research examines the value-behavior relation using games with non-trivial monetary incentives. Firstly, individuals' value priorities are measured through the Schwartz value questionnaire. Then, self-focus interventions are employed to enhance individuals' self-awareness without their knowledge. Finally, participants play the one-shot "dictator" game where one unilaterally decides how to divide a given sum of money between oneself and another person. The game's structure offers no incentive for a purely self-interested player to allocate money to the other player. The results, however, show that a non-trivial portion of the money is allocated to the other person. Furthermore, we find significant correlations between individuals' self reported value priorities and their non-egoistic allocation behavior. But we do not find self-awareness to differentially impact people whose value priorities differ. Instead, aroused self-awareness seems to enhance individuals' prosocial tendencies regardless of their value priorities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self interest, customer value, and psychology are integrated via a systems perspective. Using a perspective based on evolutionary psychology and cultural anthropology, social responsibility, a pro-social predisposition, and an ethical foundation are shown to complement the economics of self interest in the creation of a stable social order. The basis of a pro-social model is explored as a more rational and moral model replacing the hedonistic economic model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers often assume that high performance is self-fueling, overlooking important processes through which success can reduce future performance. We develop a theoretical model of the "price of success" that specifies three mechanisms through which success increases the probability of failure. We discuss implications for work motivation, performance, adaptation, and resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on synergy in corporations through supply chain collaboration. Success in business comes through many factors including input collaboration from partners in a supply chain and inter-organizational relationships. Supply chain collaboration includes linking activities such as investments and decision making across organizational boundaries. However, success in such collaboration depends upon each party focusing on the interests of the whole rather than self-interests as well as compatibility.

Exploring the evolution of digital television in China: An interplay between economic and political interestsAbstract This paper argues that the primary obstacles facing the transition to digital TV involve: (1) administrative infighting, (2) heavy-handed policymaking processes, and (3) the pursuit of self-interest and centralized control by the state network. After profiling China's television infrastructure, the paper concludes that the Communist Party's current policy initiative for the development of its digital television industry is not feasible. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that perspectives such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Workplace Spirituality (WPS) do not go far enough in mitigating the negative consequences of organizational and managerial practices based on self-interest. We suggest an alternative framework based on the notion of practical compassion and illustrate the framework with examples. We conclude with suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at ways to integrate different organizational structures for the benefit of executives and scholars that must select the optimum organizational structure. Markets, hierarchies, and clans are the focus of a proposed taxonomy that would use two dimensions to identify organizational types utilizing the variety of contemporary organizational structures. The transaction specification dimension defines the continuum ranging from ambiguous to unambiguous transactions. The motivation dimension defines the continuum ranging from self-interest to a need to belong within a group. The four organizational types theorized in the article are markets, bureaucracies, clans, and democracies.

This paper offers a substantive discussion of the multiple levels of analysis involved in macro-sociological explanation. In so doing it also criticizes the renewed emphasis on individualistic explanation found in much contemporary sociological theory. For illustrative material it returns to intellectual uses of Weber's "Protestant Ethic thesis," showing how an artificial version has been employed as a kind of proof text for an alleged scientific necessity of individualist explanation. The core of the article reconstructs the discussion of Protestantism and capitalism in an explicitly multi-level way, differentiating possible individual-level, social-organizational, and institutional linkages. We show that the causal processes involved are independent ones, with the more structural forms neither plausibly reducible to individual-level ones nor realistically attainable via individual-level reasoning. We argue more generally that methodological and theoretical individualisms typically conflate issues of explanation with issues having to do with the ontological microfoundations of social life. This persistent intellectual conflation seems to have cultural sources, specifically the extraordinary cognitive and normative standing of individualism in contemporary folk and policy models of society. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the emergence of new cultural repertoires of action within the American corporation due to the massive presence of psychology and the massive intervention of psychologists in the work process since the 1930s. The paper makes two main claims: 1. Under the aegis of psychologists, the deployment of rationality inside economic organizations counter intuitively went hand-in-hand with an intensification of emotional life. Psychologists, acting simultaneously as professionals and as producers of culture, have not only codified emotional conduct inside the workplace, but also and maybe more crucially made "self-interest," "efficiency," and "instrumentality" into cultural repertoires which shaped and guided action. 2. The cultural repertoires of "self-interest" and "efficiency" -derived from the marketâ?”when intertwined with the emotional models offered by psychologists, generated new models of sociability, most noticeably the model of "communication." Such models of sociability have in turn transformed the definition and exercise of power. Under the cultural influence of psychological cultural frames and strategies of action, power becomes divorced from the outward display of hostility and from the defense of one's honor, which have traditionally been attributes of the display of male power. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the center of the debate about trends in civic engagement are concerns about whether civic life is in decline or merely changing forms and concerns about the tensions between individualism and altruism, self-interest and public interests. In this case study of a long-distance charity bike ride to benefit an AIDS service provider, I shed new light on the debate by showing how civic organizations can mediate these tensions and create a successful volunteer event that combines self-interested recreation with altruistic voluntarism. Organizers of the event used socialization, symbolism, and a "culture of caring" in order to remind volunteer bike riders of the connection between cycling and HIV/AIDS. The result was a highly successful event that yielded high rates of satisfaction, feelings of group cohesion and social solidarity, and new personal identification with the cause. I argue that this new form of civic engagement, called "civic recreation," shows the creativity and new possibilities that organizations can take advantage of in changing conditions of civic engagement. It further shows how the tensions between self-interest and public interest are not only undermined, but also can be beneficial to civic groups. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper argues that a central reason why half of the citizens of the United States are presently being diagnosed with a mental health disorder lies within certain pathogenic elements in the American culture of individualism. The same pathogenic elements are equally to be found within the European American paradigm of mental health and within the culture of psychotherapy, which dominates American society at the dawn of the Third Millennium. American Individualism, spawned by the Protestant ethic, fueled through centuries of immigration, and strengthened by capitalism and the scientific/technological paradigm, has been transformed into a prison by our present culture of psychotherapy. The discipline of Psychotherapy, invented to support and heal middle class European family through the existential trauma of industrialization and the scientific paradigm, has actually exacerbated the illness of western society, by further undermining the institution of the family, and further discombobulating the already confused meanings of our Judeo-Christian heritage. The paper postulates that there are three essential conditions for human and societal welfare: Physical Nurture, Contextual Authority and Interpersonal Attachment. These conditions, when present in balance, allow human beings to survive through the life span, and allow societies to prosper through generations and beyond. In present day America, the unraveling of Family cohesion has weakened the condition of interpersonal attachment and the unraveling of Meaning has weakened the condition of Contextual Authority. As a result, American Consumer Culture is sinking into a desperate struggle to over satisfy our thirst for the third condition, Physical Nurture. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Model Minority Myth is a popular theme in studies of Asian Americans. We critique this theme on several grounds. First, key methodological aspects of the Model Minority Myth are based on faulty statistical reasoning. Second, the empirical status of the hypotheses derived from the Model Minority Myth appears to be largely false. Third, the political arguments usually associated with the Model Minority Myth are overly simplistic and based on faulty logic. We argue that the Model Minority Myth persists because it promotes the socioeconomic self-interests of the professors who currently control the Asian American Studies establishment that in turn provides political legitimacy for the universities that employ them. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consider a society with pre-existing subgroups based on qualitative characteristics such as race, gender, or ethnicity. Mechanisms based on sociobehavioral engines such as self-esteem, justice, or status generate an individual's orientation and loyalty to one of three entities: self, subgroup, or society. Because these propensities are generated in everyone -- that is, in all pre-existing subgroups -- there arise three new emergent subgroups -- Selfistas, Subgroupistas, and Groupistas -- each of which includes persons from all the pre-existing subgroups and thus may be thought of as a coalition. A recent paper introduced the framework for analyzing Selfistas, Subgroupistas, and Groupistas, and presented results for the special case in which the sociobehavioral engine is the sense of justice (Jasso 2005). This new paper extends the work, deriving predictions for the cases in which the sociobehavioral engines are status and potential power. This new paper then contrasts all the results, thus answering the question, What are the effects of caring about one sociobehavioral engine rather than another and what are the effects of valuing one kind of resource versus another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his primary work, Culture's Consequences, Geert Hofstede (1980) claims that culture influences national development along five dimensions: Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism-Collectivism, Masculinity-Femininity, and Long-Term Orientation. A wide range of research has been conducted to validate the existence of cultural differences along the lines of his original findings (Nasierowski and Mikula, 1998; Offermann and Hellmann, 1997; Scramm-Nielsen, 2000; van Oudenhoven, 2001). Yet most of this work, including Hofstede's, has been conducted without examining the reliability of the measurement indices. We developed an Uncertainty Avoidance Index based on Hofstede's model, and found that the individual items lacked sufficient internal consistency to be considered an adequate measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses changing perspectives on individualism. The author in this article develops an argument about embeddedness of the self and shows how the study of personal narratives can contribute to the understanding of social values of "strong selves." It has been noted that individual identities now have become so important that common purposes of a society are difficult to pursue. The author contends that the view of embedded self provides a way of retrieving the moral dimension of traditional understandings of American individualism and of recognizing the continuing importance of individual responsibility in community-oriented appeals.

This section presents abstracts of conference papers about managerial and organizational decision making. Some of the abstracts include "Emotional Intelligence and Communication Perceptions During Conflict and Decision Making," focusing on how business intelligence helps organizational effectiveness, "Knowledge Sharing and Team Effectiveness in Challenging Organizational Environments," about how management teams benefit from external knowledge, and "A Small World After All? Network Perceptions Versus Reality," that discusses how social networks can affect an organization.

This work is one of the first attempts to explicitly target the issue of network attrition. It goes beyond the dichotomy of self-interest versus ?collective logic? in seeking to illuminate a concrete set of mechanisms that reinforces membership in social structures. The analysis demonstrates that performance indicators are insufficient to account for the observed patterns of network departure. The social content of ties, much more so than the resources flowing through them or the perception of membership benefit, is responsible for the observed patterns of member retention. The analysis lends credence to sociological arguments about membership ?faithfulness?, without discounting altogether the role of self-interest in sustaining participation in the network. At the individual level of analysis, a notable finding is the primacy of perceived integration in the group over status-maintenance as a mechanism for enhanced membership loyalty. Identification with positive role models and the perception of a friendly environment provide much more powerful incentives for continued membership than the prestige accorded via nominations by network peers. At the group level, the results suggest that the distribution of ties, rather than their volume, matters for membership commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The neoclassical-economics assumption of rational self-interest as the basis for human behavior has been challenged by many sociologists who provide alternative behavioral explanations. However, many scholars would concede that self-interest does play a role in behavior. This paper explores the conditions of the implicit employment contract under which rational self-interest prevails in the work milieu. There is a significant body of literature on changes to the psychological contract for managers and professionals. This paper examines the transformation in the past two decades in the lived experiences and meaning generation of employees in the context of the political economy. It examines the role of firm practices, through the psychological contract, in the diffusion of neoliberal ideology. Drawing upon the experiences of twenty core-professional employees, working in the United States for a multi-national company, I find a collectively-shared story of work. The ?market? is regarded as the governing force driving firm actions and controlling employee wellbeing. There is a shift away from the rhetoric of meritocracy and performance over time to decisions based on instantaneous cost-benefit analyses of employees as the criterion for continued employment. These changes have resulted in the primacy of self-interest for employees, affecting collaboration and commitment to firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many narrative case studies of black migrants have been conducted in the cities, towns, and rural areas all over America. These narratives illustrate the complexity of causal processes involved in black migration by drawing attention to the fact that causal processes vary dramatically across space, time, and populations. Recent quantitative work on black migration systematically refers to earlier narrative case study work to gain legitimacy and authority when justifying the selection of populations, comparison groups, sample parameters, and time periods for empirical analyses. The embrace of economic theories of migration has resulted in explanations for black migration that focus on economic self-interest to the neglect of explanations that place the intersection among local cultural and social organization, social networks, and individual agency at the center of analysis. Have scholars have substituted disciplinary convention and the availability of relevant data for case specific theory development with respect to American black migration in the 20th century? In this essay I argue that structural approaches have their place in holistic causal accounts of black migration given the relative importance and contingent influence of structured economic forces on black migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have found social dilemmas to be useful tools for studying the emergence of bottom-up cooperation and social order. The majority of formal work in this area focuses on either dyadic interactions or undifferentiated groups. In this paper, I formally model the role of network structure on cooperation in social dilemmas using backwards-looking adaptive actors. The model considers network size and structure as well as whether actors use local strategies tailored to specific alters or generalized global strategies. Results indicate that large networks in which actors use global strategies achieve both the highest and lowest levels of cooperation, and that network structure plays a defining role under these circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents abstracts of articles on the strategic behavior of several public and nonprofit organizations. In May 2000, Russian President Vladimir Putin merged the Russian State Committee for the Protection of the Natural Environment into the Russian Ministry for Natural Resources. In the absence of an independent state ministry for environmental protection, the Russian Environmental Movement will be looked upon to fill the void left by a retreating state. The ability of the environmental movement to fill such gap and its contribution to the development of Russian civil society through the lens of social capital. The relationship between managerial quality and citizens' trust in government and in public administration systems is a promising field of study. It is necessary to explore some interrelationships among these variables and empirically test causality between performance and trust. Public pension plans in the U.S., the pension plans of public sector state, county and municipal employees, play a large role in capital markets and corporate governance debates. The public pension plans are institutions of great socio-economic significance, which provide a largely unintentional linkage between the public and private sectors.

Group organizational citizenship behavior (GOCB) is conceptualized as a distinct group-level phenomenon concerning the extent to which the work group as a whole engages in OCB. Among a sample of 148 work groups (a total of 743 employees), it was found that individual OCB was consistent within groups and that the difference between OCB among groups was greater than the difference between OCB among members within a group, suggesting that group OCB is a meaningful construct. Furthermore, the present study investigated the antecedents and consequences of group OCB in a large commercial back. We found that group OCB was positively influenced by the organizational justice climate, work group leadership support, and work group cohesiveness. We also found that the positive effect of group personality similarity in negative affectivity was fully mediated by group cohesiveness. Meanwhile, group OCB was found to have unique positive impact on work group performance, employee individual performance, and a negative effect on employee turnover intention. The theoretical and empirical implications of this study are discussed in the context of the service organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the notion of symbolic decoupling where organizations adopt formal policies that its constituents value while not actually utilizing those policies in organizational practices. The authors seek to examine decoupling and to see if the consumer can see through it and discount its value. As an example, the authors look at a stock repurchase plan. In theory, repurchase plans state that some amount of the free cash will be returned to shareholders but in practice it often happens that managers use that cash instead of returning it to investors. This study looks at decoupling during the late 1980s to see if market returns would diminish as evidence of decoupling adds up.

Organizational decision-making scholars often argue that efforts to build management consensus decrease process efficiency, while attempts to enhance efficiency inhibit the development of consensus. This study examines how managers make strategic decisions efficiently and simultaneously build management consensus. The findings suggest that groups achieve high levels of efficiency and consensus by overcoming the cognitive and social-emotional obstacles associated with making complex, ill-structured decisions. In particular, they engage in two interrelated processes that instill structure and objectivity into deliberations that are quite naturally ill-structured, emotional, and fraught with personal biases. In the structuring process, the more effective groups make difficult problems more tractable by forging a series of intermediate agreements about particular elements of a problem. Consequently, they develop closure over time, rather than trying to obtain it in a single act of choice. In the objectifying process, the high efficiency/high consensus groups promote candid debate that focuses on issues rather than personalities and organizational goals rather than narrow self-interest. They encourage authentic and legitimate deliberations, and discourage attempts to pre-ordain the decision through manipulation of the alternative generation and evaluation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effectiveness of managers is analyzed from the reputational viewpoint. It is proposed that focal managers gain the reputation of being effective by meeting the self-interested expectations of role set members. It is further suggested that organizations value the most reputationally effective managers. Five hypotheses were tested using a sample of 217 middle managers, 173 superiors, 387 subordinates and 303 peers. Results confirm all five hypotheses and provides the foundation for a new direction of research in managerial effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A matched-pairs field study examined power attributions by female and male managers and their subordinates. Male managers' subordinates made more internal and external attributions of their compliance than female managers' subordinates. Female subordinates attributed their compliance to self-interest; their managers saw altruism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethical structures (codes, review committees, etc.) can contribute to reducing transaction costs. Transaction cost analysis must be supplemented by institutional theory, however, if the full cost-reducing potential of ethical structures is to be explained. "Good ethics" can be "good business," but only if the ethics are institutionalized across markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An experiment was designed to test the theory that monitoring by the principal would interact with the presence of a tradition to affect the extent to which a compensation agreement, negotiated between the principal and the agent, would include a performance contingency. Data gathered from 40 dyads supported the prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tested the hypothesis that the congruence between motives for volunteering and types of incentives offered would have a positive impact on attitudes toward volunteering and performance. The effects of congruence between altruistic motives and incentives, and the congruence between self-interested motives and incentives supported the hypothesis with respect to attitudes but not performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing literature has proposed several reasons for income smoothing by banks. Among them, tax incentives, managerial self-interest, concerns about financial fragility triggered by worsening investor perceptions, meeting capital requirements, and avoiding supervisory scrutiny. With the exception of the first, these reasons rely upon the asymmetry of information between bank insiders and outsiders. Hence, reducing the level of asymmetric information is expected to weaken the incentives and leeway of bank-managers for income-smoothing and, thus, to be associated with smaller smoothing. Which is the subject of this research. To test for this, we estimate typical income-smoothing equations in which loan-loss provisions, as share of total loans or total assets, is regressed on several bank-specific and economy-wide variables. The existence and extent of income-smoothing is judged from the sign and size of a bank-specific variable, i.e., earnings - also as share of total loans or total assets. A positive sign of this variable is consistent with income smoothing: higher earnings are associated with higher provisions, and vice-versa. The estimated equation also includes time dummies. The sample consists of 543 US bank holding companies and covers the period 1999 - 2011. Using US banks only controls for time-invariant country-specific variables which have been explored in the literature, such as, regulations, supervisory power, creditor rights, quality of institutions and financial development. The time dummies additionally take into account the effect of time-varying country-specific variables. To account for the degree of asymmetric information, we use a dummy that takes the value 1 for the years for which a mutual fund that is a member of USSIF has invested in the shares of a particular bank. USSIF stands for US Sustainability Investment Forum, US's membership association for socially and environmentally responsible investment professionals, firms, institutions and organizations. USSIF funds base their investment decisions on firms' ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) performance. The USSIF funds compensate for the lack of readily available and reliable ESG data and ratings with an intrusive screening and monitoring process. During this process there is active engagement of the top management of the funds and the firms --here, banks--, with annual and, occasionally, quarterly meetings. Our identifying hypothesis is that this process, which amounts to stronger monitoring and, hence, stronger market discipline, is associated with lower asymmetric information. Thus, we expect that income smoothing will be smaller for the banks in which USSIF funds invest. To test for this, we use the interaction term between this dummy with the earnings variable. The preliminary results indicate that there is income smoothing. Yet, confirming our expectations, the negative coefficient of the interaction term indicates that income smoothing is smaller for the banks in which USSIF funds invest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its centrality to public discourse and everyday ethical judgment and behavior, a robust conceptual understanding of greed has been lacking from the management literature (Wang & Murninghan, 2011). This paper focuses on the factors that shape ordinary perceptions of greedy actions and business practices. Supplementing existing accounts that conceptualize greed as a sin of acquisitiveness or insatiability (always wanting more), we find in five studies that real or potential harm to other parties is an additional important determinant of whether actions are seen as greedy. People are sensitive to both the degree and victims of harm, and use both acquisitiveness and harm to evaluate the amount of greed reflected in real-world business practices. Results are discussed in terms of both theoretical and applied implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the findings of a study which explores the motivations of business owners in the repurposing market. Topics include the self-interest and altruistic motives of both producers and consumers in the market for participating in the market, institutional barriers and facilitators of the emerging market for repurposed items, and the optimism of informants in spite of the disadvantages of operating a repurposing business.