Scholars @Bentley (Bentley University)
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The Dynamics of Multinational Corporations\u27 Locational Decisions: Extensions and Contingencies
Get PDFLocational decisions are at the heart of international business strategy and this dissertation advances a dynamic view of the multinational corporation (MNC)-environment interaction by exploring the strategic, institutional and operational aspects of firm location decisions. In my first paper, I synthesize the literature on how institutions affect locational advantages and provide an organizing framework for the many levels and contexts in which these advantages can arise. This holistic framework helps identify inconsistencies between conceptual thinking and empirical verification and offers research avenues which are addressed in subsequent papers in this dissertation. In my second paper, I explore how learning and experiences within foreign countries can change the institutional distance a firm faces in a new country location. I embrace a “portfolio of locations” approach to institutional distance (which I decompose into cultural, economic and knowledge distance) to analyze and explore the construct of “added distance” - defined as the minimum distance between all current MNC locations and a potential new host country location. Results from a panel of US MNCs shows added economic and added knowledge distance deter MNCs from entering a new country, with this result being driven by the developing country investment choices by US firms (and not the developed country investments of these firms). In this way, I re-conceptualize the investment decision as being learning-driven within certain institutional experiences of the firm in clusters of countries. In my third paper, I explore how interrelationships across firm operations at home and abroad create value for the firm. The focus on distinctive activities extends the literature on the multinationality-performance link by identifying the drivers of value creation across markets and incorporates the dynamics and interplay within and between activities in both the home and foreign country environment. Empirical results from two-stage and dynamic panel models confirm that shareholder valuation of foreign value chain activities is influenced by how MNCs are changing their operations in their domestic market. The connection across these papers is important, as collectively, the dynamic interaction of experiences, value chain activities and institutional environments more fully explain the locational decisions of multinational corporations
Risky Pay and the Financial Crisis: Who\u27s Responsible?
Get PDFAccording to an existing “environmental” narrative, the financial crisis of 2007-2009 was due in part to executive compensation packages in the financial services industry that incentivized excessive risk-taking. Also according to this narrative, those who have a duty to protect society – principally, government regulators, but also firms themselves – are open to blame for how executives were paid, and must take steps to change executive compensation. This narrative is important but incomplete. I offer a supplementary “agential” narrative. According to this narrative, executives are open to blame for the financial crisis for taking socially excessive risks. Moreover, since executives can play a role in shaping their compensation, they have an obligation to ensure that it does not incentivize them to take such risks
Accountable to Whom? Rethinking the Role of Corporations in Political CSR
Get PDFAccording to Palazzo and Scherer, the changing role of business corporations in society requires that we take new measures to integrate these organizations into society-wide processes of democratic governance. We argue that their model of integration has a fundamental problem. Instead of treating business corporations as agents that must be held accountable to the democratic reasoning of affected parties, it treats corporations as agents who can hold others accountable. In our terminology, it treats business corporations as “supervising authorities” rather than “functionaries.” The result is that Palazzo and Scherer’s model does not actually address the democratic deficit that it is meant to solve. In order to fix the problem, we advocate removing business corporations from any policymaking role in political CSR and limiting participation to political NGOs and other groups that meet the standards we set out for a politically representative organization (PRO)
Employee Ethics and Rights
No full textThis chapter advances our understanding of the moral contours of the employment relationship. It considers what employers owe their employees, and what employees owe their employers. I begin with a brief discussion of the value and limits of contractual freedom in employment. Then I consider ethical issues in five areas: (1) hiring and firing, (2) compensation, (3) the nature of work, including meaningful work and workplace democracy, (4) privacy, and (5) whistleblowing
Presidential campaign talk: Question-answering in ‘Neutral Informational Interviews’
Get PDFThis article is a dual-case analysis of presidential campaign interviews conducted with former President George HW Bush when he was campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, and former President William J. Clinton when he was campaigning for the presidency in 1991. Both interviews were conducted at high schools in New Hampshire and are publicly available on the C-SPAN website. The purpose of this analysis is to investigate how the success or failure of political campaigns may be tied to candidates’ interactional competence and pragmatic skills. This will be done through an examination of the strengths and weaknesses of the answers each candidate produced in the context of these nonadversarial interviews. This conversation analytic investigation reveals key differences between the two candidates in the successful display of various types of knowledge, interactional competency, sensitivity to audience design, fluency of speech and organization of their responses. The results are discussed in terms of the importance of interactional skills for the success of political campaigns and the effectiveness of ‘Neutral Informational Interviews’ for educating the audience
Against Pay Secrecy
Get PDFMany firms keep pay secret. They do not make information about what their employees are paid available inside or outside of the firm, i.e., to other employees or to the public at large. Indeed, many firms discourage their employees from, or sanction them for, disclosing their pay. Against this, I argue that there are good moral reasons for firms to be transparent about pay. Pay transparency prevents injustice, promotes autonomy, and increases efficiency. After presenting the positive case for pay transparency, I defend it against objections, including the most common reasons firms give for keeping pay secret
Technological Proactivity: Development of a Measure and Initial Test
Get PDFAchieving effective use of new IT at the workplace can be notoriously difficult. There has been significant focus on the role of the individual in new job-related technology use, but considerations of personality differences and their role in effective use have been limited. Results have been mixed regarding the influence of personality on new IT use, discouraging research in the area. We attribute the shortcomings of prior results to three broad issues. Most personality-IT studies have either (1) used a measure of personality that is too broad and not specific to explain use activities (e.g. Junglas, Johnson, & Spitzmüller, 2008), (2) have examined personality with a single dependent variable (accept/resist) rather than looking at the process of acceptance/resistance (e.g. Venkatesh, Sykes, & Venkatraman, 2014), or (3) have examined the effect of personality traits at one instance of IT use, which is usually the initial stage of using a system, rather than examining it at different times during the use process (e.g. McElroy, Hendrickson, Townsend, & DeMarie, 2007). To advance the field, we draw on research on proactive personality to propose a new construct specific enough to be an indicator of variance in new IT appraisals and adaptation: technological proactivity. We develop a measure of technological proactivity and test its potential to explain variance in adaptation behaviors. The first portion of this dissertation provides a theoretical background and defines the conceptual domain of the proposed construct. Next, we develop and validate a measure of technological proactivity. A sample size of 937 individuals was surveyed and confirmatory factor analyses were performed to establish the validity of the construct. After finding preliminary support for the technological proactivity construct, we turn to testing the predictive validity of our new construct in the context of new technology perceptions and adaptation behaviors. We applied technological proactivity to Beaudry and Pinsonneault’s (2005) CMUA to examine the predictive validity of our new construct at different stages of new job related technology use, namely primary and secondary appraisals of new technology, and adaptation strategies. The model is tested over a 4 month period in a setting of a large business school in Massachusetts. A sample of 440 students introduced to a new technology in an introductory technology course were surveyed. Two waves of perceptual data regarding personality, new IT appraisals, and self-report behavioral adaptation approaches were gathered, along with archival data indicating participant coping behavior, specifically the frequency of logins to access the new technology for the purposes of learning and applying it to an assignment, and the total length of time spent using the new technology. Regression analyses and structural equation modeling tests provided evidence regarding technological proactivity’s predictive validity in the context of users of new technology. This cross-disciplinary dissertation makes a number of important contributions. We extend the consideration of personality by introducing a theoretically relevant personality variable to the technology use literature. We provide a longitudinal empirical test of the CMUA and conceptually extent the model by showing how individual differences can influence appraisal and control perceptions, and how this in turn changes the previously theorized outcomes that have only considered uniform users. This approach also allows us to empirically test the relationships in the CMUA using a quantitative method to test previous assumptions. Our research extends the proactive personality literature by considering proactive personality’s influence in a new domain (Parker, Bindl, and Strauss, 2010), and by examining its effects at different points in a job relevant process (Grant & Ashford, 2008), new technology adoption. Support was found for the principal proposition of this dissertation, that technological proactivity may be a key variable in explaining the impact of new technology adaptation behavior. Taking methodological shortcomings into consideration, which do not allow for a test of the full model/hypotheses, the dissertation was successful at contributing an initial empirical test of the CMUA, and the technological proactivity measure developed can serve as a foundation for further research on personality and adaptation behaviors to new technologies
Contribution of NIH funding to new drug approvals 2010–2016
Get PDFThis work examines the contribution of NIH funding to published research associated with 210 new molecular entities (NMEs) approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016. We identified \u3e2 million publications in PubMed related to the 210 NMEs (n = 131,092) or their 151 known biological targets (n = 1,966,281). Of these, \u3e600,000 (29%) were associated with NIH-funded projects in RePORTER. This funding included \u3e200,000 fiscal years of NIH project support (1985–2016) and project costs \u3e64 billion of NIH-funded projects. The percentage of fiscal years of project funding identified through target searches, but not drug searches, was greater for NMEs discovered through targeted screening than through phenotypic methods (95% versus 82%). For targeted NMEs, funding related to targets preceded funding related to the NMEs, consistent with the expectation that basic research provides validated targets for targeted screening. This analysis, which captures basic research on biological targets as well as applied research on NMEs, suggests that the NIH contribution to research associated with new drug approvals is greater than previously appreciated and highlights the risk of reducing federal funding for basic biomedical research
Corporate Prediction Markets for Business Decisions: New Applications, Challenges and Limitations
Get PDFPrediction markets, introduced roughly 30 years ago, are a way to leverage market pricing for information aggregation. Research has shown the markets provide accurate (often superior) forecasts. To date, research has been predominately of an economic nature. Despite numerous articles on the application of prediction markets in businesses (Hewlett-Packard, Google) the management literature has largely ignored the topic. This dissertation follows a three-paper model to begin to address the perceived gap.
Paper one introduces a new application of the market, namely its use as a determinant of employee compensation packages. Employers often claim to utilize a pay-for-performance model. However, principle-agent problems make it difficult for management to identify the varying performance of employees. In numerous settings, employees may have better information about the contributions of peers than management and may be better able to determine appropriate compensation.
Paper two informs the establishment of a corporate prediction market by drawing on employee motivation literature to identify incentive structures and operating processes that best attract and maintain adequate participation levels. We leverage intrinsic and extrinsic motivation research to examine methods of attracting, and perhaps more importantly, retaining sufficient participation levels. The paper concludes with a series of practical recommendations.
Finally, paper three shares results from a lab-based experiment which tested for the endowment effect within a prediction market. The prediction market run at Hewlett-Packard was set-up such that participants were endowed with some, but not all, securities. It was believed varying portfolios would encourage trade (Plott & Chen, 2002). Research on loss aversion suggests people are reluctant to adjust portfolio holdings they inherit. We leverage lab-based markets to address this perceived disconnect and the broader question of whether an anomaly in the marginal trader behavior would alter the market pricing and volume of trades.
Taken together, the three papers bring the phenomenon to the management literature through discussions of application and limitations. It is hoped that this work will expand the discussion beyond the technical aspects of the markets, and identify opportunities for management researchers and practitioners to leverage prediction markets
Modeling timelines for translational science in cancer; the impact of technological maturation
Get PDFThis work examines translational science in cancer based on theories of innovation that posit a relationship between the maturation of technologies and their capacity to generate successful products. We examined the growth of technologies associated with 138 anticancer drugs using an analytical model that identifies the point of initiation of exponential growth and the point at which growth slows as the technology becomes established. Approval of targeted and biological products corresponded with technological maturation, with first approval averaging 14 years after the established point and 44 years after initiation of associated technologies. The lag in cancer drug approvals after the increases in cancer funding and dramatic scientific advances of the 1970s thus reflects predictable timelines of technology maturation. Analytical models of technological maturation may be used for technological forecasting to guide more efficient translation of scientific discoveries into cures