Article
The Diffusion of Voluntary Environmental Programs: The Case of ISO 14001 in Korea, 1996-2011
This paper examines the adoption of ISO 14001, which is known as the most famous voluntary environmental program. The data of this paper pertain to Korean [Throughout this paper, Korea refers to the Republic of Korea (South Korea)] firms in manufacturing industries from 1996 to 2011. Event-history modeling to examine firms’ adoption of ISO 14001 finds that both resource-based factors and institutional factors have influenced the diffusion of ISO 14001 in Korea. By exploring time-related effects, I also find that while resource-based factors are important in the early periods of the diffusion, institutional factors become important in the later periods of the diffusion. This confirms the findings of previous studies that a firm’s motivation to adopt organizational policies varies according to different diffusion periods. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of what this study tells us about the institutional context of ISO 14001 in Korea and Asia more broadly. © 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
The article analyzes the content of the book by the professor A. Skorobogatov “Society as a Contract between the Strong and Weak. Essays on Economics of History”. The author of the book set the task to apply the economic method to the study of history, to look at it on the basis of the assumption of rationality of actors and, based on it, to show history as a change in the forms of interaction of strong and weak participants. The article notes that the author succeeded in many things: systematizing the hierarchies of institutions, highlighting the special role of culture, the concept of conventional expectations as an explanation of the stability of dictatorial regimes. The book correctly noted that economic activity ceases to be the lot of the weak when the economy begins to determine military power. Then there are state guarantees of property rights and force is subject to the rules. At the same time, the article has controversy with the author of the book on a number of questions. The definition of the rationality in the book is so trivial (the choice of the best means achieving the goal) that it describes any human activity. According to the author of the article, there is an excessive propensity to geographical determinism in the book. The theory of young and old dictatorships and especially its application to the history of Soviet Russia causes great doubts. A rather primitive “economism” is used in determining the optimal size of the states. However, controversy with the author does not mean at all that the book does not satisfy the interest in problems posed in. On the contrary, this book will certainly become the starting point for all subsequent works in the field of the economics of history because of its conceptual depth and new vision of many aspects of historical process.
This paper is devoted to a currently active area of scholars' research - integrated quality management systems (IQMS). Despite the high prevalence of IQMS in the US and European economies, until recently, in Russian organizations, separate management systems for each particular area were considered to be the norm: ecology, quality management of products, health and safety of personnel, etc. The reasons for the low prevalence of IQMS in small organizations in Russia are observed. We discuss such major factors as, for instance, the lack of a unified model for the formation and implementation of an IQMS at the enterprise. The methods for calculating the costs of practical implementation of IQMS, depending on the resource and organizational requirements for improving the efficiency, are not standardized. Specific measures are proposed in order to encourage the development and penetration of IQMS in Russian organizations. Attention is paid to the development of remote outsourcing organizations that build integrated quality management systems for contracting firms and allow achieving economic efficiency through economies of scale, including through the virtual integration of several small and medium-sized enterprises. The issues of developing unified schemes for the implementation of IQMS for different types of organizations, depending on the industry and other specifics, were discussed.
This article addresses the questions, What do children in urban areas do on Saturdays? What type of organizational resources do they have access to? Does this vary by social class? Using diary data on children’s activities on Saturdays in the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale metropolitan area, the authors describe the different types of venues (households, businesses, public space, associations, charities, congregations, and government/tribal agencies) that served different types of children. They find that the likelihood of using a charity or business rather than a government or tribal provider increased with family income. Also, the likelihood of using a congregation or a government facility rather than business, charity, or household increased with being Hispanic. The authors discuss implications for the urban division of labor on Saturdays and offer research questions that need further investigation.
Despite widespread scholarly attention on social movement media coverage, the full range of organizations appearing in the media with movements remains underexamined. To analyze this organizational complexity, we draw upon field theory, relating it to concepts from social network analysis. We hypothesize that interactions with stateembedded actors increase field stability, yet this effect decreases with the field's level of abstraction. We contrast a pair of US movements, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, according to their interactions with stateembedded actors. Through the New York Times's API, we collect and produce article coappearance networks that approximate the population of Times’s indexed organizations. We parse fields from these networks using community detection algorithms. Our analyses test stability using triadic closure propensities and average coreness. Our findings show that subgroups affiliated with the Tea Party had greaterstability than those of Occupy Wall Street.
The book’s stated objective is to uncover context, “how social capital interacts with social institutions.” It is part of a new wave of research on social capital that, dissatisfied with both macro analyses limited to societal patterns and micro analyses limited to actors’ conditions, seeks to understand the operation of networks at the meso-level: how institutions and organizations structure the transfer of resources across networks. It purports to make both theoretical and methodological contributions, the first by developing the concept of “institutional logics,” the latter by “casting diverse contextual settings as ‘generators’ of social relations”, and studying these contexts from multiple methodological perspectives. (from a review by M. Small)
Modern business schools exist in a complex world of rankings, ratings, and credentials. Some argue that in increasingly competitive global higher education markets, signaling status and quality has actually become more important than having them (Gioia & Corley, 2002; Trank & Rynes, 2003). For many contemporary business schools, international accreditations have become key means and first steps in pursuing legitimacy and global status. In this essay, we elaborate in detail on a business school’s international accreditation process, including its motivations and outcomes. We conclude that while accreditation processes are, at best, fruitful quality improvement exercises, the inherent motivations stemming from the urge for organizational legitimacy, status, and reputation should not be overlooked by either the accrediting agencies or business schools themselves. Ironically, while accreditation agencies (AACSB and EQUIS are those focused on here) rarely explicitly encourage competition, their exclusivity seems to generate it between schools that aspire to belong to “the club.” For schools that gain access to the process, this means that on the flip side of the happy and collaborative jump in quality there is a much more serious demarcation and revealing redefinition of the accredited entity’s future supporters, collaborators, partners, and competitors.
One of the most important indicators of company's success is the increase of its value. The article investigates traditional methods of company's value assessment and the evidence that the application of these methods is incorrect in the new stage of economy. So it is necessary to create a new method of valuation based on the new main sources of company's success that is its intellectual capital.