Firm Interests

Firms are central to trade policy-making. Some analysts even suggest that they dictate policy on the basis of their material interests. Cornelia Woll counters these assumptions, arguing that firms do not always know what they want. To be sure, firms lobby hard to attain a desired policy once they have defined their goals. Yet material factors are insufficient to account for these preferences. The ways in which firms are embedded in political settings are much more decisive. Woll demonstrates her case by analyzing the surprising evolution of support from large firms for liberalization in telecommunications and international air transport in the United States and Europe. Within less than a decade, former monopolies with important home markets abandoned their earlier calls for subsidies and protectionism and joined competitive multinationals in the demand for global markets. By comparing the complex evolution of firm preferences across sectors and countries, Woll shows that firms may influence policy outcomes, but policies and politics in turn influence business demands. This is particularly true in the European Union, where the constraints of multilevel decision-making encourage firms to pay lip service to liberalization if they want to maintain good working relations with supranational officials. In the United States, firms adjust their sectoral demands to fit the government's agenda. In both contexts, the interaction between government and firm representatives affects not only the strategy but also the content of business lobbying on global trade.

This Handbook presents a theory of Business Interest Associations and fifteen empirical country by country case studies in the EU. The book is organized into three main parts. Part I develops a theory of business associations which centres on firm size as the key explanatory variable. Part II consists of country studies covering the EU-15, which are written along strictly comparable lines of analysis. Part III contains the cross-nationally comparative analysis. The book will make essential reading for researchers working in organization studies, industrial relations, industrial sociology and political science, as well as practioners in related fields.

The corporate business enterprise is a core institution of capitalism. It holds immense political, economic, and cultural power in society. It mobilizes social and planetary resources to its utility in pursuit of private profit maximization and with little regard for social concerns. Its influence over so much of societal life and effects on the natural environment raise critical questions about the firm and its governance in democratic society. Various voices seek reforms of regulation and corporate governance practices to those shaped by the neoliberal policies persisting in the current decades. But prospects for amelioration within our current horizons of thinking appear elusive. This book contributes a distinctly social theoretical approach to the social problem of governing the firm. Its discussions complement debates in economics, politics, and law. Its critical social theorizations challenge conventional understandings of the firm and neoliberal legitimacies of its governance and posit alternatives. The book explores the social relations and moral fabric of the firm and the creativity of human action at work. It proposes a reimagined corporate governance premised on just recognition of that social vitality. It invites unprecedented collaboration for a robust participatory democracy for governing the firm and market action oriented to ecological and social sustainability.

Ethical Branding and Marketing: Cases and Lessons provides current perspectives on fascinating global cases focusing on the specific combination of the two fields of "ethics" and "branding," on their relationship, and on how that joint perspective shapes brands, companies, business strategies, and the market itself. In a contemporary environment of "truthiness" and fake news, it is more important than ever to review core principles of ethics and to reassess how these principles apply to today’s branding and marketing practices. This book addresses practices in ethical branding and corporate culture. It includes such topics as truth, integrity, value, vulnerability, and differentiation. Collectively, these cases provide a contemporary overview of intriguing scenarios and best practices in ethical branding. The book provides the reader with real, updated insight into ethical decision making; helps students integrate ethics, branding strategy, and real life, complex situations into an effective learning process; and provides the reader with up-to-date ethical branding cases from around the world.

Interest in Financial Services Marketing has grown hugely over the last few decades, particularly since the financial crisis, which scarred the industry and its relationship with customers. It reflects the importance of the financial services industry to the economies of every nation and the realisation that the consumption and marketing of financial services differs from that of tangible goods and indeed many other intangible services. This book is therefore a timely and much needed comprehensive compendium that reflects the development and maturation of the research domain, and pulls together, in a single volume, the current state of thinking and debate. The events associated with the financial crisis have highlighted that there is a need for banks and other financial institutions to understand how to rebuild trust and confidence, improve relationships and derive value from the marketing process. Edited by an international team of experts, this book will provide the latest thinking on how to manage such challenges and will be vital reading for students and lecturers in financial services marketing, policy makers and practitioners.

"An important managerial challenge is choosing the payoff horizon for strategic investments, since projects with long run benefits have immediate costs that reduce short run profits. My dissertation draws from the behavioral theory of the firm and agency theory to explain differences in payoff horizon choices between firms, based on performance relative to aspirations, incentive compensation, and external market pressure. I also test the intuition that long horizon investments have a positive impact on long run performance. The business model for cable operators during its programming variety phase from 1972-1996 offers a quasi-experimental setting ideally suited for research into these issues. Like public utilities, local cable companies are natural monopolies with single providers in each market. Unlike electricity, heat, or water service, however, there is neither a mandate for universal service nor municipal financing for capital investments. Furthermore, the distribution technology of microwave and, later, satellite eliminate the need for single firms to serve contiguous geographic regions, and the industry's pre-1972 history as a broadcast retransmission service contributed to a particularly disparate pattern of geographic expansion. As a result, cable operators during the research period do not compete with each other for market share among customers, but they do compete over future growth through their choice of investments. These investments have varying payoff horizons. In testing predictions about which firms pursue longer or shorter payoff horizons, I use simultaneous equation techniques. To assess the impact of short- and long-horizon investments on ex post performance, I use dynamic panel modeling that allows the direction and significance of investment choices to be interpreted at different lag lengths. What makes firms choose different payoff horizons? Are longer horizon investments associated with higher eventual performance, as conventional wisdom suggests? The first question is central to understanding firm strategy, while the second is crucial for evaluating that strategy. By addressing both, my dissertation generates corporate governance implications and insight into the value-creation potential of longer payoff horizons. In addition, it analyzes the causes and effects of the wide heterogeneity of firm strategies observed in the partially regulated and monopolistic cable industry"--Http://www.cablecenter.org/education/awards/2006GrantWinner.cfm (as viewed on 08/18/08)

An examination of political conflicts over pesticide drift and the differing conceptions of justice held by industry, regulators, and activists. The widespread but virtually invisible problem of pesticide drift—the airborne movement of agricultural pesticides into residential areas—has fueled grassroots activism from Maine to Hawaii. Pesticide drift accidents have terrified and sickened many living in the country's most marginalized and vulnerable communities. In this book, Jill Lindsey Harrison considers political conflicts over pesticide drift in California, using them to illuminate the broader problem and its potential solutions. The fact that pesticide pollution and illnesses associated with it disproportionately affect the poor and the powerless raises questions of environmental justice (and political injustice). Despite California's impressive record of environmental protection, massive pesticide regulatory apparatus, and booming organic farming industry, pesticide-related accidents and illnesses continue unabated. To unpack this conundrum, Harrison examines the conceptions of justice that increasingly shape environmental politics and finds that California's agricultural industry, regulators, and pesticide drift activists hold different, and conflicting, notions of what justice looks like. Drawing on her own extensive ethnographic research as well as in-depth interviews with regulators, activists, scientists, and public health practitioners, Harrison examines the ways industry, regulatory agencies, and different kinds of activists address pesticide drift, connecting their efforts to communitarian and libertarian conceptions of justice. The approach taken by pesticide drift activists, she finds, not only critiques theories of justice undergirding mainstream sustainable-agriculture activism, but also offers an entirely new notion of what justice means. To solve seemingly intractable environmental problems such as pesticide drift, Harrison argues, we need a different kind of environmental justice. She proposes the precautionary principle as a framework for effectively and justly addressing environmental inequities in the everyday work of environmental regulatory institutions.

In this book Linda Holbeche offers an historical narrative on the changing landscape of work since the 1980s and considers how definitions of organizational effectiveness have changed over time. She considers the characteristics and effects of the neo-liberal work culture of new capitalism, and how HRM practices have contributed to shaping this work culture. Influencing Organizational Effectiveness challenges mainstream thinking around business strategy, change and organizational effectiveness, and about the roles of HRM and management. While the overall tone of the book is critical, Holbeche argues that HRM can play an active role in giving voice to employees and advancing organizational effectiveness. Grounded in research, this book includes reflective questions, case studies and helpful guidelines to support HRM and organizational development professionals and master's-level students. It illustrates what ‘better’ might look like and how HRM can contribute to a new definition of effectiveness which is aligned to the needs of modern organizations.