On Loyalty

Loyalty is a highly charged and important issue, often evoking strong feelings and actions. What is loyalty? Is loyalty compatible with impartiality? How do we respond to conflicts of loyalties? In a global era, should we be trying to transcend loyalties to particular political communities? Drawing on a fascinating array of literary and cinematic examples - The Remains of the Day, No Country for Old Men, The English Patient, The Third Man, and more - Troy Jollimore expertly unravels the phenomenon of loyalty from a philosophical standpoint. He reflects on the idea that loyalty shapes our very identities, and considers both the benefits and the dangers of loyalty: on the one hand, how excessive loyalty can move us to perform immoral, even evil actions; one the other, how loyalty can expand our lives and give us a sense of meaning and belonging.

Deep friendship may express profound loyalty, but so too may virulent nationalism. What can and should we say about this Janus-faced virtue of the will? This volume explores at length the contours of an important and troubling virtue -- its cognates, contrasts, and perversions; its strengths and weaknesses; its awkward relations with universal morality; its oppositional form and limits; as well as the ways in which it functions in various associative connections, such as friendship and familial relations, organizations and professions, nations, countries, and religious tradition.

For decades we've been told that we live in fast-paced, dog-eat-dog world, that loyalty gets you nowhere, and that we must look out for number one! We've been told that to succeed we have to constantly reinvent ourselves, let go of past relationships, and move on to greener pastures. And we've been told that all this is good. But it's not good. Why Loyalty Matters is grounded in the most comprehensive study of loyalty ever conducted, and what it reveals can change your life. The science is very clear – when it comes to business success, satisfaction in our relationships and even overall happiness, loyalty is essential. Renowned loyalty experts Timothy Keiningham and Lerzan Aksoy combine their own groundbreaking research with the leading thinking in philosophy, sociology, psychology, economics and management to provide a comprehensive guide to understanding what loyalty is, what it isn't and how to unlock its power in your personal and professional life.

An innovator in contemporary thought on economic and political development looks here at decline rather than growth. Albert O. Hirschman makes a basic distinction between alternative ways of reacting to deterioration in business firms and, in general, to dissatisfaction with organizations: one, “exit,” is for the member to quit the organization or for the customer to switch to the competing product, and the other, “voice,” is for members or customers to agitate and exert influence for change “from within.” The efficiency of the competitive mechanism, with its total reliance on exit, is questioned for certain important situations. As exit often undercuts voice while being unable to counteract decline, loyalty is seen in the function of retarding exit and of permitting voice to play its proper role. The interplay of the three concepts turns out to illuminate a wide range of economic, social, and political phenomena. As the author states in the preface, “having found my own unifying way of looking at issues as diverse as competition and the two-party system, divorce and the American character, black power and the failure of ‘unhappy’ top officials to resign over Vietnam, I decided to let myself go a little.”

Many business-to-business (B2B) managers think that customers act rationally and base decisions mostly on price, customer loyalty isn’t considered. Companies outsource various activities, which enable them to improve efficiency, reduce costs, focus more on core competencies and improve their innovation capabilities. Supply Chain Management synchronizes the efforts of all parties—particularly suppliers, manufacturers, retailers, dealers, customers—involved in achieving customer’s needs. Despite much research, the relationship between customer loyalty and the supply chain strategy remains insufficiently explored and understood by practitioners and academics, while the theme has been extensively developed within marketing literature. Customer Loyalty and Supply Chain Management is the result of years of work by the authors on different projects concerning the overlapping areas of supply chains, logistics and marketing, drawing a connection between the literature to provide a holistic picture of the customer loyalty framework. Emphasis is given to the B2B context, where recent research has provided some clues to support the fact that investment in operations, new technologies and organizational strategy have had a significant role in understanding B2B loyalty, particularly in the context of global supply chains. Moreover, the book provides a modernized and predictive model of B2B loyalty, showing a different methodological approach that aims at capturing the complexity of the phenomenon. This book will be a useful resource for professionals and scholars from across the supply chain who are interested in exploring the dimension of customer loyalty in the challenging supplier and customer context.

The principle of loyalty requires the EU and its Member States to co-operate sincerely towards the implementation of EU law. Under the principle, the European courts have developed significant public law duties on States to deepen the reach of EU law. This is the first full-length analysis of the loyalty principle and its legal implications.