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Empirical Context (empirical + context)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	80%

Selected Abstracts

Corporate response to CSO criticism: decoupling the corporate responsibility discourse from business practice

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2010
Jenny Ählström
Abstract The general objective of this paper is to further research on the interaction between civil society organizations (CSOs) and corporations. The aim is to analyze how corporations are responding to demands to enlarge the responsibility sphere. A case is presented in which CSOs are putting pressure on the garment retailer Hennes & Mauritz (H&M) to be responsible for safeguarding workers' rights in the outsourced production of H&M garments. The conclusion of the paper, derived from analyzing the empirical context using discourse theory, is that: (1) CSOs represent a challenging discourse (responsible business) attempting to change the dominant corporate discourse (profitable business); (2) If the challenging discourse is threatening the legitimacy of the corporation, a responsible business discourse is created; and (3) Responding to the demands of the CSOs is done to keep the business practice intact, hence practice is decoupled from the responsible business discourse. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [source]

Gauging Public Opinion in the Hoover White House: Understanding the Roots of Presidential Polling

PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2000
ROBERT M. EISINGER
Contemporary research often ignores early presidential attempts to measure public opinion, focusing instead on the use of polls by modern presidents. The Hoover presidency precedes the invention of modern surveys and provides a rich theoretical and empirical context for analyzing the early institutionalization of political polling. President Herbert Hoover sought to assess public opinion independent of his party and Congress, in large part because of the contentious relations these institutions shared with his administration. He did so under the guise of scientific legitimacy,quantifying newspaper editorials and undertaking a scholarly survey of American life. Although he was not the first president to use media reports to measure public opinion, Hoover's systematic quantification marks a significant change in how presidents assessed citizens' views and used those assessments to gain power and independence with respect to Congress and political parties. [source]

Conditional Partisanship and Institutional Responsibility in Presidential Decision Making

PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2000
CONSTANTINE J. SPILIOTES
The interaction of political incentives and institutional structures significantly shapes the nature of presidential decision making. This interaction generates a unique effect,institutional responsibility,which substantially constrains presidential response to partisan and electoral incentives present in the policy-making environment. After discussing institutional responsibility in the theoretical context of presidential decision making and political economy, the article illustrates this effect in the empirical context of economic policy making in the Eisenhower and Carter administrations. The article demonstrates that the interaction produces an institutionally generated incentive for responsible decision making that often works at cross-purposes with other exogenous incentives for presidential behavior. In doing so, the article develops complementary notions of conditional partisanship and institutional responsibility. [source]

Linking Product Development Outcomes to Market Valuation of the Firm: The Case of the U.S. Pharmaceutical Industry,

THE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 5 2004
Anurag Sharma
The purpose of this research was to examine empirically the effects of new product development outcomes on overall firm performance. To do so, first product development and finance literature were connected to develop three testable hypotheses. Next, an event study was conducted in order to explore whether the changes in the stock market valuation of firms are influenced by the outcomes of efforts to develop new products. The pharmaceutical industry was chosen as the empirical context for the present study's analysis largely because the gate-keeping role played by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) provides a specific event date on which to focus the event study methodology. As such, this study's events were dates of public announcements of the FDA decisions to approve or to reject the New Drug Applications submitted by the sponsoring firms. Consistent with the efficient market hypothesis, this study's results show that market valuations are responsive strongly and cleanly to the success or failure of new product development efforts. Hence, one of this study's key results suggests that financial markets may be attuned sharply to product development outcomes in publicly traded firms. This study also finds that financial market losses from product development failures were much larger in magnitude than financial market gains from product development successes,indicating an asymmetry in the response of financial markets to the success and failure of new product development efforts. Hence, another implication of this study's results is that managers should factor in a substantial risk premium when considering substantial new development projects. The present study's results also imply that managers should refrain from hyping new products and perhaps even should restrain the enthusiasm that the financial community may build before the product fully is developed. The effect on firm value is severe when expectations about an anticipated new product are not fulfilled. Managers in effect should take care to build reasonable and realistic expectations about potential new products. [source]

Social Networks and Collective Action

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2009
David A. Siegel
Despite growing attention to the role of social context in determining political participation, the effect of the structure of social networks remains little examined. This article introduces a model of interdependent decision making within social networks, in which individuals have heterogeneous motivations to participate, and networks are defined via a qualitative typology mirroring common empirical contexts. The analysis finds that some metrics for networks' influence,size, the prevalence of weak ties, the presence of elites,have a more complex interaction with network structure and individual motivations than has been previously acknowledged. For example, in some contexts additional network ties decrease participation. This presents the potential for selection bias in empirical studies. The model offers a fuller characterization of the role of network structure and predicts expected levels of participation across network types and distributions of motivations as a function of network size, weak and strong ties, and elite influence. [source]