Profit Orientation Research Articles

(Un)Routinization of the Environmental Performance Measures – A Case Study; BSC Rules but Does not Routinize

This study focuses on the (un)routinization of environmental performance measures (EPMs). It studies how new environmental measures were implemented within the new environmental management system (EMS) and how they became connected with the financial measures, like cost savings and profitability. By doing so, they were connected to the taken-for-granted profit orientation of the case company in order to overcome these values and to make them succeed in organization. Later on these new measures were also included in the new BSC. In conditions of the profit oriented taken-for-granted values, the BSC locked the rule status of the environmental measures, but it locked them at the operational level, while they were not included in the more strategic level scorecard. Neither the profit connection nor the BSC were able to make the environmental activities to be enacted as the routine organizational action. The ‘power of the system’, the institutionalized profit and cost orientation was too much for the environmental agenda to overcome. We found also several sub stages in ‘rules’ or ‘routinization’. EMS rule, BSC rule, routinization of environmental reporting and finally, routinization of environmental action. The routinization of reporting preceded the routinization of action because the routinization of reporting was much easier than the routinization of environmental action. Therefore, future studies could consider two different processes of routinization in more detail by building on the framework of Burns and Scapens (2000).

Global finance and the development of regional clusters: tracing paths in Munich's film and TV industry

Recent work in economic geography has provided notable insights into the regional implications of finance-driven capitalism. In particular, it has been argued that the pressures created by the prioritisation of shareholder value and the rise of new financial agents, such as private equity and hedge funds, are disembedding regional social relations, and empirical evidence illustrates the devastating effects that the short-term profit orientation of these agents can have on local economic development. The relationship between a local economy's integration into the global capitalist system and its development performance is, however, more ambiguous than might be expected. This article explores this connection in greater detail within the context of a regional cluster, namely the film and TV industry cluster in Munich—one of the leading centres for this type of industry in Germany—by means of addressing the adjustments related to the entry of foreign investors after the insolvency of the Kirch Group in 2002. Initially, the research adds weight to the suspicion that financial agents erode the long-term wealth- and employment-generating capacities of national corporations. In addition, however, the results also reveal the dynamic restructuring processes triggered by these players which, at least in the specific case investigated, provided an acknowledged corrective and contributed to the cluster's recent resurgence.

Microfinance: Social Entrepreneurship? Commercial Entrepreneurship? Or Both?

The emerging social entrepreneurship literature has loosely characterized microfinance as entrepreneurship or social entrepreneurship, omitting much needed rigor. Through a theoretical synthesis of the entrepreneurship and microfinance literatures we unpack three different groups of entrepreneurs involved in microfinance with very different motivations: Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) are social entrepreneurs; Borrowers are necessity entrepreneurs; and, as we confirm with a descriptive content analysis of a popular field apparatus catalog, device manufacturers are commercial entrepreneurs. Building on Austin, Stevenson & Wei-Skillern (2006) we advance our own framework that we believe more completely depicts the relationship between an entity's profit orientation and social entrepreneurship.

Whistle Blowing in Healthcare: An Organizational Failure in Ethics and Leadership

Ethical behavior, decision-making and leadership are becoming increasingly important in the healthcare environment where the traditional “service orientation” is being replaced by an almost exclusive “profit orientation.” This fixation on the profit oriented business model has ominous implications for the ethical provision of healthcare services. Healthcare organizations have been in the process of restructuring for over a decade and practitioners, patients and society are questioning unethical practices in managed care including gag rules, lack of full disclosure and compensation plans that reward withholding of healthcare services. There has been very little information published about organizational and administrative ethics in the healthcare literature.Individuals employed by healthcare organizations have a very large diversity in moral ideology reflective of society at large. Under these circumstances it is necessary for the HCO to identify basic and common core values and beliefs. It is from this perspective that we will examine an organization’s responsibility to create, define, and manage ethical behavior for the organization.

Home Health Agency Profit Orientation and Risk for Hospitalization: A Propensity Score Analysis of Population Weighted Data

ABSTRACT Little recent research exists identifying home health agency (HHA) organizational characteristics that influence home health quality. This study evaluates the impact of HHA profit orientation on quality, measured as patient risk for hospitalization within 60 days of agency admission. Our sample (n = 1,304), from the National Home and Hospice Care Survey, comprised noninstitutionalized patients, 18 and older, including all payer types, discharged from free-standing HHAs. Our most deconfounded estimate, derived by propensity score adjusted, weighted polytomous logistic regression, yielded a for-profit hospitalization odds ratio of 1.31 but with a large confidence interval including unity. Results do not support our hypothesis of higher hospitalization risk for for-profit HHA patients.

Content in Publicly, Privately Owned Newspapers more Alike than Different

Almost since the first newspaper company went public in 1963,1 questions have been raised about whether public ownership is compatible with good journalism.2 That relationship is at the heart of this article. It examines the link between two forms of ownership-private ownership and public ownership-and the content that a newspaper publishes. Of particular interest is whether one of these two forms of ownership is linked to a stronger commitment to coverage about vital aspects of civic life, such as government, national security and diplomacy.Previous ResearchScholars have looked at public ownership of newspapers from two perspectives, one loosely grounded in economically oriented theories about how firms operate and the other linked more closely to organizational sociology. The main concern of most economics-based studies has been financial performance or profits. Generally speaking, that research has found that the relationship between public ownership and financial performance is not straightforward.3 There's little doubt that publicly owned newspaper companies have a strong profit orientation, but several studies have found that they don't necessarily seek to maximize short-term profits, as is often asserted. It's also not clear that publicly held companies are any more profit-driven than privately held media businesses. Though the economically oriented studies seldom include journalistic quality or content as variables, concerns about quality and content often animate that research. For example, the impact of public ownership on journalistic quality was a key issue in Taking Stock: Journalism and the Publicly Traded Newspaper Company, which is the most comprehensive examination of public newspaper ownership.4The sociological framework takes a broader approach to understanding the relationship between ownership structure and content. Scholars such as Schudson, Demers and Shoemaker and Reese focus on the myriad of influences on content decision-making.5 For them, ownership is but one of many factors that shape content. Those factors range from the social characteristics of the message makers to the ideological systems in which media organizations operate. In The Sociology of News, Schudson addresses profit motive. While he acknowledges that it's at the heart of the commercial news businesses, he argues that market logic doesn't always dictate how a news organization operates.6 He says the desire of journalists to base decisions on their own professional judgments can constrain commercial motives. That point is evident in multiple ways in the research grounded in organizational sociology. Taken as a whole, it suggests that it's simplistic to assume that public ownership is necessarily bad for journalistic quality-or that private ownership is usually good for it.Research QuestionsCritics of public ownership worry that it creates financial pressures that undermine a newspaper's journalistic mission. Yet scholars have rarely compared the journalistic output-the content-of publicly and privately held newspapers to evaluate that thesis. That's what this research does. The independent variable-ownership structure-is defined conventionally: Publicly owned companies trade their stock on public securities markets. Privately owned companies don't trade their stock on securities markets. Because so little research has examined content differences between publicly held and privately held newspapers, it seems prudent to ask research questions rather than pose hypotheses. They are:RQ1:Is the ownership structure of a newspaper's parent company associated with differences in the subjects that the newspaper covers? More specifically, are there differences in the amount of coverage of civic affairs, crime and justice and softer subjects such as sports, personalities or entertainment?Economically oriented theories suggest that publicly owned newspapers face financial pressures that undermine coverage of civic affairs in favor of cheaper or more popular fare, such as crime, celebrities or other insignificant subjects. …

Factors affecting the marketing channel choice of sheep and goat farmers in the region of east Macedonia in Greece regarding the distribution of their milk production

This study aims to identify the factors that affect the sheep and goat farmers in the Region of East Macedonia and Thrace (Region of EMTh) in Greece in their milk distribution channel choice. The survey was conducting through field interviews based on a questionnaire that was designed by the researchers. The questionnaire was pre-tested in Autumn of 2001. A pilot survey was conducted in the same period while the main survey took place in Spring of 2002 on a sample of 343 farmers that were selected at random. The factors derived from the multivariate statistical analysis are: (a) production orientation, (b) cost focus, (c) profit orientation, (d) differentiation and (e) interpersonal relationships. The main marketing channels that the sheep and goat farmers in the Region of EMTh use for selling their milk are: (a) to local private milk processing plants, (b) co-operative milk processing plants, (c) big national dairy firms and (d) private use of milk. A χ 2-analysis was performed to profile the farmers using each marketing channel regarding their farm and personal characteristics. The Kruskal–Wallis non-parametric test as well as a logistic regression analysis were used to explore the factors that affect farmers marketing channel selection. Many farm and farmers’ characteristics such as the size of the flock, volume of milk production, farm income, debt, found to affect the distribution channel choice. Factors including sales price, speed of payment, loyalty also have a significant influence on a marketing outlet selection.

The Utility of Social Obligations in the UK Energy Industry*

abstract The imposition of social obligations on the UK energy supply industry provides an important opportunity to examine how social responsibilities are construed by companies and how these constructions relate to perceptions of the role of regulation, specifically the scope for compromise and influence with the regulator. Our data suggest four templates for understanding this relationship: embracing social obligations, business as usual, management deliberation, and conflicts with commerce. First, embracing social obligations is based on competitive advantage and struggles for market leadership, and highlights informal mechanisms in attempts to influence the regulatory agenda. Second, business as usual reflects pre‐existing standard operating procedures and a generalized approach to serving the broad consumer base in line with regulation as formal policing procedures. Third, management deliberation is a way of either reflecting upon or stalling progress on social issues, and suggests compromise and passivity in regulatory relations. Fourth, conflicts with commerce focuses on the inherent difficulties of reconciling social obligations with economic regulation and a profit orientation, so that meeting minimum standards or the risk of regulatory censure may be sensible strategies. Together these templates emphasize the subjective and multiple nature of social responsibility and of regulatory relationships, and demonstrate struggles for the strategic and operational meaning over the nature of public interest and competitive advantage.

Standardization's Role in Care Quality Studied

Standardization's Role in Care Quality Studied

Market orientation and the property development business in Singapore

Abstract The property development business is often regarded as one of high risk and return. As such, developing a competitive advantage is critical. Extant literature suggests that market orientation is a form of sustainable competitive advantage for businesses. This paper is an attempt to test this relationship with specific reference to a high risk business such as property development. A market orientation scale is developed to measure the degree of market orientation in property development firms. The results show that there exists a significant positive relationship for two specific dimensions of market orientation, i.e., profit orientation and responsiveness with business performance and marketing performance. Furthermore, empirical findings showed that the relationship between market orientation and marketing performance was stronger than with business performance.

The strategic evolution of large US law firms

In recent years, large US law firms have been undergoing significant changes. Most have switched from a professional model (P2 form) to a corporate business model, employing competitive strategies and a profit orientation. As the market for corporate legal services became more competitive, many large US law firms began to diversify the services they offer and expand their operations into new geographic regions of the country and into international markets. They even engaged in acquisitions and learned to manage and leverage their critical resources, human capital and relational capital. As a result, most of these law firms have added more professional management. All in all, the services law firms offer and the rivals with which they must contend have changed substantially over the last 15 years.

Do “stakeholders” represent citizen interests? An empirical inquiry into assessments of policy aims in the National Forest Programme for Germany

Participatory National Forest Programmes (NFPs) intend to democratise forest sector policy, but they may suffer from a fundamental democratic legitimisation deficit since the stakeholders involved are neither democratically authorised nor accountable to the population. In order to scrutinise the empirical relevance of this problem in the case of the German NFP, it is analysed how the German population on the one hand and the NFP participants on the other hand assess central forest policy aims of the NFP, and how far both assessments coincide. Two surveys based on identical questionnaires are used as the data base. The respondents assessed the importance of the respective aims as well as at their implementation. Results show that the population considers the majority of the NFP aims to be generally relevant, but assesses the majority of the aims significantly differently from the stakeholders. The formal legitimisation deficit of the German NFP therefore also matters in terms of content. Discussing the NFP among the elected representatives and in the public seems indispensable. Moreover, the differences in the assessment of some policy aims are significantly dependent on how people judge the image of forest enterprises between the opposing poles of profit orientation and nature protection. Public acceptance of those aims could be furthered more appropriately by adjusting the partly incorrect image of forestry rather than by providing more information about the particular aims and their background.

Privatized urbanity or a politicized society? Reconstruction in Beirut after the civil war

After 16 years of civil war in Lebanon, with massive destruction and, in the end, a fragmented society, the reconstruction of Beirut has been very difficult, with the marginalized state stepping back early on in favour of a private reconstruction under the leadership of the businessman and later Prime Minister Hariri. For the successful implementation of the reconstruction Hariri established a private real estate company that not only expropriated the former tenants and owners, but also evacuated the refugees who had occupied properties in the deserted city centre. The reconstruction of Beirut is characterized by the exclusion of most of the protagonists involved. Tenants, owners, and refugees, but also the former elites from politics, science and society were replaced by a group of newcomers, war-profiteers and investors. The decision-making therefore was strongly profit-orientated and often took place behind closed doors. In Beirut a radical new concept of urban development and urban governance has been implemented that led to a “privatization of the urban”. Due to the profit orientation and the exclusion of the protagonists involved, the reconstruction of Beirut's downtown triggered a highly controversial public debate and resulted in a substantial “political mobilization” of Lebanese society. For the first time after the civil war, Lebanese society dared to speak up and publicly comment on the reconstruction. The political mobilization of the society was accompanied by a subsequent “medialization” of the conflict: The struggle over the reconstruction was negotiated to a large part through the media where initiators and critics tried to promote their strategic visions for the reconstruction. Regarding a New Urban Governance, post-war urban development in Beirut was realized mainly within a framework of democratic society. Nevertheless the process of reconstruction is characterized by an exclusion of most of the protagonists involved and by a strong market orientation which often disregarded public interests.

Profit Oriented Multichannel Resource Management of Integrated Communication and Broadcast Networks

Broadcast networks are potential for carrying services with both high data rate and high mobility. Combined with other media as return channels for user requests and acknowledgment signaling, broadcast networks can provide interactive data services too. This paper proposes a multichannel architecture for Integrated Communication and Broadcast Networks (ICBN) which employs all redundant available broadcast bandwidth to provide huge access bandwidth for multimedia information delivery while in fast moving. This architecture can be a highly recommendable candidate of future 4G/5G communications. Most existing bandwidth management policies focus on single channel bandwidth distribution over different data flows, and no multichannel bandwidth management policies for ICBN are found yet. In order to fully employ all channels, a Profit Oriented Bandwidth Allocation Method (POBAM) is given for real-time multichannel bandwidth management. Analytical and simulation results show that the POBAM can exploit the multichannel resources for near global profit maximization, and provide effective QoS differentiation as well. In addition, the joint channel management outperforms the separate channel management greatly. The complexity of the POBAM is low enough for on-line multichannel bandwidth management even when the scale of ICBN is quite large.

Wage Bargaining and Managerial Incentives

If managers bargain with workers over wage before choosing output in a Cournot duopoly, owners face two conflicting interests in designing managerial incentives: one for profit orientation to reduce wage, and the other for sales orientation to gain in output competition. The net effect depends on the workers' bargaining power.

Impact of uncertainties on recovery behavior in a remanufacturing environment

PurposeRemanufacturing of used products is an emerging business area, which is attractive from both an economic and an environmental point of view. Aims to investigate to what extent profit orientation in product recovery management will stimulate an environmentally conscious behavior in the sense that it promotes high recovery levels. This study also seeks to focus on a product recovery system where, in the context of extended product responsibility, a manufacturer of original products is also engaged in remanufacturing used products taken back from its customers.Design/methodology/approachFor this type of a closed‐loop supply chain the optimal recovery and production policy is evaluated. By a numerical analysis, it is shown how cost‐efficient decision making affects the product recovery behavior. In a sensitivity analysis it is evaluated how various problem determinants influence the preference for product recovery. Specifically, the impact of different sources of uncertainty is investigated.FindingsTaking advantage of the respective insights, it is discussed which measures can be taken to harmonize economical and environmental‐driven behavior in product recovery management. It is shown that uncertainty in returns and demands can be a considerable obstacle to follow a consequently environmental‐benign recovery strategy within a reverse logistics system.Research limitations/implicationsThe analysis in this paper is restricted to stationary demand and return patterns. In a non‐stationary situation the impact of uncertainties could be even stronger, since excessive returns might happen more often.Originality/valueFocuses on important issues in product recovery management.

Technology and empowerment in Danish insurance companies

Both empowerment and the use of emergent technologies are ways to cope with increasing competition and customer demands on service industries. The relationship between empowerment, technology and behaviour at the service encounter is, however, sparsely documented. This article offers a comparative empirical analysis of the relationships between empowerment in the job enrichment sense and perceived performance based on survey and interview data from the Danish insurance industry. The results indicate that empowerment initiatives in insurance companies, unlike in banks, are insignificantly associated with perceived price competitiveness and profit orientation. None the less, perceived service quality was significantly associated with empowerment, training, rules and guidelines, and technology. Technology in the form of information system support was found to be especially associated with service quality and the price competitiveness. Furthermore, the study indicated that professionals are less sensitive to empowerment initiatives than are clerks.

The Performance of Venture-Backed Firms: The Effect of Venture Capital Company Characteristics

This paper deals with the empirical investigation of the question as to which type of venture capital (VC) companies determines the growth and survival of istics of VC companies as additional factors that explain the high variation of the employment growth rate of portfolio firms and their probability of surviving. Surprisingly, venture- backed firms financed by independent VC companies are not among the most successful firms. Independent VC companies are some of those with the greatest profit orientation and hence, a high quality of the value chain process is to be expected. Significantly higher employment growth rates are evident for firms financed by locally active VCs. Changes in the board of directors do not have a positive effect on firms' performance. Syndicated investment strategy seems to be a successful strategy.

Ekonomikos humanizacija - efektyvios Lietuvos ūkio integracijos į Europos Sąjungą sąlyga

Straipsnyje konstatuojama, kad šiuolaikinės inovatyvios vadybos, “Naujosios ekonomikos” (New economics) sampratos yra persmelktos ekonominių santykių humanizacijos paradigma. ES šalyse diegiamos ir sėkmingai funkcionuoja naujos, socialiniais humanistiniais orientyrais paremtos ekonominių struktūrų strategijos. Į jas dabar jau inkorporuotos socialinės etinės dimensijos, todėl humanistinės ekonominės veiklos konstantos yra įmanentiškos ilgalaikės ūkio plėtros strategijoms. Jos derina, subalansuoja ekonominius, ekologinius ir socialinius dorovinius visuomenės raidos parametrus. Straipsnio tikslas - supažindinti su etinėmis ekonomikos humanizacijos, ilgalaikės ūkio plėtros dimensijomis, atkreipti dėmesį į Lietuvoje dar neišnagrinėtus, tačiau nepaprastai svarbius etikos institucionalizacijos įmonėse aspektus, atskleisti naujų integralių socialinių humanitarinių mokslų konceptų daugiaplaniškumą, pateikiant jų gilaus suvokimo būtinybę kaip galimybę įžvelgti dar gerai nepažintus integracijos iššūkius Lietuvos ekonomikai.

A New European Socioeconomic Perspective

Over the past few decades a new associationism and cooperativism perspective that takes on a broader, civil-society and solidarity-based view of the economy has developed in France. This perspective resonates with the long tradition of “reform-economics” that France is known for and expresses an understanding of economic relationships as embedded in non-market and non-monetary social relationships. Such broadly understood conceptions of economic activity defy narrow definitions of profit orientation, production and distribution. Economic activity motives include social and political ones that link ‘civil entrepreneurs’ in solidarity networks to service recipients and other stakeholders. One of the functional foundations of this new interdependent notion of the economy is the growing ‘tertiarization’ of economic activities, that is the “intensification of social interactions within productive systems” (Perret and Roustang 1993: 59 – 60). While the market economy is dependent on the non-monetary economy, the tertiarisation of production activities accentuates the interdependence between the market economy and non-market economies. This article seeks to analyze the links between the re-emergence of a civil and solidarity-based economy to the evolution of new forms of public commitment and the changing structures of productive activities in France. It further argues for a theoretical perspective that provides an analytical framework for a more comprehensive approach to the empirical complexity of social economic considerations consisting of three economic spheres: the for-profit economy, the public sector economy and the generally locally based non-monetary reciprocity based economy. Given its ability to link these three poles the civil and solidarity-based economy can revitalize social and political link and consolidate the social fabric while at the same time creating jobs. Yet despite this potential, its mission cannot be to the problems of unemployment and other failures of the market economy. It is instead to facilitate relationships between paid and volunteer work in a context that makes users, workers and volunteers the participants in collectively designed services and economic relationships.