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Full-Text Articles in Business

Using Community Service Projects To Teach Leadership And Team-Building: Theoretical Foundations, Students' Reactions And Practical Considerations, Gilbert Tan Dec 2005

Using Community Service Projects To Teach Leadership And Team-Building: Theoretical Foundations, Students' Reactions And Practical Considerations, Gilbert Tan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper discusses the theoretical foundations of utilizing Community Service Project (CSP) or service-learning to teach Leadership and Team-Building. It examines the students’ reactions to this innovative method of instruction. This is done through conducting a content analysis of students’ learning journals, in which students reflect on their CSP learning experiences. Two themes emerged from the data: (a) variety of learning experiences, and (b) impact of CSP experience. The data suggested that students derived a variety of learning experiences from the CSP. In addition, there were attitudinal and learning impacts associated with the CSP experiences. The paper also outlines some …


Defining The 'Social' In 'Social Entrepreneurship': Altruism And Entrepreneurship, Wee Liang Tan, John N. Williams, Teck Meng Tan Sep 2005

Defining The 'Social' In 'Social Entrepreneurship': Altruism And Entrepreneurship, Wee Liang Tan, John N. Williams, Teck Meng Tan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

What is social entrepreneurship? In, particular, what’s so social about it? Understanding what social entrepreneurship is enables researchers to study the phenomenon and policy-makers to design measures to encourage it. However, such an understanding is lacking partly because there is no universally accepted definition of entrepreneurship as yet. In this paper, we suggest a definition of social entrepreneurship that intuitively accords with what is generally accepted as entrepreneurship and that captures the way in which entrepreneurship may be altruistic. Based on this we provide a taxonomy of social entrepreneurship and identify a number of real cases from Asia illustrating the …


Slack Resources And The Performance Of Privately Held Firms, Gerard George Aug 2005

Slack Resources And The Performance Of Privately Held Firms, Gerard George

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Empirical findings from publicly traded firms and behavioral arguments suggest a positive influence of resource slack on financial performance. While this area has remained unexplored in privately held firms, conceptual arguments indicate that resource constraints may enhance performance. Longitudinal data on 900 privately held firms confirm the differing influences of forms of slack on performance. Results indicate that a combination of behavioral and resource constraints arguments are necessary to explain the slack-performance relationship in privately held firms. The implications of these findings for theories of resources and entrepreneurship are discussed.


Too Little Or Too Much? Reexamining The Relationship Between Corporate Charitable Giving And Corporate Financial Performance, Heli Wang, Jaepil Choi, Jiatao Li Aug 2005

Too Little Or Too Much? Reexamining The Relationship Between Corporate Charitable Giving And Corporate Financial Performance, Heli Wang, Jaepil Choi, Jiatao Li

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

How do corporate charitable contributions affect corporate financial performance? Instrumental stakeholder theory posits that corporate giving can lead to high levels of corporate financial performance through improved stakeholder relations. In contrast, agency theory suggests that corporate giving diverts valuable corporate resources and inhibits corporate financial performance. Extant empirical studies that have examined the relationship found inconclusive results. We depart from and extend the existing literature in two main aspects. First, building upon the instrumental stakeholder argument and agency perspective, we develop the argument that there is an inverse U-shaped relationship between corporate charitable giving and corporate financial performance. Second, we …


Why Is Management A Cliché?, Stefano Harney Jul 2005

Why Is Management A Cliché?, Stefano Harney

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article introduces the term demotics of management by asking why so much management literature reads like a cliché. Typically this question has been approached by seeing the cliché as strategic. This article instead views the cliché as symptomatic. It marks a growing problem—how can management track labor out of the workplace and into the realm of social reproduction, a realm that is increasingly, with the tendency of immaterial labor, directly productive. This problem has produced not only the explosion of popular management literature, particularly in the United States, in the last 20 years, but also what might be called …


The Singapore Edge In India's Silicon Valley: New Insights?, Caroline Yeoh, David David May 2005

The Singapore Edge In India's Silicon Valley: New Insights?, Caroline Yeoh, David David

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

No abstract provided.


The Impact Of Ownership Structure On Wage Intensity In Japanese Corporations, Toru Yoshikawa, Phillip H. Phan, Parthiban David Apr 2005

The Impact Of Ownership Structure On Wage Intensity In Japanese Corporations, Toru Yoshikawa, Phillip H. Phan, Parthiban David

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The authors studied the effect of ownership structure on human capital investments as indicated by wage intensity, defined as the ratio of expenditure on employee wages to sales, in a sample of 996 Japanese manufacturing firms during their economic recession of 1998-2002. They found that domestic shareholders, with interests beyond financial considerations, enhance wage intensity, especially when performance is low, and thereby safeguard human capital investments. Foreign shareholders with sole interest in financial returns have an opposite effect; they reduce wage intensity when firm performance is low.


The Effects Of Ownership And Capital Structure On Board Composition And Strategic Diversification In Japanese Corporations, Toru Yoshikawa, Phillip H. Phan Mar 2005

The Effects Of Ownership And Capital Structure On Board Composition And Strategic Diversification In Japanese Corporations, Toru Yoshikawa, Phillip H. Phan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The board of directors plays an important role in solving the agency problem between shareholders and management. This paper investigates the relationships between ownership and board structure with the diversification strategy of large Japanese firms. The results show that corporate nominee directors are associated with lower levels of product diversification of their investee firms. This suggests that nominee directors in large Japanese corporations see themselves representing specific interests and therefore investors should pay attention to board composition in order to assess the level of protection they can expect to receive. Even without any apparent agency problem with management, there remains …


Strategic Management For Economic Development: Remaking The Singapore 'Model', Caroline Yeoh, Wilfred Pow Ngee How Jan 2005

Strategic Management For Economic Development: Remaking The Singapore 'Model', Caroline Yeoh, Wilfred Pow Ngee How

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The dynamics of international economic competition have far-reaching policy implications for both developing and developed countries. Established industrial and trade policy regimes in most countries are under tremendous strain, and this applies even to the dynamic Newly Industrialising Economies (NIEs). The outward-oriented development strategies of the Asian NIEs, which once seemed unbeatable, have run up against protectionist barriers in the developed countries, and increasingly, against competitive pressures from other up and coming developing countries. Governments in these NIEs have had to re-examine accustomed policies and strategies, and search for alternative strategies and programs, in order to re-position their economies for …


Ownership Structure, Investment Behaviour And Firm Performance In Japanese Manufacturing Industries, Eric Gedajlovic, Toru Yoshikawa, Motomi Hashimoto Jan 2005

Ownership Structure, Investment Behaviour And Firm Performance In Japanese Manufacturing Industries, Eric Gedajlovic, Toru Yoshikawa, Motomi Hashimoto

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Using data spanning the 1996-98 fiscal years of 247 of Japan's largest manufacturers, we empirically evaluate the extent to which a firm's investment behaviour and financial performance are influenced by its ownership structure. To do so, we examine six distinct categories of Japanese shareholders: foreign investors, investment funds, pension funds, banks and insurance companies, affiliated companies and insiders. Our findings strongly indicate that the relationship between the equity stakes of a particular category of investor and a firm' s financial performance and investment behaviour is considerably more complex than is depicted in simple principal-agent representations. Such a result emphasizes the …