Business Commons^™

Seed Program Sparks A Successful Bakery In Peru, Usu Jon M. Huntsman School Of Business, Allie Jeppson

Jon M. Huntsman School of Business News Collection

Graduates from the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business earn diplomas for their hard work and effort. Four graduates in Peru, however, have their own bakery to show for their efforts.

2012 Private Capital Markets Report, John K. Paglia

Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Report

The Pepperdine private cost of capital survey was originally launched in 2007 and is the first comprehensive and simultaneous investigation of the major private capital market segments. This year’s survey specifically examined the behavior of senior lenders, asset‐based lenders, mezzanine funds, private equity groups, venture capital firms, angel investors, privately‐held businesses, investment bankers, business brokers, limited partners, and business appraisers. The Pepperdine survey investigated, for each private capital market segment, the important benchmarks that must be met in order to qualify for capital, how much capital is typically accessible, what the required returns are for extending capital in today’s economic …

Ada News - 01/02/2012, American Dental Association, Publishing Division

ADA News

Established in 1970 as the official newspaper of the American Dental Association, the ADA News serves practicing dentists and others allied to the dental profession in the U.S. and internationally. It is the No. 1 source of news and information about the many benefits and services the ADA delivers to members daily as well as timely information on scientific, social, political and economic developments affecting dentistry and health care.

Bringing Bottom Of The Pyramid Markets And Consumers Into The Economic Mainstream, Al Hammond

Social Space

Governments and markets have failed to adequately serve the four billion consumers at the bottom of the economic pyramid (BOP). Al Hammond explains why this is so and outlines strategies for how different players can harness the growth of the BOP market.

Training And Development Of Financial Education Program Staff, Sonya L. Britt, Ryan Halley, D. B. Durband

Faculty Publications - College of Business

No abstract provided.

Time-Varying Performance Of International Mutual Funds, H. J. Turtle, Chengping Zhang

Faculty Publications - College of Business

We examine the ability of one- and two-factor regime switching models to describe US, developed, and emerging market mutual fund returns. We find that a two-factor fixed transition probability model adequately describes the multivariate series of mutual fund returns without the need to model time-varying transition probabilities. Mutual fund performance, as measured by a state dependent Jensen's alpha, varies with economic regimes that are defined according to the global equity market mean. Our primary two-factor fixed transition probability model shows that emerging market mutual fund alphas are often significantly positive in global bull regimes. Consideration of alternative second risk factors …

Nice Guys (And Gals) Finish First: Ethical Leadership And Organizational Trust, Satisfaction, And Effectiveness, Paul Shelton

Faculty Publications - College of Business

In this study we examined the relationship between ethical leader behavior and organizational trust, satisfaction with organizational outcomes, and perceived organizational effectiveness. A survey of working adults revealed that perceptions of ethical leadership are positively related to collective trust levels. Those who believed that their leaders acted as moral persons and moral managers rated their organizations as more competent, open, concerned for employees, and reliable while identifying more strongly with their employers. They also reported higher satisfaction with organizational outcomes and considered their organizations to be more effective. Direct supervisors were perceived as more ethical than CEOs. These findings provide …

The Harmonization Of Accounting Standards, Seth Sikkema

Faculty Publications - College of Business

No abstract provided.

Caring Capitalist (Chapter 15 Of Financially Alive: Wealth Creation. Social Responsibility. Biblical Values), Christopher Meade

Faculty Publications - College of Business

The crisis of ethics and values is more evident in the world of business than in any other area. Many people have come to associate capitalism with corporate corruption. From big businesses to mortgage brokers to banking services to Wall Street, greed and self-interest appear unchecked and out of control. While some companies struggle to survive, their senior executives are still receiving staggering salaries, lavish bonuses, and ridiculous perks causing confusion and mistrust within their ranks. The average person can quickly become untrusting at best and disillusioned at worst. At times, it seems that making money at any cost, has …

Does More Mean Better? An Examination Of Visual Product Presentation In E-Retailing, Sarah Song Southworth

Faculty Publications - College of Business

Because of the intangible nature of online shopping, consumers perceive online shopping as being risky. This study examined how this risk can be reduced specifically by using a more effective online product presentation method. A combination of the number of product views (one and four) and size (small and large) of the product image were used to examine their influence on consumer’s mental intangibility and perceived amount of information, in which the two constructs ultimately influence perceived risk and patronage intentions. The results from the study showed that both product displays influenced mental intangibility even though an interaction effect did …

Staffing And Recruiting Considerations For Financial Education Programs (Chapter Three Of Student Financial Literacy), Ryan E. Halley, Dorothy B. Durband, Sonya L. Britt

Faculty Publications - College of Business

A financial education program is only as good as the people who staff it. In order to get the right people on staff, careful attention must be paid to the strategy and execution of recruiting and hiring. Underlying the strategy is the determination of which staff positions are needed and how the roles will be defined. Various questions need to be addressed, such as: What financial resources are available? What types of services is the program planning to offer? What is the level of counselor content expertise? What is the type and size of facility where counseling will take place? …

Does Technology Acceptance Affect E-Learning In A Non-Technology-Intensive Course?, Mari W. Buche, Larry R. Davis, Chelley Vician

College of Business Publications

Prior research suggests that individuals’ technology acceptance levels may affect their work and learning performanceoutcomes when activities are conducted through information technology usage. Most previous research investigating the relationship between individual attitudes towards technology and learning has been conducted in technology intensive settings. In this study we investigate the relationship between individuals’ technology acceptance factors and their performance in a non-technology intensive course – an introductory accounting course where technology is used as a learning tool but where knowledge of technology is not a primary learning objective. Results show that individuals with lower levels of academic proficiency are likely to …

It’S My Body: The Biomedical Ethics Of Cell And Organ Harvest, Christina Perri

Common Reading Essay Contest Winners

First Place

Imsa360: Winter 2012, Imsa Fund

IMSA Fund Reports

Last year we celebrated IMSA’s 25th anniversary. With the commencement of our 212 Seniors, we closed this incredible chapter of IMSA’s history knowing that these young men and women have joined a long line of IMSA alumni whose life work has made an important, positive impact. While the past 25 years have seen IMSA graduates become great leaders in new fields and new careers, they have also seen even more IMSA alumni making less famous but equally as important contributions.

In addition to our Seniors, we also “graduated” more than 3,547 students and 727 teachers whom we served last year …

Walley School Community Arts Center Feasibility Study: Appendices, Katelyn Galvin, Jessica Kraiza, Macs Santacroce, Hank Kniskern, Arnold Robinson

Business

Having a large capacity (over 300 seats) in Walley School demands a major investment in space and cost. Taking this into consideration, the business planning team conducted research and spoke with several individuals in an attempt to inventory and assess the community’s auditorium capabilities. Our research on existing auditorium spaces uncovered many interesting things. We found that there are over 15 existing auditorium spaces available within a 17-mile radius from the Walley School building available for public use.

Washington Park Main Street Plan, Benjamin Bergenholtz, Derek Dandurand, Valerie Fram, Tracy Jonsson, Kimberly Lindner, Carolyn Reid, D.J. Sevigny, Alexandra Skerry, Timothy Guimond, Brooke Kourafas, Elise Murphy, Matt Berry, Erik Butler, Kayla Nerone, Arnold Robinson, Jeremy Wells, Julie Coon, Joel Cooper

Historic Preservation

There is an immense variety of privately owned businesses. They will be stakeholders because their businesses are located there, but they will also be assets in themselves in drawing people to the area. There is basically everything anyone could possible want or need in this area. There are two gas stations, a Family Dollar, a liquor store, a few sit down restaurants, numerous places where one can get a quick bite to eat, a frame shop, a clothing store, a pawn shop, a store with fresh produce (which is hard to find in urban areas), a store that sells sports …

January 2012, Inland Empire Business Journal

Inland Empire Business Journal

5 Ways to Drive Customer Conversion Rates in Your Stores If you don’t track traffic or measure conversion rate in all your stores today, you are missing out on an entirely new way to drive sales. You can’t improve conversion if you don’t measure it

Estate Planning Mistakes of the Rich and Famous We think celebrities and famous people have their estates in perfect order. Think again. Attorney William Hayes gives us examples of well-known people who did not have their estates in proper order. People from all walks of life make the same mistakes over and over again

For …

Finding A Good Job: Academic Network Centrality And Early Occupational Outcomes In Management Academia, Michael Hadani, Susan Coombes, Diya Das, David Jalajas

Faculty of Management Publications

The impact of universalistic versus particularistic criteria on academic hiring has been receiving growing attention in recent years. Yet, most studies conducted on hiring norms in academy and management academy have ignored the impact of social capital, particularly structural social capital, a particularistic attribute, on occupational outcomes. This could lead to a partial if not misleading view of the sociology of hiring in management academy. We utilize a novel approach, focusing on academic departments’ structural social capital in the form of network centrality (based on cumulative PhD exchange networks), and explore how this type of centrality impacts job seekers’ occupational …

The Embeddedness Of Responsible Business Practice: National Institutional Environments And Corporate Social Responsibility, Luc Fransen

Transnational Business Governance Interactions Working Papers

Academic literature recognizes that firms in different countries deal with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in different ways. Because of this, analysts presume that variations in national institutional arrangements affect CSR practices. Literature however lacks specificity in determining, first, what parts of national political economic configurations actually affect CSR practices; second, the precise aspects of CSR affected by national-institutional variables; third, how casual mechanisms between national institutional framework variables and aspects of CSR practices work. Because of this the literature is not able to address to what extent CSR practices are affected by either global or national policies, discourses and economic …

Transnational Business Governance And The Management Of Natural Resources, Virginia Haufler

Transnational Business Governance Interactions Working Papers

In the last two decades, the international community has intervened directly to reduce the conflict and corruption that accompany natural resource development in weakly governed states. These efforts converge on the norm of information disclosure by a number of different transnational business governance initiatives. This article examines how the successive failures of public and private efforts led to patterns of convergence and divergence in the transnational governance of the extractive sector. The timing of the effort, combined with variation in industry structure, differences in the targets of information disclosure, and learning over time influence the outcome in each case. This …

Iso 26000: Bridging The Public/Private Divide In Transnational Business Governance Interactions, Kernaghan Webb

Transnational Business Governance Interactions Working Papers

This paper explores the proposition that the ISO 26000 social responsibility guidance standard represents an innovative form of global social responsibility (SR) rule instrument that performs five key distinctive bridging functions in addressing public and private transnational business governance interactions: (1) top down transpositions of key concepts from inter-­‐governmental instruments directed at first instance at states into a non-­‐state global SR rule instrument applying directly to transnational corporations (TNCs) and other organizations; (2) bottom up transpositions of key concepts from non-­‐state SR instruments of narrow focus to apply more broadly to all SR activities; (3) innovations in the standards development …

Transnational Business Governance Interactions And Technical Systems In Global Finance, Tony Porter

Transnational Business Governance Interactions Working Papers

Most transnational regulatory problems involve technical systems: extended sets of productive connections between humans, organized knowledge, and material objects. The functioning and relations between transnational business governance (TBG) schemes in any particular issue area are usually shaped by these technical systems. These technical systems and the material world that they interact with are not simply exogenous environments for tBG schemes. Individual TBG schemes can enhance their power and influence by expanding their function in a technical system, by incorporating the material aspects of the system into their activities, or by producing the system's technical knowledge. I hypothesize that where a …

The Architecture Of Transnational Private Regulation, Fabrizio Cafaggi

Transnational Business Governance Interactions Working Papers

Conflicting interests among private actors constitute an important factor to explain why and how transnational private regulation has grown and the proliferation of standards and standard setting organizations that has followed. This essay provides a map of transnational regulatory space suggesting that the different levels are related to various governance responses to conflicts within the private sphere and between private and public actors.Three levels of the global regulatory space are considered: (1) the single global regulatory body, where interests are integrated into one organization, (2) the regime, in which multiple organizations operate, regulating within the same policy field, (3) multiple …

Unbundling The Regime Complex: The Effects Of Private Authority, Graeme Auld, Jessica F. Green

Transnational Business Governance Interactions Working Papers

There is a commonly held view that forms of private regulation and governance arise when intergovernmental cooperation fails. While we do not dispute that this is sometimes the case, this paper focuses on the longer-term effects of private authority—namely, the ways that public and private authority interact over time. We argue that a more complete understanding of regime complexity must include private authority, which we define as situations in which non-state actors make rules or set standards that other actors in world politics adopt, and its interactions with public authority. Interactions among public and private actors occur in two ways—one …

Process Vs. Performance Standards For Sustainable Meeting And Event Management, Andrew Stephen Walker

Transnational Business Governance Interactions Working Papers

This paper examines two emerging voluntary industry standards — the process-based ISO 20121 Event sustainability management systems and the performance-based APEX/ASTM Environmentally Sustainable Event Standard — and examines whether they can complement, rather than compete with, each other to provide a comprehensive approach to the complex task of managing and measuring sustainability within meetings and events. A framework for analysis was developed through examining the academic literature on competition between process and performance-based sustainability standards within the forestry sector where several internationally-recognized standards have interacted in the marketplace for over a decade. Three criteria — legitimacy, accountability and effectiveness — …

A Dynamic And Flexible Undergraduate Curriculum: Preparing Agribusiness Students For A Continually Changing Agricultural Sector, Sean P. Hurley, Xiaowei Cai

Agribusiness

Individuals entering the Agribusiness industry need to have the flexibility to adapt to a rapidly changing global environment, and so does an Agribusiness curriculum. This essay provides an overview of a major curriculum overhaul that has transformed the Department of Agribusiness at the California Polytech­nic State University. A rigid concentration structure has been reformed to a more flexible and dynamic no-concentration structure to develop successful future leaders in an ever-evolving industry. This essay explains the need for a more flexible undergraduate agribusiness curriculum and identifies its potential benefits and drawbacks.

Mis 7900 Capstone: 2012 Winter Cohort List, Raj Soin College Of Business, Wright State University

Master of Information Systems Capstone Executive Summary

Available for download is a list of the 2012 Winter Cohorts, complete with student names, project titles, and faculty advisor names.

Forecasts For A Fairer Future, Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg

Politics

A system delivering weather details via short message service (SMS) to farmers in Kenya makes use of traditional and modern forecasting methods, alerting them to periods of heavy rain or drought. The IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC), a climate research institute representing seven east African countries, is working on a system using cell phones to help farmers address the negative impacts of climate change. The new system makes use of the Nganyi's traditional forecasting techniques combined with data from the Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD). KMD staff compile the resulting information and enter it into a database. The information …

Implementing The Recovery Act: Report Gives Nine Action Steps Based On Federal Case Studies, Richard Callahan, Kay Sterner

Public and Nonprofit Administration

No abstract provided.

Chinese Guanxi And Anglo-American Networking: A Comparative Investigation Of Cross-Cultural Interpersonal Business Relationships, Kevin D. Lo

Organization, Leadership, and Communication

Both Chinese and Anglo-American cultures highlight the importance of interpersonal relationships for successful business. In Chinese and Anglo-American culture respectively, guanxi and networking are linguistic equivalents. However, cross-culturally there are emic differences, particularly of Chinese guanxi, which are not captured by these linguistic equivalencies. As such, Chinese guanxi remain somewhat mysterious to a non-Chinese audience. This study explores the differences between Chinese guanxi and Anglo-American networking through a process of semi-structured interviews with n=10 individuals familiar with both cultural contexts. The data indicate three major themes for Chinese guanxi: a heavy emphasis on reciprocity, a long-term orientation, and culture specific …