3.8 Internet resources There are many websites where you will find useful information for business and management. With all information on the internet you need to make a judgement on the reliability of the information. 3.3 Books and electronic books Books are a good source of information. The publishing process (where a book is checked by an editor before publishing, and often reviewed by another author) means that books are reliable sources of information, although they may need to be evaluated for bias. To find out about other books available in your subject area, you can search library catalogues and/or online bookshops. Some useful links can be found on the Author(s): 1.5 Organising information How confident are you that you know when it is appropriate to cite references (refer to the work of other people) in your written work? 5 - Very confident 4 - Confident 3 - Fairly confident 2 - Not very confident 1 - Not confident at all How confident do you feel about producing bibliographies (lists of references) in an appropriate format to accompany your written work? References 5 Making a choice If you are interviewing a shortlist of potential providers, the clearer you are in your own mind about what you require, the more effective your selection is likely to be. Given the size of the investment you are likely to be considering and its potential impact on the organisation, this selection process may be at least as significant as the selection of a senior manager, and you should invest appropriate effort in making your choice. You will want to think carefully about the process you wi Learning outcomes After studying this course, you should be able to: appreciate the characteristics of consultancy when viewed as a service offered for sale as client, identify suitable contexts for using consultants as client, identify, gather information on, and evaluate the suitability of competing consultants. 2.4 Shareholder activism Shareholder (investor) activism can also force better corporate governance. Historically, individual shareholders, whether institutions or private persons, have had little chance of influencing the board or management given the fragmentation of ownership. Shareholders can ask questions at the annual general meeting, but they would need a majority of votes in order to pass a motion that was binding on management. Even institutional shareholders do not, in most countries, hold as much as 1.1 Definitions The need for corporate governance arises out of the divorce in modern corporations between the rights of shareholders and other suppliers of capital on the one hand, and the operational control, which is in the hands of professional managers, on the other. This can be described as the ‘principal–agent’ problem. Put simply, the question is: will the managers run the corporation exclusively for the long-term benefit of the shareholders, and what mechanisms can be put in place to ensure th 6.6 The social construction of unknown risk While some risks can be quantified, many are unknown. In the face of such uncertainty our approach to risk depends on fundamental assumptions about the way the world works which cannot be readily subject to empirical test. Different social groups have different approaches to uncertainty. Schwarz and Thompson (1990) characterise these in terms of what they describe as four myths of nature. Adams (1995) has conceptualised these in terms of a ball on a surface ( 6.3 The psychology of risk Within the psychological paradigm there is a different starting point for understanding risk. In financial economic accounts, risk is generally regarded as a combination of the expected magnitude of loss or gain and the variability of that expected outcome. Human perception of risk works rather differently. There are two other important components of risk that influence our perceptions: the fear factor – how much we dread the potential outcome – and the control factor 5.5.1 Coercive pressures
Coercive pressures come from the social sanctions that can be applied if we do not act in socially legitimate ways. The law is one source of coercive pressure, but so too is the knowledge that you will get promoted only if you act in ways which fit accepted ways of doing things in your organisation. 4.5.2 Anchoring adjustment Many decisions need revisiting and updating as new information comes available. However, most of us make insufficient anchoring adjustment: this is the tendency to fail to update one's targets as the environment changes (Rutledge, 1993). Once a manager has made an initial decision or judgement then this provides a mental anchor which acts as a source of resistance to reaching a significantly different conclusion as new information becomes available. It is what happens when one has made 3.3 Limitations of the rational-economic perspective As an approach to understanding economic life, the assumption of formal rationality has been very successful. For example, there is great deal of evidence that, on average, prices in financial markets behave as if investors were formally rational. However, there is also a great deal of evidence that individuals do not behave in this way (e.g. de Bondt, 1998). Even within the field of financial economics, there is increasing interest in developing theories of market behaviour which take better Acknowledgements Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence Course image: eri 2 The ‘business sense’ of an ethical approach Sternberg (1995: 125) argues that treating employees ethically is not an optional extra but an essential ingredient in maximising long-term value: Treating employees ethically simply means treating them with ordinary decency and distributive justice. The ethical business rewards contributions to the business objective, and is honest and fair to its staff; it avoids lying, cheating and stealing, coercion, physical v 1.2 The relationship between stakeholders and the organisation Public and voluntary sector organisations do not have the same shareholder obligations as those in the private sector. However, as the distinction between public and private sector organisations becomes blurred, there are concerns that the ethical role of public service organisations – defined as acting in the public interest through a public service ethos – is being undermined. As public service and non-profit organisations are increasingly expected to achieve targets and become more ‘ Learning outcomes After studying this course, you should be able to: explain the relationship between strategy and the ethical dimension of organisational purposes. References 4 Conclusion The primary thrust of this course has been to emphasise the need for all organisations to acknowledge the influence of their environments and, in turn, the impact of organisations on their context. We have argued that the commercial environment is characterised primarily by the growing trend toward globalisation. To a much greater extent than ever before we live in a global village where goods and services will be produced wherever they can be provided at the least cost. Consumers in the West 3.2 CSR reporting We mentioned earlier three reasons for environmentally friendly behaviour, effectively deriving from personally held values, niche marketing or regulatory pressure. To a large extent the same holds true for ethical behaviour. Some organisations have a long tradition of good citizenship, ranging from the UK social housing of Bourneville or Port Sunlight, through to community involvement schemes from such as Xerox and IBM. Financial sponsorship of good causes, whether that be artistic end
Interactive Investor International A good market data site, offering a mixture of real-time, dela