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There has been a general increase in the use of promotions within UK multiple grocers over recent years, during which the spirits category has grown in both volume and monetary terms. The results from an econometric analysis of weekly cross‐sectional store data and cluster analysis of consumer panel data suggest that promotions have had a slight positive impact on the volume of sales, particularly over the seasonally important Christmas period. However, some promotions, especially multibuys, appear largely to reward loyal buyers, doing little for either volume or monetary growth of the spirits category. Other promotions, such as price and gift offers, appeal more to consumers who do not purchase spirits so frequently and also attract people who are less brand and store loyal. The case study provides clear evidence of the differential impacts which different promotional methods have on sales growth and the need to carefully target different promotional offers to different groups of buyers.

Enlightenment philosophers profoundly influenced the emergence of democracy. Enlightenment ideas underlie much of the theory and practice of public procurement today. Economic theory, dating from the writings of Adam Smith and his mentor Frances Hutcheson, assumes that suppliers will act in their own self interest. Knowing this, public buyers seek to fashion incentives to align the private interests of suppliers with public needs. But Hutcheson and others argued that civic duty and benevolence should guide public servants in seeking value for their fellow citizens. That argument is the basis of our codes of ethics. The clams of public procurement to being a profession will be greatly bolstered when it is recognized that our knowledge base is rooted in the same Enlightenment thinking that undergirds other professions and academic disciplines.

Corporate social responsibility is one of the earliest and key conceptions in the academic study of business and society relations. This article examines the future of corporate social responsibility. Bowen's (1953) key question concerned whether the interests of business and society merge in the long ran. That question is assessed in the present and future contexts. There seem to be distinctly anti‐responsibility trends in recent academic literature and managerial views concerning best practices. These trends raise significant doubts about the future status of corporate social responsibility theory and practice. The vital change is that a leitmotif of wealth creation progressively dominates the managerial conception of responsibility. The article provides a developmental history of the corporate social responsibility notion from the Progressive Era forward to the corporate social performance framework and Carroll's pyramid of corporate social responsibilities. There are three emerging alternatives or competitors to responsibility: (1) an economic conception of responsibility; (2) global corporate citizenship; and (3) stakeholder management practices. The article examines and assesses each alternative. The article then assesses the prospects for business responsibility in a global context. Two fundamentals of social responsibility remain: (1) the prevailing psychology of the manager; and (2) the normative framework for addressing how that psychology should be shaped. Implications for practice and scholarship are considered.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between buyer's emotional intelligence and buyer's relationship performance.

A survey methodology was used to collect data for this study. The survey was administered using an assessment process which incorporated “buyers'” and “suppliers'” assessment for the independent variable, emotional intelligence, and the dependent variable, relationship performance. The respondents consisted of 34 buyers and 102 suppliers.

Correlation and regression analysis revealed several significant relationships between the variables. Specifically, buyers' self‐assessed emotional intelligence was not significantly related to buyers' self‐assessed relationship performance. Buyers' emotional intelligence assessed by suppliers was significantly related to buyers' relationship performance assessed by suppliers. Buyers' emotional intelligence (as assessed by buyers and suppliers' assessment differences) was not significantly related to buyers' self‐assessed relationship performance. Last, buyers' emotional intelligence (as assessed by buyers' and suppliers' assessment differences) was significantly related to buyers' relationship performance (as assessed by buyers' and suppliers' assessment differences). Thus, the results suggest that buyers' emotional intelligence is positively related to relationship performance, most significantly from the perspective of their key suppliers.

This study is the first to introduce emotional intelligence within an environment that consisted of individuals working with others outside of their respective organizations (buyers and suppliers). This research offers some insight to buyers on the implications of emotional intelligence and how it can be used to support their interactions with their key suppliers.

In an increasingly global business environment, the interaction of people with different cultural and ethical norms requires that multinational corporations consider these differences in addressing the concerns of stakeholders at home and abroad. This article examines the cultural and ethical issues facing MNCs in developing an international code of ethics and training expatriate managers.

Design-based research (DBR) involves multiple iterations, and innovations are needed in analytical methods for understanding how learners experience a learning experience in ways that both embrace the complexity of learning and allow for data-driven changes to the design of the learning experience between iterations. The purpose of this paper is to propose a method of crafting design moves in DBR using network analysis.

This paper introduces learning experience network analysis (LENA) to allow researchers to investigate the multiple interdependencies between aspects of learner experiences, and to craft design moves that leverage the relationships between struggles, what worked and experiences aligned with principles from theory.

The use of network analysis is a promising method of crafting data-driven design changes between iterations in DBR. The LENA process developed by the authors may serve as inspiration for other researchers to develop even more powerful methodological innovations.

LENA may provide design-based researchers with a new approach to analyzing learner experiences and crafting data-driven design moves in a way that honors the complexity of learning.

LENA may provide novice design-based researchers with a structured and easy-to-use method of crafting design moves informed by patterns emergent in the data.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to propose a method for using network analysis of qualitative learning experience data for DBR.

Argues that stakeholder theory may be an appropriate model to describe firm behavior and replace the dominant paradigm, the economic model of the firm. However, current conceptualizations of stakeholder theory do not meet the requirements of scientific theory. Thus, looks at the historic roots of stakeholder “theory”, critiques its current form, and suggests steps that may be taken for stakeholder theory to satisfy the conceptual requirements of theory. Specifically suggests that contractual interests may underlie stakeholder relationships just as they do the agency relationship between managers and stockholders as prescribed by traditional economic theory.

Entrepreneurs and their ventures are often portrayed as unambiguously positive forces in society. Specifically, high technology and equity-funded startups are heralded for their innovative products and services that are believed to alter the economic, social, and even political fabric of life in advantageous ways. This paper draws on established theory on the causes of misconduct in and by organizations to elaborate the factors that can give rise to misconduct in entrepreneurial ventures, illustrating our arguments with case material on both widely known and less well-known instances of entrepreneurial misconduct. In venturing into the dark side of entrepreneurship, we hope to contribute to theory on entrepreneurship and organizational misconduct, augment entrepreneurship pedagogy, and offer ideas and examples that can enhance entrepreneurs’ awareness of their susceptibility to wrongdoing.

The objective of this paper is to collate and debate the main issues driving the stakeholder theory academic debate.

First, a discussion of the stakeholder concept is set out before moving on to the history and nature of stakeholder theory. The work proceeds with an attempt to bring together systematically the points of divergence among researchers interested in stakeholder theory, and, finally, there is a brief discussion of these theoretical loopholes in conjunction with a proposed research agenda for the field.

Based on the unification of the theoretically problematic issues, research agenda are put forward with the objective of clarifying doubts and resolving the controversies ongoing among academics. As regards the formulation of stakeholder theory, one question requiring resolution is that of the stakeholder concept itself. Additionally, further research should focus on the boundaries as to what constitutes a stakeholder group as well as defining the criteria for attributing individual membership of one or another group. In practical theoretical application, it is correspondingly necessary to target research on aspects such as conflicts of interest between stakeholders and management difficulties in coping with multiple objectives. Finally, there is a need for research that systematizes the knowledge produced with the objective of attaining the theoretical convergence necessary for the development of stakeholder theory.

The main contribution of this paper derives from the systematization of the various shortcomings that need overcoming within the framework of stakeholder theory and the identification of research agendas.

This chapter addresses one of the most crucial areas for critical thinking: the morality of turbulent markets around the world. All of us are overwhelmed by such turbulent markets. Following Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2004, 2010), we distinguish between nonscalable industries (ordinary professions where income grows linearly, piecemeal or by marginal jumps) and scalable industries (extraordinary risk-prone professions where income grows in a nonlinear fashion, and by exponential jumps and fractures). Nonscalable industries generate tame and predictable markets of goods and services, while scalable industries regularly explode into behemoth virulent markets where rewards are disproportionately large compared to effort, and they are the major causes of turbulent financial markets that rock our world causing ever-widening inequities and inequalities. Part I describes both scalable and nonscalable markets in sufficient detail, including propensity of scalable industries to randomness, and the turbulent markets they create. Part II seeks understanding of moral responsibility of turbulent markets and discusses who should appropriate moral responsibility for turbulent markets and under what conditions. Part III synthesizes various theories of necessary and sufficient conditions for accepting or assigning moral responsibility. We also analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions for attribution of moral responsibility such as rationality, intentionality, autonomy or freedom, causality, accountability, and avoidability of various actors as moral agents or as moral persons. By grouping these conditions, we then derive some useful models for assigning moral responsibility to various entities such as individual executives, corporations, or joint bodies. We discuss the challenges and limitations of such models.