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Extending the holistic research on corporate reputation (CR), the authors examine whether and how single CR dimensions affect consumers' intentional loyalty toward multinational corporations (MNCs) across nations. They study the dimensions of the predominant customer-based CR scale of Walsh and Beatty (2007): customer orientation, product range quality, social/environmental responsibility, good employer and reliability/financial strength. Furthermore, important country-level moderators – embeddedness and country development – are studied.

The authors refer to hierarchical data on 32,811 consumer evaluations of a MNC in 44 countries using the still novel method of multilevel structural equation modeling.

The results underscore a strong relationship between CR in general and consumers' loyalty but identify different effects for the CR dimensions (e.g. product quality, social/environmental responsibility dominate). The important national institutions reinforce or diminish some – but not all – effects of the CR dimensions.

The results are of importance for finer-grained cross-national reputation management. Studying both national culture and country development shows that MNCs face tradeoff decisions. Accordingly, the authors provide a country portfolio, which offers options for standardized operations in groups of countries with similar country characteristics and CR effects.

Disentangling the five CR levers emphasizes that CR is not a pure signal of quality. Two main levers emerge: one stable across countries and one strongly depending on a country's degree of country development, for example. A finer-grained management of CR signals across nations is possible, especially in emerging countries, with increasing importance for MNCs.

This chapter examines the relationship between constitutional guarantees of sex equality, understood as prohibiting unequal treatment between men and women, and the constitutional protections of maternity. Textual guarantees of sex equality are nearly universal in constitutions around the world, and many constitutions in Europe, Latin America, and Asia also include provisions guaranteeing mothers the special protection of the state. In the United States, by contrast, the special treatment of mothers has long been contested as a threat to gender equality, and the efforts to add a sex equality amendment to the U.S. constitution have failed over the past century because of conflicts about the status of motherhood. This study traces the origins and jurisprudential development of maternity clauses in European constitutions to shed light on the possibility of synthesizing maternity protection with a constitutional commitment to gender equality.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the surface vibrations of an induction machine due to force waves acting on the stator and rotor core. The focus lies on the investigation of the influence of force waves with axial variation and with higher spatial ordinal numbers on the surface vibration of an induction machine and thus its emitted noise.

Unit force waves with different spatial ordinal numbers and varying in axial direction are set up and applied on the stator and rotor teeth of a structural finite element model of an induction machine. Structural harmonic analyses with different frequencies are performed and the deformation of the machine is determined. After that, the root mean square of the normal component of the velocity on the surface of the machine's housing is determined and compared for the different force waves.

The influence of force waves with spatial ordinal numbers of higher order can have a significant influence on the structural vibration, especially if the spatial ordinal number is near the number of teeth. Furthermore, it is shown that the structure may react sensitively to axial variations of the forces, particularly near distinct structural resonances.

The presented investigations show relevant issues influencing the noise behaviour of electrical machines.

The chapter deals with the interface between the law of succession and corporate law and explains the completely different objects of these two fields of law. Succession law tries to shift and contribute assets to the successors, whereas corporate law focuses on the well-being of the company. However, in a family business, it is necessary to find legal, social, and psychological techniques to combine these two areas and to establish strong and binding relations. This is the function of shareholder agreements and family constitutions.

Interdisciplinarity is necessary to explain or solve complex problems and questions of today's world. Therefore, it's important to analyze the situation within an educational institution to get to know what students think about interdisciplinary work. The purpose of this paper is to try to achieve an insight into how e‐learning technologies (like WebCT) are perceived by students and to what degree information and communication technologies (ICTs) could improve communication and cooperation between students.

On the basis of two online surveys and the attendance of a course, the experiences and approaches of students were analyzed.

The results show that most of the students see the positive aspects of interdisciplinary interchange and the benefit of learning from each other, so most of them are open minded regarding interdisciplinarity – an important requirement is given. Information and communication technologies are a good instrument to strengthen the cooperation and communication between students and can further be a helpful device for an interdisciplinary working approach.

Based on these findings, more accesses to interdisciplinary cooperation can be worked out especially in the master program we have analyzed which sees interdisciplinarity as one of its main goals. Knowing that the openness and readiness from students' side is given, the offer for interdisciplinary ways of interchange could be expanded.

The results show that the students are open‐minded to other students' knowledge and views, which also shows the mutual acceptance and respect for other opinions. This is very important for teamwork and also for multicultural interchange on an international basis.

Not only in social regard but also for complex questions of science and society in general the results of student's experiences and approaches are auspicious for international frameworks.

The present paper takes a look at the particularities of German strategy research over the last three decades. In contrast to much of the Anglo-Saxon research, which has focused on competition as a guiding concept in theorizing about strategy, German research has typically been concerned with more fundamental questions about the general relationship between organizations and their environments and, as a result, tended to be more conceptual than empirical. Researchers have been particularly influenced by the German sociological and philosophical traditions, specifically by the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas and by the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Also, there are authors who draw on the economic tradition of the Austrian School in order to develop a competence-based theory of the firm. Another branch builds on Anthony Giddens's structuration theory and Jacques Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction. As we will demonstrate, much of the research has been concerned with fundamental theoretical tensions: evolution vs. planning, selection vs. compensation, cognitive–instrumental rationality vs. moral–practical rationality, etc. We note that, as a consequence, much of German strategy research shows a particular interest in paradoxa and oxymora (such as ‘planned evolution’, ‘productive misunderstandings’ or ‘unfocused monitoring’). This paper will identify and explore important strands of German strategy research and discuss its particularities compared to mainstream strategy research in the United States.

Investigates the differences in protocols between arbitral tribunals and courts, with particular emphasis on US, Greek and English law. Gives examples of each country and its way of using the law in specific circumstances, and shows the variations therein. Sums up that arbitration is much the better way to gok as it avoids delays and expenses, plus the vexation/frustration of normal litigation. Concludes that the US and Greek constitutions and common law tradition in England appear to allow involved parties to choose their own judge, who can thus be an arbitrator. Discusses e‐commerce and speculates on this for the future.

Being embedded in family has proven to bring opportunities and facilitate resources for a firm. However, it has its dark side, where too much family involvement may hamper the entrepreneur’s ability to develop psychological ownership of the firm. By focusing on the role that family plays in entrepreneurship, this paper aims to explore how embeddedness and agency interact during the entrepreneurial process. The research questions are as follows: how does family interact in the entrepreneurial process? How does embeddedness inform this process?

The paper builds on a longitudinal case study of a small firm that is part of a local community of family-controlled firms. The narrative was created through in-depth interviews with the business owner covering a period of eight years from the opening to the closure of the firm. Departing from theories of family embeddedness, the family is viewed as part of the context.

The findings show how agency operates in a community of family-controlled firms and how entrepreneurship is thus partly executed outside the firm’s legal boundaries. The metaphor of a marionette illustrates how family may tie up and restrain an entrepreneur. This hampers the entrepreneur in developing psychological ownership of the firm and thereby restrains the firm’s development. This shows a downside to having too much positive influence from embeddedness.

The paper stresses the social role of family by emphasising the value that a family can bring to an entrepreneurial process and thereby to society at large. Practitioners need to reflect on the effects of embeddedness. By recognising the downsides of too much help from outsiders, they may instead strive for a balance. By introducing the theory of psychological ownership to the literature on embeddedness, this paper opens the space for future developments of this cross-section.

The paper contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by unfolding the mechanisms of family embeddedness and illustrating how embeddedness informs the entrepreneurial process in different ways. Even though over-embeddedness has been investigated before, this has primarily focused on the negative control from outside the firm. This paper uses the notion of psychological ownership to shed light on the previously hidden problem of too much positive influence from family.

The paper investigates whether a family firm's control context is directly associated with a manager's stewardship attitude or whether this relationship is mediated by the manager's perception with respect to the fairness of the control processes.

The authors have sent a survey to family businesses in Brazil. The authors tested the hypotheses with the data collected from 141 responding family and nonfamily managers with the use of structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses (SmartPLS).

The authors find that more participative and more formal controls are associated with higher procedural justice perceptions. Zooming in on the types of control, namely forward-looking action controls, like target setting (TS), and backward-looking results controls, like performance measurement (PM), the authors observe that TS is significantly positively associated with stewardship identification through a manager's procedural justice perceptions for both control characteristics (partial mediation for participative TS and full mediation for formal TS). PM on the other hand is only significantly directly related to a stewardship identification if it is of a participative character. In addition, the authors find a significant moderating effect of family affiliation, increasing the strength of the association between PM procedural justice and stewardship identification for nonfamily managers.

Prior literature focused on discussing stewardship attitudes and behaviors in family firms, but few provided empirical evidence that a stewardship attitude in a family firm is associated with contextual factors, like the design of controls in family firms in combination with a manager's individual perception of family firm's process factors.