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This study aims to examine whether officers' perceptions of the probability of suffering informal sanctions mediate the relationship between formal sanction threats and attitudes toward misconduct. Most importantly, the study examines whether the potential mediating effect of informal sanction threats varies by the type of rank.

The current study utilizes data collected from a mail survey of 480 police officers over a period of six weeks from 20 police stations across two cities in South Korea.

Officers' fear of legal sanctions on the attitudes toward misconduct was entirely mediated by the fear of extralegal forms of punishment. However, this mediation effect was held only for the officers in supervisory positions.

Probing a moderated mediation between the type of rank and sanction threats on police integrity advances the literature by moving beyond simply exploring the additive effects of sanction threats and adds clarity to existing concerns about exactly how rank-related cultural differences matter.

This study investigated why employees' cyberloafing behavior is affected by their coworkers' cyberloafing behavior. By integrating social learning theory and deterrence theory, the authors developed a model to explain the role of employees' perceived certainty of formal and informal sanctions in understanding the effect of coworkers' cyberloafing behavior on employees' cyberloafing behavior.

The authors conducted a survey that involved a two-stage data collection process (including 293 respondents) to test our developed model. Mplus 7.0 was used to analyze the data.

The results revealed that employees' cyberloafing was positively affected by their coworkers' cyberloafing both directly and indirectly. The indirect effect of coworkers' cyberloafing on employees' cyberloafing was mediated by the employees' perceived certainty of formal and informal sanctions on cyberloafing. Employees' perceived certainty of formal and informal sanctions were found to mediate the relationship both separately (each type of sanctions mediates the relationship individually) and in combination (the two types of sanctions form a serial mediation effect).

The study reveals an important mechanism – employees’ perceived certainty of formal and informal sanctions – that underlies the relationship between coworkers' cyberloafing and employees' cyberloafing, thus, contributing to the cyberloafing literature. It also demonstrates the importance of negative reinforcement (perceived sanctions) in the social learning process, which contributes to the literature on social learning theory because previous studies have primarily focused on the role of positive reinforcement. Lastly, the study reveals a positive relationship between employees' perceived certainty of formal sanctions and informal sanctions, which has important implications for deterrence theory.

Employees may see technostress, that is, the stress experienced by individuals as a result of the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), as a threat to their jobs. In other words, employees may have a strong sense of job insecurity because of the ICT. This study aims to examine why and when employees might respond to technology-induced job insecurity (techno-insecurity) by engaging in workplace deviance – an activity that is costly for organizations.

The authors apply partial least squares structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses, using a sample of 354 valid responses.

The authors found that job-related technostress creators and technology-related technostress creators are positively associated with techno-insecurity. Techno-insecurity affects deviant behavior by increasing employees' moral disengagement. The authors also found that informal sanctions moderated the relationship between techno-insecurity and moral disengagement, while formal sanctions moderated the relationship between moral disengagement and deviance.

This study contributes to a better understanding of employee techno-insecurity and deviance by expanding the technostress literature and applying moral disengagement theory.

Threats from the informal sector have become an important concern among formal firms. As a response to these threats, formal firms can adopt product innovation (PI) and marketing innovation (MI) strategies to differentiate themselves. The purpose of this paper is to examine how firm-level technical capability and external institutional quality affect firms’ reactions to the threats from informal firms by adopting innovative activities.

Based on attention-based view (ABV), an empirical study is conducted by using firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey in 2013.

The findings indicate that when faced with competition from informal firms, formal firms will intensify their innovation activities in both MI and PI, and their technical capability mitigates the competitive threats from informal sectors and thus weakens the impact of informal competitors on the level of product and marketing innovations. Moreover, it is found that the improvement of institutional quality reduces formal firms’ urgency to introduce new products when facing informal competitors. However, this improvement strengthens the impact of informal rivalry on formal firms’ innovation in marketing methods.

Previous studies that investigate the influence of informal threats are focused on technological innovation (e.g., PI and process innovation) strategies, but little knowledge is provided on non-technological innovative strategies, such as marketing strategies (e.g., MI and organizational innovation). This study contributes to the innovation literature by delving into the circumstances under which PI and/or MI is adopted to counter informal rivals. The findings enrich ABV by investigating how inter-firm resource similarity and marketing commonality strengthen top managers' attention to competition from informal firms.

The purpose of this paper is to show that, instead of replacing trade retaliation with alternatives that are equally problematic, such as monetary damages, mandatory trade compensation, or formal membership sanctions, the World Trade Organization (WTO) might gain from relying exclusively on informal remedies.

The paper critically reviews the main proposals brought forward in the literature and by WTO members on how to reform WTO remedies. It takes a fresh look at whether any viable, both economically and legally sensitive, alternatives exist.

First, the fact that WTO dispute settlement does not rely on monetary damages and on reparation for past losses is economically justified. Second, switching to an alternative remedy of mandatory trade compensation is not a viable alternative to proportional countermeasures. Third, introducing formal membership sanctions into the WTO would either remain ineffective or turn out to be counterproductive for progressive trade liberalization. Fourth, in order not to provoke an excessive increase of the total cost for WTO members to breach their obligations, any strengthening of the WTO's informal remedies should not be undertaken on top of existing remedies, but as part of a major paradigm shift built on the abrogation of trade retaliation.

The article contributes to the ongoing debate on how to reform the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism.

This article joins an already vast body of literature dealing with potential reforms of the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism. It provides a holistic review of the main existing reform proposals under both legal and economic aspects and adds original insights in discussing the replacement of trade remedies by strengthened informal remedies.

In this chapter, the authors adopt a macrofoundations perspective to explore punishment within institutional theory. Institutional theorists have long focused on a single type of punishment – retribution – including the use of sanctions, fines, and incarceration to maintain conformity. The authors expand the types of punishment that work to uphold institutions, organized by visible and hidden, and formal and informal characteristics. The four types of punishment include (1) punishment-as-retribution; (2) punishment-as-charivari; (3) punishment-as-rehabilitation; and (4) punishment-as-vigilantism. The authors develop important connections between punishment-as-charivari, which relies on shaming efforts, and burgeoning interest in organizational stigma and social evaluations. The authors also point to informal types of punishment, including punishment-as-vigilantism, to expand the variety of actors that punish wrongdoing, including actors without the legal authority to do so. Finally, the authors detail a number of questions for each type of punishment as a means to generate a future research agenda.

When tackling the informal economy, an emergent literature has called for the conventional rational economic actor approach (which uses deterrents to ensure that the costs of undeclared work outweigh the benefits) to be replaced or complemented by a social actor approach which focusses upon improving tax morale. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of these two policy approaches in reducing informal sector entrepreneurship.

To evaluate this, data are reported from a 2015 representative survey involving 1,384 face-to-face interviews with owners or managers of small businesses in three South-Eastern European countries, namely, Croatia, Bulgaria and FYR Macedonia.

The findings provide support for the “social actor” approach and display that small businesses have a greater propensity to perceive competitors as operating informally when the level of tax morale is lower. Meanwhile, no support for the deterrence measures of the “rational economic actor” model is reported.

The major limitation of the study is that the paper is not able to display the reasons for the low level of tax morale and horizontal trust. Therefore, further in-depth qualitative research is necessary to explain whether and how the low levels of trust are determined by the failures of various formal institutions.

This is the first known study on small businesses which analyses simultaneously two distinct policy approaches that aim to reduce participation in informal entrepreneurship.

Despite the growing concern about security breaches and risks emerging from Shadow IT usage, a type of information security violation committed by organizational insiders, this phenomenon has received little scholarly attention. By integrating the dual-factor theory, unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) and social control theory, this research aims to examine facilitating and deterring factors of Shadow IT usage intention.

An online survey was performed to obtain data. As this study aims at investigating the behavior of organizational insiders, LinkedIn, an employment-oriented network site, was chosen as the main site to reach the potential respondents.

The results show that while performance expectancy, effort expectancy and subjective norms considerably impact intention to use Shadow IT, personal norms and sanctions-related factors exert no influence. Besides, an organizational factor of ethical work climate is found to significantly increase individual perceptions of informal controls and formal controls.

This work is the first attempt to extend the generalizability of the dual-factor theory and UTAUT model, which primarily has been utilized in the context of system usage, to the new context of information security. This study is also one of few studies that simultaneously take both organizational and individual factors into consideration and identify its impacts on user's behaviors in the information security context.

This article aims to explore how knowledge-intensive service firms design inter-firm contracts to govern the exchange of highly intangible and inseparable knowledge under varying degrees of property right protection.

This research uses a multiple case study of management consulting firms domiciled in Serbia and Albania.

Firms domiciled in relatively weak property right settings prefer more informal contracts, whereas those in settings of superior property right protection favour greater formality as a means of encouraging the creation and sharing of knowledge, whilst concurrently mitigating the threat of opportunism.

This article contributes new knowledge with regard to the design of inter-firm contracts to govern the sharing of highly intangible and inseparable knowledge. In terms of theory, it employs a transaction cost economics approach in which inter-firm contracts are decomposed into five requisite provisions, which are then related to the degree of formality.

Knowledge-intensive service firm managers should assess the degree of property right protection when considering the degree of formality of inter-firm contracts.

The study constitutes the first attempt to empirically examine how knowledge-intensive service firms craft contracts in different property right settings. With the burgeoning number of cross-border collaborative partnerships between such firms, it offers important insights into the choice of governance mechanism in different property right protection settings.