Search results

This chapter critically analyzes the outcomes of a legal reform enacted in Bali to address unintended consequences of a World Bank policy that undermined women’s economic, legal, and human rights.

This qualitative exploratory inquiry employs ethnographic data including participant observations and 18 interviews conducted in Denpasar, Bali.

The analysis suggests that policy measures intended to empower women which fail to address the influence of gender in the formation and functioning of social institutions reinforce conceptualizations of gender that constrain women’s autonomy and reify patriarchal sociocultural institutions.

Conceptualizations of gender in post-conflict research have lagged behind the richness of theories pertaining to gender as a social structure. Incorporating analyses of gender ideologies into the research phase of policy development will bridge this gap between theory and application.

Calls for women’s empowerment in the wake of the collapse of central governance structures, such as in the Arab Spring, must be accompanied by attention of feminist researchers and activists ensuring that policy measures intended to address barriers to women’s equality move beyond conceptions of empowerment that privilege economic capital. Dominant frameworks employed by microcredit programs and legal reformers emphasizing economic independence without attending to structural causes of women’s marginalization run the ironic risk of more deeply entrenching harmful social institutions.

This project allows women’s voices to reciprocally transform social theories and practices, contributing to understandings of the influence of gender in legal reform efforts and gender as a social structure.

Meta-analysis is one of a number of scientific approaches for accumulating knowledge in a research domain. It provides a quantitative synthesis of a literature using various statistical instruments. This chapter introduces the main points underlying meta-analytic methodology by discussing its merits when compared to a conventional literature review and covers the fundamental approaches used when conducting a meta-analysis. Criticism of meta-analysis is briefly discussed in the context of the major issues facing meta-analysis in international business.

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to examine the Internet financial reporting (IFR) practice by listed companies in Egypt as one of the emerging markets (EMs) and investigate empirically some company characteristics as determinants of such practice.

Methodology/approach – Using a 39-item index, content analysis of websites was performed for 88 of the most active Egyptian listed companies on the Egyptian Stock Exchange (EGX). Further, the article employs statistical analysis to test the association between six company characteristics (independent variables) and the extent of the IFR (including three dependent variables).

Findings – Among the sampled companies, only 57 have accessible websites and 45 provide financial information in their websites. The results of univariate analysis, which were verified by multivariate linear regression, show that some company characteristics (e.g. size, profitability, foreign listing and ownership structure) are significantly positively associated with the IFR, while legal form is significantly negatively associated.

Research limitations and implications – The scope of this study is limited to a relatively small sample of Egyptian listed companies and they may not represent all of the possible listed companies. It would be interesting to duplicate this study in other EM countries which have many similarities to the Egyptian environment.

Originality/value – This investigation concerned a country with an EM – Egypt. Few articles have provided insight into the IFR practices of listed companies in Egypt as one of the EM. Unlike previous studies conducted in Egypt, the current study provides evidence regarding two company characteristics, for the first time in Egypt, namely ‘ownership structure’ and ‘legal form’ as explanatory variables of the extent of IFR by listed companies in EGX.

An emerging management trend is to use the “wisdom of the crowd” to make decisions traditionally made by the top management alone. Research on this phenomenon has focused mainly on the capacity of crowds to generate ideas, but much less is known about a crowd’s capacity to select ideas. To study crowd-based idea selection in firms, this chapter develops a mathematical model of a crowd that makes decisions by majority voting. The model takes into account contingencies that are of particular importance to firms, namely: the size of the population from which the crowd is drawn, the distribution of accuracy among members of the population, and the firm’s ability to recruit the population’s most accurate individuals. The results show that: (1) under relatively common conditions, increasing the size of the crowd may actually reduce performance; (2) near-optimal performance can usually be achieved by a much smaller crowd than the one required to achieve optimal performance; (3) determining the best crowd size depends critically on the firm’s ability to recruit “accurate” individuals; and (4) good performance does not require large crowds unless all population members exhibit low levels of accuracy.

The Canadian mutual fund setting is unique in that two governance mechanisms – corporate and trust – coexist. This study empirically examines the impact of each mechanism on fund fees and performance. We find that corporate class funds charge higher fees but deliver superior fee-adjusted returns than trust funds. We then analyze the impact of various board characteristics on fees and performance for corporate class funds. We find that a board with smaller size, CEO duality, and a higher percentage of independent directors is more likely to charge lower fees. In addition, smaller boards are strongly associated with higher fee-adjusted performance. Our study supports agency theory over stewardship theory and provides valuable guidelines for Canadian investors and regulatory agencies.

This chapter presents an investigation of the sex abuse scandal within the Catholic Church through the lens of stigmatization for the purpose of elaborating the theory, making it more widely applicable across multiples levels of analysis. Much like individuals, organizations must engage in information management in order to conceal discrediting information that would blemish their reputation. Given the number of people who comprise an organization, such secrecy relies on teamwork in order to contain damaging information. Based on an analysis of investigative journalist accounts of the scandal between 1985 and 2014, I present a typology representing the system of organizational secrecy developed by the Catholic Church. While organizations like the church have more structural resources at their disposal to ensure information control is maintained, their size and the varying levels of commitment to secrecy on the part of individual members of the team ultimately work against them.