Competitive advantage in public-sector organizations: explaining the public good/sustainable competitive advantage paradox

Resource-based views of the firm and in particular Kay's (Why Firms Succeed. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995) model of sustainable competitive advantage have been used to advance an understanding of differences in the competitive advantage of private-sector firms. We extend the analysis to a public-sector firm where its major purpose includes engaging in public good by giving away its knowledge base and services. The case highlights the paradox that many public-sector organizations face in simultaneously pursuing public good and sustainable competitive advantage. While Kay's model is applicable for understanding intergovernmental agency competition, we find it necessary to incorporate resource dependency theory to address the paradox. Implications for theory and practice are provided. (C) 2002 Elsevier Inc. All rights reseved.

The role of uncertainty in the relationship between fairness evaluations and willingness to pay

Participants in contingent valuation studies may be uncertain about a number of aspects of the policy and survey context. The uncertainty management model of fairness judgments states that individuals will evaluate a policy in terms of its fairness when they do not know whether they can trust the relevant managing authority or experience uncertainty due to insufficient knowledge of the general issues surrounding the environmental policy. Similarly, some researchers have suggested that, not knowing how to answer WTP questions, participants convey their general attitudes toward the public good rather than report well-defined economic preferences. These contentions were investigated in a sample of 840 residents in four urban catchments across Australia who were interviewed about their WTP for stormwater pollution abatement. Four sources of uncertainty were measured: amount of prior issue-related thought, trustworthiness of the water authority, insufficient scenario information, and WTP response uncertainty. A logistic regression model was estimated in each subsample to test the main effects of the uncertainty sources on WTP as well as their interaction with fairness and proenvironmental attitudes. Results indicated support for the uncertainty management model in only one of the four samples. Similarly, proenvironmental attitudes interacted rarely with uncertainty to a significant level, and in ways that were more complex than hypothesised. It was concluded that uncertain individuals were generally not more likely than other participants to draw on either fairness evaluations or proenvironmental attitudes when making decisions about paying for stormwater pollution abatement.

The ethics pyramid: Making ethics unavoidable in the public relations process

To move from the realm of good intent to verifiable practice, ethics needs to be approached in the same way as any other desired outcome of the public relations process: that is, operationalized and evaluated at each stage of a public relations campaign. A pyramid model—the "ethics pyramid" —is useful for incorporating ethical reflection and evaluation processes into the standard structure of a typical public relations plan. Practitioners can use it to integrate and manage ethical intent, means, and ends, by setting ethics objectives, considering the ethics of each campaign tactic, and reporting whether ethical outcomes have been attained.