Managerial failure in mid-Victorian Britain?: Corporate expansion during a promotion boom

This article examines the mid-1840s expansion of the British railway network, which was associated with a large deterioration in shareholder value. Using a counterfactual approach and new data on railway competition, we argue that the expansion of the railway companies, and their subsequent decline in financial performance, was not due to managerial failure. Rather, the promotion of new routes by established railways and mergers with other companies was part of a managerial strategy to maintain incumbent positions, and may have been preferable to not expanding whilst their competitors did.

“Local politics and global corporate crime in Irish crime fiction : Alan Glynn's Winterland trilogy",

Why Are Some Subsidiaries of Multinationals the Source of Novel Practices while Others Are Not? National, Corporate and Functional Influences

It has frequently been argued that multinational companies are moving towards network forms whereby subsidiaries share different practices with the rest of the company. This paper presents large-scale empirical evidence concerning the extent to which subsidiaries input novel practices into the rest of the multinational. We investigate this in the field of human resources through analysis of a unique international data set in four host countries - Canada, Ireland, Spain and the UK - and address the question of how we can explain variation between subsidiaries in terms of whether they initiate the diffusion of practices to other subsidiaries. The data support the argument that multiple, rather than single, factor explanations are required to more effectively understand the factors promoting or retarding the diffusion of human resource practices within multinational companies. It emerges that national, corporate and functional contexts all matter. More specifically, actors at subsidiary level who seek to initiate diffusion appear to be differentially placed according to their national context, their place within corporate structures and the extent to which the human resource function is internationally networked.

Robust bimodal person identification using face and speech with limited training data and corruption of both modalities

This paper presents a novel method of audio-visual fusion for person identification where both the speech and facial modalities may be corrupted, and there is a lack of prior knowledge about the corruption. Furthermore, we assume there is a limited amount of training data for each modality (e.g., a short training speech segment and a single training facial image for each person). A new representation and a modified cosine similarity are introduced for combining and comparing bimodal features with limited training data as well as vastly differing data rates and feature sizes. Optimal feature selection and multicondition training are used to reduce the mismatch between training and testing, thereby making the system robust to unknown bimodal corruption. Experiments have been carried out on a bimodal data set created from the SPIDRE and AR databases with variable noise corruption of speech and occlusion in the face images. The new method has demonstrated improved recognition accuracy.

Corporate Ownership, Control, and Firm Performance in Victorian Britain

Scholars have long debated whether ownership structure matters for firm performance. The standard view with respect to Victorian Britain is that family-controlled companies had a detrimental effect on operating profit and shareholder value. Here, we examine this view using a hand-collected corporate ownership dataset. Our main finding is that it was not necessarily the broad structure of corporate ownership that mattered for performance, but whether family blockholders had a governance role. Large active blockholders tended to increase operating performance, implying that they reduced managerial agency problems. In contrast, we find that directors who were independent of large family owners were more likely to increase shareholder value.

The Legitimacy of Subsidiary Issue Selling: Balancing Positive & Negative Attention from Corporate Headquarters

We consider how in issue selling, subsidiaries draw on different forms of legitimacy to attract corporate headquarters’ (CHQ) positive attention and minimise negative CHQ attention. Through case study evidence, we find that directing CHQ attention to subsidiary issues needs to be executed as a balancing act through forms of subsidiary legitimacy, namely; the personal legitimacy of key individuals at the subsidiary; consequential legitimacy vis-à-vis peer subsidiaries; and linkage legitimacy in the local environment. We develop a typology of subsidiary issue-selling roles and illustrate how negative CHQ attention results from a failure to legitimise issue selling.

Corporate social marketing: um estudo de caso no setor da energia elétrica

Grupos privados que comercializam eletricidade ao setor residencial estão, atualmente, a implementar programas que procuram alcançar Eficiência Energética (EE). Estes programas levam a um menor consumo do produto core destas empresas. A EE é um tema destacado na atualidade, nações de todo o mundo traçam planos para alcançá-la, indo ao encontro do estabelecido no Protocolo de Quioto. Em Portugal, o setor da energia elétrica encontra-se entre os que mais danos acarretam para o ambiente. O presente estudo quis conhecer a orientação destes grupos nestes programas. Ou seja, conhecer a sua motivação para os implementar, bem como conhecer a abordagem disciplinar utilizada para os “desenhar”, procurando saber até que ponto o Corporate Social Marketing (CSM) é aplicado. O CSM utiliza a tecnologia do Marketing mainstream para alcançar mudanças comportamentais desejadas. Visa o bem-estar social e/ou ambiental e mede os resultados que atinge. A sua aplicação em programas que visam a EE no consumo, tratando-a como um produto social, é o foco da presente pesquisa. Para o efeito delineou-se a pesquisa através da metodologia Estudo de Caso, com o objetivo de estudar a orientação do Grupo EDP nestes programas, através do programa A Tua Energia, sabendo que “os projetos de Eficiência Energética são sempre definidos e implementados pela EDP enquanto Grupo” (EDP, 2012). A metodologia de análise de dados utilizada é a Grounded Theory (GT) que procura ir ao encontro de uma teoria substantiva, emersa dos dados, que se enquadre ao contexto da pesquisa. O Estudo da orientação do Grupo EDP levou a pesquisa a conhecer a realidade do setor elétrico em relação a estes programas, não só em Portugal mas noutro mercado onde a empresa EDP atua, o Brasil. Os principais resultados alcançados quanto à motivação dos Grupos privados para implementar estes programas foram Ganhos Empresariais, nos quais se integram Imagem Positiva, Estratégia de Negócio e Relacionamento com Stakeholders. Os dados revelam que o programa A Tua Energia não é um programa de CSM pois ainda que foque a mudança comportamental não a alcança efetivamente. Já a EDP no Brasil implementa um programa de mudança comportamental assente na abordagem do CSM. Concluiu-se que a envolvente influencia a orientação da EDP nestes programas, ainda que estes sejam designados pela EDP enquanto Grupo.

Corporate governance in municipality-owned enterprises: a case study

Dissertação de Mestrado, Finanças Empresariais, Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Algarve, 2015