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- 2017
- Working Paper
Business History, the Great Divergence and the Great Convergence
By: Geoffrey Jones
This working paper provides a business history perspective on debates about the Great Divergence, the rise of the income gap between the West and the Rest, and the more recent Great Convergence, which has seen a narrowing of that gap. The literature on the timing and... View Details
- July 2017
- Article
Business Responsibilities for Human Rights: A Commentary on Arnold
By: Nien-hê Hsieh
Human rights have come to play a prominent role in debates about the responsibilities of business. In the business ethics literature, there are two approaches to the question of whether businesses have human rights obligations. The “moral” approach conceives of human... View Details
- June 2017
- Article
The Social Trajectory of a Finance Professor and the Common Sense of Capital
By: Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana
This paper traces the career of Michael Jensen, a Chicago finance PhD turned Harvard Business School professor to reveal the intellectual and social conditions that enabled the emergence and institutionalization of what we call the “neoliberal common sense of capital,”... View Details
- 2017
- Chapter
Corporate Moral Agency, Positive Duties, and Purpose
By: Nien-hê Hsieh
A long-standing question in business ethics is whether business enterprises are themselves moral agents with distinct moral responsibilities. To date, the debate about corporate moral agency has focused on responsibility for past wrongdoing that involves violating... View Details
- April 2017 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Making Target the Target: Boycotts and Corporate Political Activity
By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Victor Wu
Through the challenges facing Target, the case examines ways in which corporations can become involved in political and legislative debates and processes, ranging from campaign contributions to lobbying to political activism. In 2016, Target CEO Brian Cornell must... View Details
Keywords: Boycott; Corporate Political Activity; Lobbying; LGBTQ; Campaign Contributions; Campaign Finance; Retail; Shareholder Activism; Public Opinion; Social Issues; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Problems and Challenges; Laws and Statutes; Rights; Crisis Management; Risk Management; Media; Political Elections; Taxation; Corporate Accountability; Values and Beliefs; Fairness; Diversity; Customers; Communication; Business and Government Relations; Retail Industry; United States
- March 2017 (Revised December 2017)
- Case
The Ready-Made Garment Industry: A Bangladeshi Perspective (A)
By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Saloni Chaturvedi
Responsibility for working conditions in contract factories within the supply chain presents an ongoing challenge for managers and an area of debate. Much of the debate approaches the challenge from the perspective of large global apparel brands. This case helps... View Details
- March 2017 (Revised October 2018)
- Case
Catalant: The Future of Work?
By: Thomas Eisenmann, Jeffrey F. Rayport and Christine Snively
Catalant, founded in 2013 as an online marketplace where MBAs could bid on consulting projects posted by small- to medium-sized businesses, had expanded by 2016 to provide Fortune 1000 companies with access to over 35,000 independent experts. The founders envisioned... View Details
- 2017
- Chapter
Gapponshugi in Global Perspective: Debating the Responsibility of Capitalism
By: Geoffrey Jones
This chapter places the concepts of ethical capitalism developed by the 19th century Japanese venture capitalist Shibusawa Eiichi in a global historical perspective. The chapter reviews the similarities and differences over time and between countries of proponents of... View Details
- 2017
- Article
Making Transparency Transparent: The Evolution of Observation in Management Theory
By: Ethan Bernstein
Observation is key to management scholarship and practice. Yet a holistic view of its role in management has been elusive, in part due to shifting terminology. The current popularity of the term “transparency” provides the occasion for a thorough review, which finds... View Details
Keywords: Transparency; Privacy; Observation; Tracking; Monitoring; Surveillance; Learning; Control; Disclosure; Process Visibility; Organizations; Theory; Information Technology; Relationships; Measurement and Metrics; Management Practices and Processes; Leadership; Law; Knowledge; Human Resources; Communication
- December 2016 (Revised March 2017)
- Case
Beingmate
By: David E. Bell, Juan Ma and Natalie Kindred
Founded in 2002, Hangzhou, China–based Beingmate was a major producer of infant formula and related products in the high-demand Chinese market. After an infamous 2008 food safety episode in China, in which toxic infant formula sickened thousands of babies and led to... View Details
- December 2016
- Article
The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales, Revisited
By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf
Even as we approach the twentieth anniversary of widespread file sharing, its impact on the sale of copyrighted material remains in dispute. We contributed to this debate with an early study, “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” that was... View Details
- September 2016 (Revised March 2018)
- Case
Qalaa Holdings and the Egyptian Refining Company
By: Victoria Ivashina and Marc Homsy
This case follows Qalaa Holdings, a successful Egypt-based private equity firm, and gives insight into the types of investments it pursued, its growth over time, and the limited partner base it had at hand. It also allows students to consider and debate whether the... View Details
- August 2016
- Teaching Note
Mahindra Lifespace Developers' Venture into Affordable Housing
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Monica Baraldi
Mahindra Lifespace Developers Limited (MLDL) was the infrastructure and real estate arm of the Mahindra Group, an Indian conglomerate with revenues of $16.5 billion in 2014. Employing 400 experts in land acquisition, design, project management, sales and marketing, and... View Details
Keywords: Business Conglomerates; Business Startups; Development Economics; Developing Countries and Economies; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Housing; Emerging Markets; Business and Government Relations; Human Needs; Social Issues; Urban Development; Real Estate Industry; India
- 2016
- Working Paper
Decision-Making by Precedent and the Founding of American Honda (1948 – 1974)
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and John Heilbron
American Honda was founded in 1959 as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Honda Motor Company to facilitate sales and distribution in the United States. The details of American Honda’s early history have long served as evidence in debates among scholars and practitioners... View Details
- July 2016
- Technical Note
Net Neutrality: A Managerial Perspective
By: Shane Greenstein and Christine Snively
The net neutrality debate had implications for Internet service providers, content providers, and end users. This note aims to inform the reader of the various sides of the debate where open issues remain, as well as what aspects an entrepreneur, investor, or content... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Fiscal Rules and Sovereign Default
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
Recurrent concerns over debt sustainability in emerging and developed nations have prompted renewed debate on the role of fiscal rules. Their optimality, however, remains unclear. We provide a quantitative analysis of fiscal rules in a standard model of sovereign debt... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
Towards a Prescriptive Theory of Dynamic Capabilities: Connecting Strategic Choice, Learning, and Competition
By: Gary P. Pisano
The field of strategy has mounted an enormous effort to understand, define, predict, and measure how organizational capabilities shape competitive advantage. While the notion that capabilities influence strategy dates back to the work of Andrews (1971), attempts to... View Details
Keywords: Competitive Advantage
- June 2016
- Article
When Doctors Go to Business School: Career Choices of Physician-MBAs
By: Damir Ljuboja, Brian W. Powers, Benjamin Robbins, Robert S. Huckman, Krishna Yeshwant and Sachin Jain
There has been substantial growth in the number of physicians pursuing Master of Business Administration (MBA) degrees over the past decade, but there is continuing debate over the utility of these programs and the career outcomes of their graduates. The authors... View Details
- 2016
- Book
Antonio Serra and the Economics of Good Government
By: Rosario Patalano and Sophus A. Reinert
Little is known of Antonio Serra except that he wrote his extraordinary 1613 Short Treatise on the Causes That Make Kingdoms Abound in Gold and Silver even in the Absence of Mines in a Neapolitan jail and that he died there soon afterwards. However, the... View Details
- Spring 2016
- Article
Net Neutrality: A Fast Lane to Understanding the Tradeoffs
By: Shane Greenstein, Martin Peitz and Tommaso Valletti
The last decade has seen a strident public debate about the principle of "net neutrality." The economic literature has focused on two definitions of net neutrality. The most basic definition of net neutrality is to prohibit payments from content providers to internet... View Details