The Determinants and Effects of Board Nomination Committees*

This article assesses the corporate governance-related antecedents of nomination committee adoption, and the impact of nomination committees’ existence and their composition on board independence and board demographic diversity. We conducted a longitudinal study of board composition amongst 210 Swiss public companies from January 2001 through December 2003, a period during which the Swiss (Stock) Exchange (SWX) introduced new corporate governance-related disclosure guidelines. We find firms with nomination committees are more likely to have a higher number of independent and foreign directors, but not more likely to have a higher number of female board members. Further, the existence of nomination committees is associated with a higher degree of nationality diversity but is not related to board educational diversity. We also find that nomination committee composition matters in the nomination of independent and foreign, but not of female directors. Our results suggest that understanding different board roles and composition require a multi-theoretical approach, and that agency theory, resource-dependence theory and group effectiveness theory help to explain different aspects of board composition and effectiveness. Finally, the article discusses the concept of diversity and appropriate ways to study diversity in a boardroom context. * The Editor acknowledges that Hans van Ees, Morten Huse, and Jonas Gabrielsson – convenors of the EURAM (European Academy of Management) Corporate Governance track in 2004 – acted as Co-Editors on this paper.     

全球化、环境与全球管治

本文系统阐述了关于全球化与环境的四个论点。首先,一个不断扩展的和全球化的文明对地球产生了物理的与生物的重要影响;其次,与全球化相关联的工业与知识生产构型的变化导致了环境外部性从一个国家向另一个国家的重新分布;再次,隐含于后福特主义之中的使所有东西商品化以一种未曾预见的方式改变了传统的生产构型和废弃物制造;最后,全球化的、以市场为基础的机制作为应对全球化的环境影响的政策工具听起来不错做起来难。不仅如此,全球环境不应被视为与其他社会方面相割裂的领域,全球环境作为人类社会的物质基础的角色是独特的,但这一基础被利用和滥用的方式却完全是社会的。物理性的事实本身并不会改变社会的事实,而保护全球环境以及弘扬人性归根结底将取决于对后者的改变。这些社会事实必须被改变是无可置疑的,但这种改变既不能凭借市场、也不能通过生态现代化来实现。如果不想让全球化吞噬全球环境,我们所真正需要的是一种包括所有人的政治,而这将是21世纪的使命。     

思想的历程:斯图亚特·霍尔、文化研究以及悬而未决的文化与“非文化”的关系问题

斯图亚特·霍尔几乎就是文化研究的同义词。通过回顾霍尔的思想历程,可以大致把握文化研究的发展蓝图:先是从文化主义到结构主义、再从结构主义的马克思主义到后结构主义,最终一路发展来到了后马克思主义。霍尔的思想历程展现了文化研究试图解决文化反映论问题的不懈努力,而本文最终认同霍尔这种放弃文化唯物主义且又旨在超越经济主义与唯心主义的立论方式。     

Exploring the Roles of Extracurricular Activity Quantity and Quality in the Educational Resilience of Vulnerable Adolescents: Variable- and Pattern-Centered Approaches

This longitudinal study examines how extracurricular activity involvement contributes to "educational resilience"—the unexpected educational attainments of adolescents who are otherwise vulnerable to curtailed school success due to personal- and social-level risks. Educationally vulnerable youth characterized by significant risks and an absence of assets were identified during early adolescence (approximately age 14) using measures of academic motivation, achievement, and mental health as well as family, school, and peer contexts. Using a mixture of variable- and pattern-centered analytic techniques, we investigate how both the total amount time that vulnerable youth spent in positive extracurricular activities and the specific pattern of their extracurricular activity involvement during late adolescence (approximately age 17) predict their subsequent enrollment in college during early adulthood (up through approximately age 21). Educational resilience was predicted uniquely by some, but not all, activity patterns. These results suggest that positive extracurricular activity settings afford vulnerable youth developmentally appropriate experiences that promote educational persistence and healthy development .     

Acting with the best of intentions… or not: A typology and model of impression management in leadership

Impression management (IM) is important for effective leadership. Followers accept influence from individuals who meet their perceptions of what it means to be a leader, and IM is an important way of impacting those perceptions. Yet, the extant literature on leader IM is fragmented. We unify the literature in this area by creating a multi-dimensional typology and multi-level model of IM in leadership. We examine the multi-dimensional nature of IM as a construct composed of information processing, communicative, and goal-directed components, thereby creating eight IM archetypes. Then, we examine how IM can be used to impact follower perceptions of the leader through the lenses of transformational/charismatic, authentic, and leader categorization theories. This research unites a currently fragmented area of research and sparks new questions about how leader behaviors can be used to influence followers toward multi-level leadership outcomes.     

The Value of Environmental Information without Control of Subsequent Decisions

The standard value of information approach of decision analysis assumes that the individual or agency that collects the information is also in control of the subsequent decisions based on the information. We refer to this situation as the “value of information with control (VOI‐C).” This paradigm leads to powerful results, for example, that the value of information cannot be negative and that it is zero, when the information cannot change subsequent decisions. In many real world situations, however, the agency collecting the information is different from the one that makes the decision on the basis of that information. For example, an environmental research group may contemplate to fund a study that can affect an environmental policy decision that is made by a regulatory organization. In this two‐agency formulation, the information‐acquiring agency has to decide, whether an investment in research is worthwhile, while not being in control of the subsequent decision. We refer to this situation as “value of information without control (VOI‐NC).” In this article, we present a framework for the VOI‐NC and illustrate it with an example of a specific problem of determining the value of a research program on the health effects of power‐frequency electromagnetic fields. We first compare the VOI‐C approach with the VOI‐NC approach. We show that the VOI‐NC can be negative, but that with high‐quality research (low probabilities of errors of type I and II) it is positive. We also demonstrate, both in the example and in more general mathematical terms, that the VOI‐NC for environmental studies breaks down into a sum of the VOI‐NC due to the possible reduction of environmental impacts and the VOI‐NC due to the reduction of policy costs, with each component being positive for low environmental impacts and high‐quality research. Interesting results include that the environmental and cost components of the VOI‐NC move in opposite directions as a function of the probability of environmental impacts and that VOI‐NC can be positive, even though the probability of environmental impacts is zero or one.     

Factors Related to Successful Outcomes Among Preschool Children Born to Low‐Income Adolescent Mothers

The purpose of this study was to describe how the experiences and circumstances of the most successful children born to low‐income adolescent mothers differed from the experiences and circumstances of the least successful children over the first 54 months of their lives. Success was defined as scoring in the top quartile for this sample on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test‐Revised (PPVT‐R) when the children were 54 months old and about to make the transition to kindergarten. The experiences of the 22 children with the highest scores on the PPVT‐R were contrasted with the experiences of the 22 children who had the lowest scores on the PPVT‐R for this sample. The two groups differed markedly on measures of caregiving and home environment assessed when the children were 12, 24, 36, and 54 months old. In addition, mothers of the most successful children achieved more years of education, were more likely to be employed, had fewer children on average, tended to live in more desirable neighborhoods, and were more likely to be living with a male partner. Case studies are also presented on four families (two from the most successful group and two from the least successful group) to further illustrate how the experiences and circumstances of children in the two groups differed.