Corporate Governance and Director Accountability: an Institutional Comparative Perspective*

This paper examines the role of boards of directors in light of institutional contingencies and recent best practice governance guidelines and regulation such as the United Kingdom Higgs Review and the United States Sarbanes‐Oxley Act 2002. Particular attention is paid to discussing the role of independent directors across countries, and the implications for corporate governance innovation. It concludes by posing questions about recent corporate governance transformations and providing suggestions for future research.     

Intensive management reduces butterfly diversity over time in urban green spaces

Urban Ecosystems - Loss and fragmentation of semi-natural grasslands have had negative consequences for grassland biodiversity, such as butterflies. Urban parks and other urban green spaces have so...     

Usability and Feasibility Study of a Remote Cognitive Behavioral Therapy System with Long-Term Unemployed Women

We present the results of the use of a cognitive behavioral therapeutic intervention tool to improve the mental, physical, and social health of a group of long-term unemployed women in Spain. Method: We sent automated text messages (SMS) to the mobile phones of long-term unemployed women selected at random from public social services. During a 28-day intervention period, women received four daily automated text messages on her mobile phone on a predetermined hourly schedule. We measured depression symptoms at the start and end of the intervention and we analyzed qualitative data to determine the acceptability of a remote SMS program. Results: Depression symptoms using the Personal Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), went from an average of 13.8 at baseline to 4.9 at the end of 28 days (p?=?0.89). One hundred percent of the women reported that they liked receiving the text messages and most found them helpful.     

Are Boards Designed to Fail? The Implausibility of Effective Board Monitoring

In this review, we challenge the idea that directors are well positioned to be effective monitors of management. Moving beyond the logic of incentives and ability, we conceptualize a model based on the premise of boards as groups of individuals obtaining, processing and sharing information and explain how variation in information-processing demands at the director, board and firm level may challenge effective monitoring. We draw on multiple theoretical perspectives to identify these barriers to effective board monitoring. Our goal in reviewing these barriers is to help us take stock of existing research in corporate governance and to better explain board behavior beyond traditional agency and resource dependency accounts. We also aim to uncover gaps in the conceptual and empirical research and suggest areas of fruitful future research.     

Prompting Depression Treatment Seeking among Smokers: A Comparison of Participants from Six Countries in an Internet Stop Smoking RCT

Websites containing information and advice about health are increasingly common and popular. It is important to understand whether the material these sites contain can positively influence individual behavior, and whether populations differ in their response to that material. Participants in an international web-based stop smoking randomized controlled trial (RCT) were screened for major depression; participants whose history and/or depression symptoms were deemed of concern were offered one of two prompts (Strong and Mild) to seek treatment, depending on depression history. Participants from 3 predominantly English-speaking and 3 predominantly Spanish-speaking countries were analyzed. Individuals given a Strong prompt were more likely to seek treatment for depression than those given a weak prompt (16.6% vs. 10.2% of previously untreated individuals reported seeking treatment), controlling for symptom level and other variables. Country-specific differences were observed, with participants from South Africa and Spain departing from the common pattern of Strong prompt leading to higher likelihood of treatment seeking. Older age and female gender, but not symptom level predicted higher likelihood of seeking treatment following a prompt. The results suggest that information provided by the health websites can promote help seeking in affected individuals.     

Multitudinous identities: a qualitative and network analysis of the 15M collective identity

The emergence of network-movements since 2011 has opened the debate around the way in which social media and networked practices make possible innovative forms of collective identity. We briefly review the literature on social movements and ‘collective identity’, and show the tension between different positions stressing either organization or culture, the personal or the collective, aggregative or networking logics. We argue that the 15M (indignados) network-movement in Spain demands conceptual and methodological innovations. Its rapid emergence, endurance, diversity, multifaceted development and adaptive capacity, posit numerous theoretical and methodological challenges. We show how the use of structural and dynamic analysis of interaction networks (in combination with qualitative data) is a valuable tool to track the shape and change of what we term the ‘systemic dimension’ of collective identities in network-movements. In particular, we introduce a novel method for synchrony detection in Facebook activity to identify the distributed, yet integrated, coordinated activity behind collective identities. Applying this analytical strategy to the 15M movement, we show how it displays a specific form of systemic collective identity we call ‘multitudinous identity’, characterized by social transversality and internal heterogeneity, as well as a transient and distributed leadership driven by action initiatives. Our approach attends to the role of distributed interaction and transient leadership at a mesoscale level of organizational dynamics, which may contribute to contemporary discussions of collective identity in network-movements.     

Forecasting a class of doubly stochastic Poisson processes

Received: July 21, 2000; revised version: April 24, 2001     

Foreign Location Choice: Review and Extensions

International Business (IB) research on foreign‐location choice has experienced a revival in recent years, yet a comprehensive review has been sorely lacking. The purpose of this review is to synthesize the findings of recently published articles on the topic of foreign‐location choice and offer fruitful directions for future research. This review consists of three sections: first, the authors provide a historical overview of this research stream by tracing its origins and analyzing the general trend that has shaped research on foreign‐location choice. Next, the authors conduct a review of 137 recent articles published in leading IB and business/management journals. These articles are categorized according to common topics, and the main findings of each category are synthesized in order to bring some cohesion to this fragmented field. Lastly, the authors identify issues that remain under‐researched or require re‐thinking some taken‐for‐granted assumptions. Through this effort, they are able to connect the past, present and future of research on foreign‐location choice and to shed some new light on the IB literature.     

Conceptual design pattern for ergonomic workplaces

In this paper, we analyzed two laboratories of liquid chromatography (LC), separation technique of mixtures and identification of its components, in order to identify projectual gaps relating to the environment and the working station. The methodology used was the ergonomic analysis with interactional and participatory techniques applied during the activity performance. This work incorporated and adapted the concept developed by Alexander (1979)--pattern languages--passing from architectural projects to workstations project and physical arrangement of the work environment. The adaptation of the concept resulted in a list of recommendations, requirements and concepts that have brought design solutions for the problematic aspects observed in the ergonomic analysis. The employed methodology, strongly supported in ergonomics principles, and in interactional and participatory techniques, contributed to achieve our gold that is what we now call Conceptual Standards. The patterns go beyond of a usual model of book a of ergonomics specification, once incorporating the viewpoint of the end user, it is also a set of best project practices and of project management in conception ergonomics.