ASU Scholarship Showcase

Although perceptions of physically, socially, and morally stigmatized occupations – ‘dirty work’ – are socially constructed, very little attention has been paid to how the context shapes those constructions. We explore the impact of historical trends (when), macro and micro cultures (where), and demographic characteristics (who) on the social construction of dirty work. Historically, the rise of hygiene, along with economic and technological development, resulted in greater societal distancing from dirty work, while the rise of liberalism has resulted in greater social acceptance of some morally stigmatized occupations. Culturally, masculinity tends to be preferred over femininity as an ideological discourse for dirty work, unless the occupation is female-dominated; members of collectivist cultures are generally better able than members of individualist cultures to combat the collective-level threat that stigma inherently represents; and members of high power-distance cultures tend to view dirty work more negatively than members of low power-distance cultures. Demographically, marginalized work tends to devolve to marginalized socioeconomic, gender, and racioethnic categories, creating a pernicious and entrapping recursive loop between ‘dirty work’ and being labeled as ‘dirty people.’

Collective behaviors in social insect societies often emerge from simple local rules. However, little is known about how these behaviors are dynamically regulated in response to environmental changes. Here, we use a compartmental modeling approach to identify factors that allow harvester ant colonies to regulate collective foraging activity in response to their environment. We propose a set of differential equations describing the dynamics of: (1) available foragers inside the nest, (2) active foragers outside the nest, and (3) successful returning foragers, to understand how colony-specific parameters, such as baseline number of foragers, interactions among foragers, food discovery rates, successful forager return rates, and foraging duration might influence collective foraging dynamics, while maintaining functional robustness to perturbations. Our analysis indicates that the model can undergo a forward (transcritical) bifurcation or a backward bifurcation depending on colony-specific parameters. In the former case, foraging activity persists when the average number of recruits per successful returning forager is larger than one. In the latter case, the backward bifurcation creates a region of bistability in which the size and fate of foraging activity depends on the distribution of the foraging workforce among the model׳s compartments. We validate the model with experimental data from harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) and perform sensitivity analysis. Our model provides insights on how simple, local interactions can achieve an emergent and robust regulatory system of collective foraging activity in ant colonies.

As our discipline has matured, we have begun to develop theories of supply chain management. However, we submit that a major omission of theory development in the supply chain management discipline is that we have failed to develop a theory of what we are managing - a theory of the supply chain. Using a conceptual theory building approach, we introduce foundational premises about the structure and boundary of the supply chain, which can serve as the basis for much needed, additional development of the theory of the supply chain.

Using a natural experiment (Regulation SHO), we show that short selling pressure and consequent stock price behavior have a causal effect on managers’ voluntary disclosure choices. Specifically, we find that managers respond to a positive exogenous shock to short selling pressure and price sensitivity to bad news by reducing the precision of bad news forecasts. This finding on management forecasts appears to be generalizable to other corporate disclosures. In particular, we find that, in response to increased short selling pressure, managers also reduce the readability (or increase the fuzziness) of bad news annual reports. Overall, our results suggest that maintaining the current level of stock prices is an important consideration in managers’ strategic disclosure decisions.

Persistent economic pressures in today's business landscape require organizations to be constantly vigilant about managing costs. Reducing headcount is one common but often controversial form of cost cutting. Recently Hewlett-Packard announced that it would be cutting an additional 11,000-16,000 jobs on top of an original plan to let as many as 34,000 workers go as part of a business restructuring and turnaround strategy. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Meg Whitman said major shifts that are transforming how technology is paid for and consumed pose major challenges for HP, along with its competitors. To be successful in this new reality, she emphasized that HP needs to be lower-cost and more nimble. This is just one of a long list of examples of significant corporate workforce reductions in the face of mounting financial and competitive challenges faced by businesses across many industries.

This paper traces the history of mortgage law in the United States. I explore the history of foreclosure procedures, redemption periods, restrictions on deficiency judgments, and foreclosure moratoria. The historical record shows that the most enduring aspects of mortgage law stem from case law rather than statute. In particular, the ability of creditors to foreclose nonjudicially is determined very early in states’ histories, usually before the Civil War, and usually in case law. In contrast, the aspects of mortgage law developed through statute change more frequently. This finding calls into question whether common law is inherently more flexible than the civil-law system used in some other countries. However, case law tends to be less responsive to populist pressures than statutes. My findings suggest that the reason common law favors financial development is unlikely to be its greater flexibility relative to law made by statute.

This article develops welfare-consistent measures of the employment effects of environmental regulation. Our analysis is based on a microeconomic model of how households with heterogeneous preferences and skills decide where to live and work. We use the model to examine how job loss and unemployment would affect workers in Northern California. Our stylized simulations produce earnings losses that are consistent with empirical evidence. They also produce two new insights. First, we find that earnings losses are sensitive to business cycle conditions. Second, we find that earnings losses may substantially understate welfare losses once we account for the fact that workers may have to commute further or live in a less desirable community after losing a job.

We examine the relation between high frequency quotation and the behavior of stock prices between 2009 and 2011 for the full cross section of securities in the US. On average, higher quotation activity is associated with price series that more closely resemble a random walk, and significantly lower cost of trading. We also explore market resiliency during periods of exceptionally high low-latency trading: large liquidity drawdowns in which, within the same millisecond, trading algorithms systematically sweep large volume across multiple trading venues. Although such large drawdowns incur trading costs, they do not appear to degrade the price formation process or increase the subsequent cost of trading. In an out-of-sample analysis, we investigate an exogenous technological change to the trading environment on the Tokyo Stock Exchange that dramatically reduces latency and allows co-location of servers. This shock also results in prices more closely resembling a random walk and a sharp decline in the cost of trading.

Operations managers clearly play a critical role in targeting plant-level investments toward environment and safety practices. In principle, a “rational” response would be to align this investment with senior management's competitive goals for operational performance. However, operations managers also are influenced by contingent factors, such as their national culture, thus creating potential tension that might bias investment away from a simple rational response. Using data from 1,453 plants in 24 countries, we test the moderating influence of seven of the national cultural characteristics on investment at the plant level in environment and safety practices. Four of the seven national cultural characteristics from GLOBE (i.e., uncertainty avoidance, in-group collectivism, future orientation and performance orientation) shifted investment away from an expected “rational” response. Positive bias was evident when the national culture favored consistency and formalized procedures and rewarded performance improvement. In contrast, managers exhibited negative bias when familial groups and local coalitions were powerful, or future outcomes—rather than current actions—were more important. Overall, this study highlights the critical importance of moving beyond a naïve expectation that plant-level investment will naturally align with corporate competitive goals for environment and safety. Instead, the national culture where the plant is located will influence these investments, and must be taken into account by senior management.

Collaborating with a supplier in a buying firm's new product development (NPD) project is commonly advocated and adopted, but does not always improve project performance. Some pre-existing collaboration contexts, such as buyer–supplier NPD projects, are especially exposed to supplier opportunism due to the uncertain nature of the collaboration process. Adopting agency theory and transaction cost theory perspectives, we examine: (i) contextual antecedents and project consequences of supplier opportunism and (ii) if these causal influences vary in different cultural and institutional contexts. Using a survey sample of 214 United States (U.S.) and 212 Chinese buying firms’ responses about buyer–supplier NPD projects, we find that supplier opportunism is significantly influenced by the task and relational contexts. We also show that supplier opportunism damages both design quality and efficiency, two aspects of project performance. When comparing U.S. to China, we find that task and relational contexts have a greater impact on supplier opportunism in the U.S., but design efficiency is less hurt by supplier opportunism there. Finally, we show challenges of preventing supplier opportunism in certain NPD collaboration contexts, and offer solutions for overcoming these challenges.