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When can financial advisor conflicts of interest generate worse outcomes for clients? A regulation following from Dodd-Frank prohibits municipal advisors from simultaneously acting as bond underwriters. Using a difference-in-differences approach and 20,051 bond auctions, I test whether limited advisor privileges affect financial advice and borrower outcomes. Financing costs of bonds with potential dual advisor-underwriters fall by 11.4 basis points after the advisor is no longer allowed to underwrite. The decline follows from increases in standardization, third-party certification, and auction participation, all of which are consistent with limiting the adverse selection that arises from advisors withholding information from the market. (JEL D44, D53, G12, G14, G28, H74) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I present a sociological approach to the problem of meaningful work that dwells on its broad social and cultural sources, as opposed to the focus on subjective and organizational factors currently prevailing in the field. Specifically, I consider two sociological perspectives, those of community and autonomy, as important conceptual tools for understanding the ambivalent character of modern culture in providing individuals with a sense of meaningfulness of their activities. I also review some of the existing research on meaningful work and interpret it through this conceptual distinction, both to show the latter's relevance for the field and to identify the gaps it might help fill. As a result, based on the sociological perspectives, I propose a general conceptual model and discuss five directions to further advance the theoretical comprehension of meaningful work, and I suggest some implications of these perspectives for normative business ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is an abstract from the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, which covers various topics related to personal selling and sales management. The abstracts summarize recent research articles in these areas, providing valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in the field of sales and marketing. One article discusses the importance of considering cultural differences when conducting international sales force research and proposes a method called "response standardization" to improve the comparability of survey data. Another article explores the use of automation and technology in B2B salesperson pricing decisions, suggesting that a human-machine hybrid approach can improve pricing accuracy and efficiency. The collection of research articles covers a wide range of topics, including the impact of social media on B2B buying behavior, the role of AI in enhancing the customer experience, and the relationship between ethical leadership and salesperson creativity. [Extracted from the article]

Organizations can motivate and coordinate work by socializing members to internalize organizational values. Existing theories posit that organizations achieve normative control through encapsulation, wherein peers and managers are primary sources of members' socialization. Drawing on ethnographic data from a not-for-profit school, I show how an external actor—beneficiaries—can become a source of normative control. I develop a multistage process that explains how teachers were socialized by parents, specifically by hearing these parent beneficiaries narrate their needs; engaging in collective storytelling about beneficiaries; experiencing episodic shaming centered on how teachers' daily performance met (or did not meet) beneficiaries' needs; and receiving validation from beneficiaries. Because these sequential stages establish beneficiaries as sources of control through social interactions set in specific times and places, and establish shared emotional states among organizational members, I theorize that these stages compose a ritual of integration. Although teachers initially arrived at the school with heterogeneous values, this ritual led many of them to internalize the organizational value of self-sacrifice. Teachers who were unmoved by parents' stories or came to see parents as exploitative did not internalize this value, and they tended to exit the organization. This study reveals how normative control can arise not only through socialization from in-group members but also from ritual interactions with and about beneficiaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper conducts a textual analysis of earnings call transcripts to quantify climate risk exposure at the firm level. We construct dictionaries that measure physical and transition climate risks separately and identify firms that proactively respond to climate risks. Our validation analysis shows that our measures capture firm-level variations in respective climate risk exposure. Firms facing high transition risk, especially those that do not proactively respond, have been valued at a discount in recent years as aggregate investor attention to climate-related issues has been increasing. We document differences in how firms respond through investment, green innovation, and employment when facing high climate risk exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Diversity and Inclusion Matters: Tactics and Tools to Inspire Equity and Game-Changing Performance" by Jason R. Thompson is a practical guide for individuals leading diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives in organizations. Thompson, drawing from his experience as a DE&I practitioner, provides a roadmap for starting and measuring progress in DE&I programs, addressing systemic issues, and creating strong DE&I teams. The book emphasizes the importance of recruitment and retention in DE&I programs and offers templates, tools, and examples tailored to different industries. While the book lacks academic sources, it serves as a valuable resource for practitioners and can inspire future research in the field of DE&I. [Extracted from the article]

Stephanie Collins' book, "Organizations as Wrongdoers: From Ontology to Morality," explores the concept of organizations as moral agents and their responsibility for wrongdoing. Collins defines an organization as a collective agent that coordinates labor through rules and hierarchical command relations. She argues that organizations are real and have agency, which makes them blameworthy for their actions. However, there are challenges in attributing blame to organizations, such as the role of individual members and power dynamics within organizations. Collins' theory requires further examination of the epistemic and political inequalities that exist in real organizations to properly attribute blame. [Extracted from the article]

The text discusses Eija-Liisa Ahtila's video installation titled "Horizontal," which features a six-channel projected video of a spruce tree. The installation aims to challenge the perception of trees as passive objects and instead presents the spruce as a sensing body deeply connected to its environment. By experiencing the installation, viewers are encouraged to reconsider their relationship with the nonhuman world and develop a more affective and relational ethics. The text emphasizes the importance of alternative ways of perceiving and relating to the world in the face of climate crisis and calls for a posthuman business ethics that includes nonhuman entities and materialities. [Extracted from the article]

This article reviews and criticizes Joseph Heath's market failures approach (MFA) to business ethics. Our criticism is organized into three sections. First, we argue that, even under the ideal assumptions of perfect competition, when markets generate Pareto-efficient distributions, Heath's approach does not rule out significant harms. Second, we show that, under nonideal conditions, the MFA is either too demanding, if efficiency is to be attained, or not sufficiently demanding, if the goal of Pareto efficiency is abandoned. Finally, we argue that Heath's appeal to regulations and specific moral requirements as a remedy for market failures is unlikely to safeguard efficiency and exposes a number of general worries regarding the moral force of the MFA. We end this article with a constructive suggestion on how to adjust the MFA to avoid these problems while preserving its contractualist and Paretian spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we theorize humanness in organizations as a property of practice. We apply practice theory to examine how humanness becomes enacted in a business organization as people prioritize organizational and individual ends in their work activities. Our empirical case study examines the everyday interactions of development team members in an R&D organization of a large Nordic cooperative. Challenging the dominant individualist and structuralist approaches in humanness and human dignity studies, we identify and locate four different aspects of humanness in organizational practices. As a result, we show how the emergence of humanness is an ongoing process that transpires through two mechanisms: site shifting and reconciliation; that is, people shift between different sites of the social, consisting of different sets of practices with underlying disparate assumptions of humanness, which requires reconciliation. These findings provide a basis for an alternative theorizing of humanness in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]