Curt H. Stiles

Merger Strategies as a Response to Bilateral Market Power

Merger behavior is explored within the framework of the desire to manage resources and market dependencies. It is argued that market power resides in the bilateral relationships between buyer and s...

Disasters and Entrepreneurship: A Short Review

It is well recognized that disasters, whether naturally occurring or the result of human invention, affect a region on many levels. Not only are disasters felt within the painful context of human tragedy, loss of life, and physical suffering, but disasters can also destroy the immediate socio-economic fabric of the affected population as well as the ability of a region to sustain itself during the slow process of recovery and reconstruction. As Newton (1997) notes, “disasters are not isolated from the social structure within which they occur; rather, they are social phenomena” (p. 219).

Real estate ownership and closely-held firm value

Purpose - – The authors aim to measure the value of leasing, versus owning, business locations for the closely-held firm. Design/methodology/approach - – The authors examine the sales transactions of small businesses in the USA – those with revenues of less than

Economics and Spirituality in the Entrepreneurial Development Strategy of the Franciscan California Missions: The Historical Case of San Diego

20 million per year – between 1995 and 2010. The authors contrast the values of firms that own, and do not own, their real estate. Findings - – In general, the authors find negative relationships between closely-held firm values and real estate ownership. Nowhere did the authors observe firm value being enhanced by property ownership. Research limitations/implications - – The data set may be limited by the accuracy of the data provided by business brokers. Compared to the capital markets, the small business “exchange” is less efficient, but it is the only source of unlisted business sales data. Practical implications - – The findings are important to the small-business broker and the investor. The broker might better advise the buyer and seller with the findings. Business owners, private equity investors, and their advisors, are all reminded to focus on the core business strategy and avoid getting “locked into” real estate ownership in a business investment. Originality/value - – The impact of real estate on the valuations of closely-held firms is a largely unexamined area. And there is a lack of consistency on publicly-held company valuations as a function of real estate ownership; these public company findings and the dearth of work on the privately-held companys real estate attract the attention in this study.

Chapter 5 Curricula strategies in university graduate MBA programs: The demands of corporate social responsibility and sustainability

While there is a large literature debating spanish mission and colonial activities in the region that currently makes up California, the vast majority of this work is either historical or anthropological in orientation. Few, if any, researchers have approached the issue as a clash between the region’s pre-colonial indigenous political economy and the mission based political economy. not surprising, looking at history through different lenses may result in different views, colors, emphasis and even conclusions. Examining the history of indigenous populations, and the interactions with colonial forces using economic thought, has become increasingly important in recent years. as nobel laureate douglass C. north writes, “the history of native americans... requires a far richer understanding of the complex nature of human cultures, and equally, of the fundamentals of economic and societal change that we have possessed.“1 With respect to the California mission period this is important for a number of reasons. First, the business model followed by the Franciscan friars in California was just one of several possible strategies proposed at the time. the governor of California, Pedro Fages, for example, urged a strategy of small free-hold farms with private ownership by indigenous families. This recommendation by Fages was mentioned in French naval officer

INTRODUCTION: THOUGHTS ON A COMMON THREAD

As recently as the 1970s, scholars were defending the proposition that the only responsibility of businesses was to maximize its profits (Friedman, 1970). The ensuing years saw the birth and growth of another proposition: that the responsibilities of businesses extend beyond profitability, particularly short run profitability, to embrace a larger responsibility to society. The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) was initially fed by scandals concerning defective products, political misbehavior, executive corruption, and labor abuses. The CSR agenda rapidly expanded in the 1980s, driven by very public incidents such as the Exxon Valdez and Amoco Cadiz oil spills, the ICMESA Italian dioxin release, the Bhobal chemical spill, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, the Three Mile Island near disaster, and the discovery of the ozone “hole” to include environmental concerns. Interest in CSR concerns expanded further, in response to such occurrences as the massive destruction of tropical forests and the exploding amount of greenhouse gases produced in both the expanding economies of China and India and the developed economy of the United States, to include the realization that the link between corporate decision making and disasters has become truly global in their impacts. The size and dominance of multinational and transitional economic organizations have brought an appreciation of their global impacts into the center of consciousness of the modern world.

Firm profitability and relative firm power

Leading off the book, and the first paper in this section, is, “The Ethnic Ownership Economy” by Ivan Light. This survey paper hardly needs an introduction, because the author is one of the foremost scholars in the field of ethnic economics and entrepreneurship. Ivan Light can be argued to be one of the founders of fields concerned with ethnicity on the strength of his groundbreaking early study Ethnic Enterprise in America (1972). Over the subsequent years he has remained on the cutting edge of research, and the survey paper included here clearly reflects that fact. In this paper, the author reviews and summarizes a significant body of sociological research concerning ethnic economies. He offers three challenges for future research: the first is to examine how the ethnic or immigrant entrepreneurs differ from non-immigrant entrepreneurs, the second is to investigate how immigrants tend to differ in the bundle of resources when compared to their indigenous counterparts, and the third is to study how in multi-ethnic societies non-immigrant entrepreneurs and immigrant/ethnic minority entrepreneurs operate out of social networks with minimal overlap.