Wayne Eastman

Working for Position: Women, Men, and Managerial Work Hours

Job hours may be determined in part by positional striving to keep up with or outwork others in ones organization. A prisoners dilemma in which employees have an incentive to work more than a socially optimal level of hours may arise from positional competition. This article uses survey data to estimate how much positional striving increases job hours, and considers how it may contribute to workplaces more in accord with mens than womens hours preferences.

Toward a Civic Culture for Multicultural Organizations

As workplaces become more demographically diverse, there is an increased need for an overarching civic culture that explicitly addresses relations and interactions among various identity groups within an organization. Despite differences in the level of analysis and the standpoints of organization versus subgroup, both the integration and differentiation perspectives on organizational culture are inadequate to address cultural conflicts associated with demographic diversity. Based on a literature review of works by philosophers, political scientists, and educators, the authors suggest that civic culture, which focuses on relational values such as equality and a respect for differences rather than on substantive values such as product quality and timeliness, is an appropriate framework for multicultural organizations. An empirical study found preliminary evidence that people in demographically diverse organizations are more likely to emphasize relational over substantive values and that values proposed for diverse organizations emphasize both differentiation and integration.

Examining the Origins of Management Theory: Value Divisions in the Positivist Program:

Management theories, such as scientific management and human relations, have traditionally assumed that organizational success can be achieved through the application of science. This assumption is part of a broader belief in social and natural science as the central vehicle for objective knowledge and social betterment, which was cogently expressed in the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte and termed positivism. In this article, the authors trace the relationship between the thought of Comte, his contemporary John Stuart Mill, and twentieth-century management theory, focusing on how value differences and similarities evident more than a century ago have persisted to the present. The authors then propose a typology that classifies these value issues along two major dimensions: uniformity versus diversity and economics versus culture. This typology clarifies the value commitments, explicit or implicit, underlying management theory and practice.

Positivism and the Promise of the Social Sciences

This paper contends that Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, though politically disparate, were all vigorous proponents of a scientific approach to human phenomena, and in that way were harbingers of modem social and behavioral science. We show how for these three thinkers social science was inextricably linked to a notion of human betterment embodied in a specific moral and political vision, and argue that a dilemma emerged from their belief that such a science would lead to objective prescriptions. We then analyze how each resolved this dilemma, and review major disciplinary developments to illustrate how the modem professionalized version of social science is a response to this same dilemma. Knowledge of the historical conditions and intentions that surrounded the extension of scientific principles from physical to human arenas may better enable modem practitioners to understand why the promise the early positivists saw in social science has gone unfulfilled.

Overestimating Oneself and Overlooking the Law: Psychological Supports for Employment at Will

This article studies the hypotheses that people tend to underrate other peoples work motivation and skills relative to their own, and further tend to be unaware of the legal status of employment at will in contemporary U.S. law. The theoretical part of the article describes psychological bases for the hypothesized tendencies and explains how they can be expected to foster acquiescence to employment at will and high employment insecurity. The empirical portion of the article describes and discusses a survey of M.B.A. students that probed their knowledge of and attitudes toward U.S. employment law, along with their attitudes toward employment insecurity and work motivation. Consistent with the hypotheses, the study found widespread lack of knowledge about the legal status of employment at will, as well as a tendency toward overrating ones own work motivation relative to others and a tendency toward taking higher risks of termination when they were presented as controllable on an individual, though not a group, basis.

Bondholder-Stockholder Conflict: Contractual Covenants vs. Court-Mediated Ex-Post Settling-Up

Bondholders have failed to respond to corporate restructurings by demanding more protective provisions; in fact, the trend has been toward fewer rather than more restrictive covenants. In this article, we model the use of contractual covenants as a trade-off between contract implementation costs and deadweight efficiency losses. We find that the current lack of restrictive covenants is arguably consistent with rational investor behavior. The key to this conclusion is the recognition that there is an implicit ex-post settlement component to debt contracts, which is enforced by the courts. A look at the behavior of the courts and of bondholders supports our point of view.

Critical Business Ethics

My aim in this chapter is to provide some practical ideas on how the Four Temperaments approach to game theory that this book is devoted to promoting can be related to teaching, and also to research and practice. Although the material in the chapter can stand on its own, it can also be related to a potential critical business ethics school, and to analogous groups in other disciplines, that bring together people who share an emotional commitment both to scientific truth and to fictionalizing, fabulizing story-telling, and who respect and embrace both a critical, debunking spirit and a Sanguine, accepting one.

Why Business Ethics Matters

In our lives, there are times to make peace, to make love, to make amends, to make money, to make tracks, and to do many other things. There is also a time to make war. Making war in the form of making a systematic, reasoned argument that A is better than B, in a situation in which other reasonable people can, and should, argue that B is better than A, is not for everyone. But for those of us who, in at least part of our lives, are politicians, lawyers, normative philosophers, or other types of advocate, it is our duty.

The structural failures of the heavenly markets

Previous scholarship analyzing cross-sectional international data has noted that religious monopolies impede the efficiency of religious markets and that the benefits of competitive markets apply in religion as elsewhere. Our paper, analyzing U.S. state-level data, is premised on the complementary point that competitive markets in religion as elsewhere may fail if there are externalities, public goods, or asymmetries in information. In our model, we hypothesize that perfect competition will foster forms of religion that fail to create positive externalities and that in turn engender doubts about religious faith. We test empirically the Iannaccone hypothesis that more religious competition/diversity engenders more religious faith and our contrary hypothesis using state-level data showing overall levels of religious competition among Protestants provokes less religious faith.

The Bargain between the Elite and the Majority to Control Politicians and Managers: Party and Managerial Ideologies as Devices to Align Agents

How can office-seeking politicians or managers be aligned with social welfare or firm welfare, given that such agents have a suboptimal incentive to cater to majority preferences in situations with low participation costs and to elite preferences in situations with high participation costs? In the for-profit firm, the primary elite-majority bargain to reduce agency costs involves the creation of an electorate of shareholders who as residual claimants are better aligned with firm welfare than other groups. In democratic politics, where there is no comparable group of residual claimants who are aligned to social welfare, an efficient elite-majority bargain involves the creation of competing party ideologies that serve to check opportunism by majorities in low participation-cost scenarios and by elites in high participation-cost scenarios, and in doing so align politicians with social welfare. In non-profit firms that also lack a residual claimant, an efficient elite-majority bargain involves a parallel creation of managerial ideologies. Such managerial ideologies may also have utility in the for-profit firm as a supplementary device to foster alignment with firm value.