International Journal of Value-Based Management

Value of a product reflects the owner(s)'/buyer(s)' desire to retain or obtain a product. Individual's level of desire to retain or obtain a product depends on how much the product details and/or its performance agree with the value system of the individual. To an individual, therefore, value of a product includes cost and a subjective part associated with cost. Value of a product can be expressed in units of currency if the subjective part of it is assessed in units of currency. This paper aims to propose a definition of value of a product and develop a method to assess it in units of a currency. To test the methodology in practice, experiments are conducted and the values of two of the elements of the external envelope of residential housing projects are determined.

Changes in the structure and provisions of the employment relationship create substantial challenges for the management community. The employer-manager's traditional prerogatives to terminate at will are being eroded in response to changing socioeconomic values that recognize the emergence of an employee's reasonable expectations of job security. The United States lags far behind the international community in protecting these expectations. The authors survey the erosion of the employment-at-will doctrine, and review the concepts of corporate due process and property rights relating to employment. To ensure the institutionalization of this “new equity,” the authors call on the management community to take the initiative in crafting progressive legislation that strikes a sensible balance between managerial prerogatives and employee expectations of job security.

Codes of ethics are prevalent in major corporations around the world. They are seen as the first tangible commitment to being ethical. This paper examines codes of ethics and tries to establish what they are, how they are developed and their net utility. We then proffer the idea of codes as the first part of a five-stage process that leads to an overall corporate commitment to being ethical in one's business dealings.

The authors contend that what can legitimately be owned in a free society is only rights to physical property, not to the value thereof. You are thus free to undermine the value of our property by underselling us, by inventing a new substitute for our property, etc. But you cannot legitimately physically agress against our property, even if its value remains constant despite your efforts.

The concept of Market-Focused Management posits that the ultimate goal of the organization is the satisfaction of custumers' needs. In doing so other objectives of the firm, including financial objectives such as increasing shareholder wealth and long term profitability, will be achieved. The chief marketing and financial officers of the Fortune 1000 firms were surveyed regarding their personal values and a variety of organizational values relating to company stakeholders, organizational goals, appropriate strategies and tactics, competitive strengths and advantages. While both groups exhibited some differences, there was a startling amount of consensus in all areas surveyed. Both groups ranked shareholders and customers as the two most important stakeholders. While the overall goal of customer satisfaction was ranked by both groups as the most important organizational goal, the means to achieving that end differ somewhat. While a large number of organizational values were related to personal value strength, there was little overlap in the relationships between the two groups, although both groups are overwhelmingly driven by other-focused values such as warm relationships with others, sense of belonging and being well respected. Thus, it was concluded that similar personal values lead marketing and financial managers to substantially different attitudinal schema in their approach to managing their responsibilites.

If commercial corporations are to stay economically viable and the general society is to stay healthy, corporate decisions must be even more responsive to rapidly changing environments and stakeholder needs and responsible in increasingly complex and interdependent social contexts. The dominant economic conception of corporations and the accompanying emphasis on profitability, value-neutral rationality, and managerial control is increasingly problematic. Public values have a right of representation in corporate decisions but current means of representation through the marketplace and through governmental guidance are limited in effect. Replacing the economic conception with a stakeholder model recognizing multiple forms of ownership and enabling wide-spread participation can help initiate important value debate leading to both economic and social benefits. But even with more stakeholder participation, value debate has not and will not necessary resulted. Many new programs have increased the number offorums in which representation and debate could occur, but have not increasedvoice. Richer conceptions of communication, negotiation, and rationality are necessary if we are to reform corporations in significant ways.

This paper discusses situation-specific contingency processes used by managers and business educators in handling such (1) common cross-boundary links or frameworks and (2) significant cross-boundary differences — two seemingly divergent aspects of cross-cultural management situations. This paper is based on the authors' conducting business training programs (focusing mainly on free market planning and management and on advanced computer technologies) for Asian and Russian/Central European business managers and graduate business students. It is also based on their research work done while investigating investment opportunities and in consulting in these countries over the past seven years.

It is widely believed that there is a clear distinction between `quantitative' and `qualitative' research, and these embedded or institutionalised terms profoundly affect the practice of such research. In this article the clarity and/or usefulness of the distinction is challenged together with the whole idea that there are given `methodologies' for research. Almost everything turns on conceptual clarity in relation to the initial research-questions: that leads the research to methods which follow logically from the concepts involved. The alleged `quantitative'/`qualitative' distinction does no more than pre-empt methods and procedures of research which should be left open.