Search results

Umbrellas always sell well when it is raining. After a major hurricane hit Miami last year, Home Depot shipped in plywood from nearly every store in the southeast and still couldn’t keep up with the demand. Profiting by creating natural disasters is, of course, the stuff of comic books and spy novels, but recognizing and satisfying unmet needs is the key tenet of the demand chain.

This article explores the methods and benefits of creating an executive‐level position accountable for maintaining and enhancing the value of the customer base as an asset. This position is referred to as chief customer officer (CCO). The article is based on the author’s recent study of companies with a CCO, including Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Hewlett‐Packard, Unica, Monster.com, Fidelity, The MathWorks, and others. The study was conducted using personal and telephone interviews with executives with the defined function, whatever their actual title. The interviews were supplemented with documentary material. The CCO, by whatever title he or she may go, uses various methods to continually gather customer insight, to disseminate that insight throughout the organization, and to drive change so that the organization consistently meets customer needs quickly and profitably. To do this, a CCO needs sufficient authority and respect across divisions and functions, and needs to be held accountable for measurable results (although they may not be the familiar metrics). Three types of CCO are the generalist, the service‐revenue driver, and champions by committee. This article addresses executives in companies frustrated by declining prices and margins, decaying sales, lackluster market performance, and unprofitable customers. Such problems reflect a lack of customer insight, or of ability to act on it, and call for the creation of a CCO role specifically tasked with gathering such insight and using it to drive company change and initiative.

This paper articulates the significant value of the role of the Chief Customer Officer, namely in the CCO's ability to create and leverage customer strategy.

The paper offers a view of the evolution of the CCO over six years based on recently completed in‐depth interviews with more than 50 CCOs at Fortune 500, mid‐cap, and smaller companies.

The article describes the three most common reasons why CEOs hire Chief Customer Officers. The CCO role is evolving and rapidly increasing in complexity, defying simple categorization that was possible six years ago. CCOs can be classified in two dimensions according to their customer accountability and the organizational authority of their role. CCOs share three common goals: drive profitable customer behavior, create a customer‐centric culture, and driver corporate and customer strategy. Also discussed are the most critical factors that must be in place to ensure CCO success.

While the sample size of 50 out of 300 is representative, the CCO role is evolving quickly and is adapted as necessary within each company to fit the specific organizational needs.

The majority of the material is new. This research begins to codify the most critical factors in the CCO role to provide structure for CEOs and Boards considering installing a CCO. CCOs should evaluate their key performance indicators to ensure they are tied to profitability so as to better justify and defend their value. Growth companies must bear in mind the need to migrate the CCO from line ownership to process ownership to properly manage complexity.

In this chapter, we explore the importance of morality in groups. We draw from decades of research from multiple perspectives, including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and organizational science, to illustrate the range of ways that morality influences social attitudes and group behavior. After synthesizing the literature, we identify promising directions for business ethics scholars to pursue. We specifically call for greater research on morality at the meso, or group, level of analysis and encourage studies examining the complex relationship between moral emotions and the social environment. We ultimately hope that this work will provide new insights for managing moral behavior in groups and society.

Business ethics provide a potent source of competitive advantage, placing increasing pressure on organizations to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Nonetheless, ethical breaches continue to permeate corporate life, suggesting that there is something missing from how we conceptualize and institutionalize organizational ethics. The current effort seeks to fill this void in two ways. First, we introduce an extended ethical framework premised on sensemaking in organizations. Within this framework, we suggest that multiple individual, organizational, and societal factors may differentially influence the ethical sensemaking process. Second, we contend that human resource management plays a central role in sustaining workplace ethics and explore the strategies through which human resource personnel can work to foster an ethical culture and spearhead ethics initiatives. Future research directions applicable to scholars in both the ethics and human resources domains are provided.

To explore the politics of gender, health, medicine, and citizenship in high-income countries, medical sociologists have focused primarily on the practice of legal abortion. In middle- and low-income countries with restrictive abortion laws, however, medical sociologists must examine what happens when women have already experienced spontaneous or induced abortion. Post-abortion care (PAC), a global reproductive health intervention that treats complications of abortion and has been implemented in nearly 50 countries worldwide, offers important theoretical insights into transnational politics of abortion and reproduction in countries with restrictive abortion laws. In this chapter, I draw on my ethnography of Senegal’s PAC program to examine the professional, clinical, and technological politics and practices of obstetric care for abortions that have already occurred. I use the sociological concepts of professional boundary work and boundary objects to demonstrate how Senegalese health professionals have established the political and clinical legitimacy of PAC. I demonstrate the professional precariousness of practicing PAC for physicians, midwives, and nurses. I show how the dual capacity of PAC technologies to terminate pregnancy and treat abortion complications has limited their circulation within the health system, thereby reducing quality of care. Given the contradictory and complex global landscape of twenty-first-century abortion governance, in which pharmaceutical forms of abortion such as Misoprostol are increasingly available in developing countries, and as abortion restrictions are increasingly enforced across the developed world, PAC offers important theoretical opportunities to advance medical sociology research on abortion politics and practices in the global North and South.

This study investigates whether higher catch rates near a marine protected area (MPA), and/or in other fishing areas within a choice set, attract more fishers. A survey conducted in the fishing grounds near an MPA located in south east of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean shows concentration of fishers in regions with lower catch rates. This contrasts with the predictions of the “fishing the line” hypothesis and the ideal free distribution (IFD) that fishers are likely to be attracted near the MPA with higher resource abundance.

Using the random utility model as the framework and the random parameter logit (RPL) model, the study attempts to explain spatial behaviour of fishers. Expected catch and catch variability are modelled using the Just and Pope (JP) production function. The study also estimates effort elasticities with respect to expected catch and catch variability and simulates the relocation of effort from area closure.

The paper concludes that higher catch does attract fishers but is a partial and very restrictive explanation of fishers' behaviour. The “fishing the line” hypothesis does hold to some extent, but it should not be taken for granted that rising catch rates in adjacent waters will increase fishing pressure. The paper concludes that factors such as catch variability, distance from homeport to fishing ground, potential physical risk and attitudes towards risk of fishers affect spatial behaviour of fishers and should be considered for the placement and size of MPAs. The study also finds that the responsiveness of effort to catch rates is lowest in areas which are already heavily fished and easily accessible.

The identification of fishing areas as complements (when fishing in one area increases fishing effort in another) and substitutes is valuable information for determining the placement and size of an MPA. A larger reserve is likely to have more displacement effect in this case than a smaller one. Therefore, a small or a network of a small reserve may be appropriate. The premise to select the site and size of the reserve is to avoid overconcentration of fishers in alternative fishing areas, which can be vulnerable to excessive fishing and unintended effects from fishers.

The paper contributes to an understanding of fishing behaviour and its impact on the configuration of marine reserves. It discusses the importance of effort elasticities to determine the placement and size of an MPA. Studies on this topic are very scanty in the Indian Ocean region. It also shows the application of location choice model, the RPL model and the JP production function in the fisheries sector for a small island.