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Disruptions and shortages of drugs have become severe problems in recent years, which has triggered strong media and public interest in the topic. However, little is known about the factors that can be associated with the increased frequency of shortages. In this paper, the authors analyze the drivers of drug shortages using empirical data for Germany, the fourth largest pharmaceutical market.

The authors use a dataset provided by the German Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices (Bundesinstitut für Arzneimittel und Medizinprodukte [BfArM]) with 425 reported shortages for drug substances (DSs) in the 24-month period between May 2017 and April 2019 and enrich the data with information from additional sources. Using logistic and negative binomial regression models, the authors analyze the impact of (1) market characteristics, (2) drug substance characteristics and (3) regulatory characteristics on the likelihood of a shortage.

The authors find that factors like market concentration, patent situation, manufacturing processes or dosage form are significantly associated with the odds of a shortage. The authors discuss the implications of these findings to reduce the frequency and severity of shortages.

The authors contribute to the empirical research on drug shortages by analyzing the impact of market characteristics, DS characteristics and regulatory characteristics on the reported shortages. The authors’ analysis provides a starting point for better prioritizing efforts to strengthen drug supply as it is currently intensely discussed healthcare authorities.

Institutions are collective responses to collective concerns, with the underlying link between concern and response being the purpose of the institution. With this conceptual lens, we analyze the history of the Aktiengesellschaft (AG), which emerged in Austria and Germany around 1800. While any analysis of the organizational features of the form would have diagnosed marked stability over the past two centuries, our historical study reveals significant shifts of the AG’s purpose and meaning: from a vehicle in the service of the public interest, shareholders, and employees to a persona with legitimate self-interests and the will to survive. We suggest to regard such purpose drifts as distinct variant of institutional change. In addition, we conclude that the AG’s essentially political actorhood institutionalizes the ever fragile and delicate quest for a balance between the different legitimate interests on whose behalf a corporation acts (including those of the self). Such a view, we argue, can offer a future for the corporation as organizational form.

In this paper, I compare Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger upon whom Schatzki drew in its formation, and my own theory of institutional logics which I have sought to develop as a religious sociology of institution. I examine how Schatzki and I both differently locate our thinking at the level of practice. In this essay I also explore the possibility of appropriating Heidegger’s religious ontology of worldhood, which Schatzki rejects, in that project. My institutional logical position is an atheological religious one, poly-onto-teleological. Institutional logics are grounded in ultimate goods which are praiseworthy “objects” of striving and practice, signifieds to which elements of an institutional logic have a non-arbitrary relation, sources of and references for practical norms about how one should have, make, do or be that good, and a basis of knowing the world of practice as ordered around such goods. Institutional logics are constellations co-constituted by substances, not fields animated by values, interests or powers.

Because we are speaking against “values,” people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more “logical” than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless? Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (2008a, p. 249).

By reviewing the overall concept of corporate political strategy (CPS), the purpose of this paper is to display a contemporary summary of issues of the diverse global CPSs. This study additionally aims to provide relevant corporate political behavioral concepts that surround a firm’s political actions when entering specific politico-economic markets as well as future work recommendations. This paper further provides a contemporary bibliographic analysis on CPS.

Through a systematic ISI Web of Knowledge^TM All Databases literature review on “CPS,” the research was refined in relation to articles from “all year time-span,” “social science,” and “business economic” areas. After relevant papers were retrieved, sorted, and analyzed, a final bibliographic analysis on CPS was performed using HistCite reference graph maker.

Results of this research provide a table with a conceptual summary of different CPS types, approaches to political strategy, participation levels, assessment of the political environments, research implications, as well as other related CPS factors.

There is still a lack of empirical research on how specific firm CPSs can help overcome the effect of foreignness within different host countries. This study provides an overview and list of CPSs that companies use when entering a particular politico-economic context as well as inner CPS research streams.

This contemporary conceptual taxonomy on CPS provides researchers as well as practitioners with insights into the global CPS evolution, in addition to a current picture of CPS within different contexts.

Governmental regulations aiming to protect environmental goals often require firms to increase sales prices with negative consequences on price fairness perception. Companies might therefore either justify the price increase by highlighting the good cause (environmental framing) or they could blame the government for the regulation (governmental framing). Firms might also communicate their investments in the relationship to motivate customers to stay. This paper aims to examine the impact of such communication content on price increase fairness perception and switching intention in a contractual service setting.

This paper first examines the content of 119 price increase letters from electricity suppliers in a qualitative pilot study. The main study then tests our research framework with 552 respondents using a 2 x 2 x 2 between-subjects experimental scenario design (manipulating framing, effort and regret communication).

Customers perceive governmental framing as fairer than environmental framing. Effort and regret communication by firms weaken or reverse this effect. They reduce customers’ fairness perception for the governmental framing, while regret communication increases it for the environmental framing. However, regret communication also increases switching intention in both framings through a strong direct effect.

Cost-induced price increases are perceived on a “locus continuum” on which reason-framing and relationship investments can shift the consumer perception. Future studies may apply our framework in different industries and contexts.

The results provide guidelines for communicating price increases. Firms should prefer a governmental framing and they should also hesitate to communicate relationship investments, which signal internal locus of the firm, such as effort or regret.

Our results question the naive assumption of general positive effects of environmental framings and relationship investments on customer responses. Based on a new view on attributions of cost-caused price increases, we suggest and find several counterintuitive results. We argue that the framing and relationship investments shift the cause perception of an external cost increase on the attributional locus continuum.

For over four decades, IB scholars have been conceptualizing and empirically examining the organizational structure of the multinational corporation (MNC) without really placing relationships at the center of attention. It therefore remains unclear what characterizes those relationships beyond subunits’ roles, motivation, or control mechanisms. Relationship as a term has often been used but rarely defined in the IB literature on intra-firm networks. We develop arguments that position such relationships as the focal unit of analysis. We extend current IB literature to examine in detail the nature and dynamics of relationships in MNCs by borrowing insights from Industrial Marketing and Purchasing research, which focuses on the relational nature and dynamics of interactions between actors. We offer a theoretical framework and develop a conceptual model that brings to the fore the multiplexity and temporality of relationships in MNCs. We also argue that intra-MNC network relationships can be seen as an evolving process and advocate for shifting away from variance-based and typological views toward a process view for examining relationships. Theoretically, understanding what characterizes the nature of MNC intra-firm relationships and what processes contribute to structuring them provides important insights into the global configuration of the MNC and the required organizational design mechanisms needed for MNC existence and resilience. The study is timely and practically relevant in the sense that considering intra-firm relationships deserves even more attention in the current global economic environment when accessing external resources becomes costly and/or inefficient.

This chapter focuses on strategies to initiate a shift in mobility behaviour away from private cars towards a combination of more environmentally friendly transport modes including public transport, ride- and car sharing or even completely carbon-free modes like walking and cycling. The requirement for such a shift is that people must be able to actually choose between different travelling options and combine them within an intermodal mobility network. Here, shared mobility has a considerable potential to fill the gap between public and individual transport options.

This chapter summarises results from different studies on shared mobility from the providers’, the users’ and the political perspective. The user’s perspective is based on an empirical study comparing car sharers’, car drivers’ and public transport users’ attitudes and mobility patterns.

The empirical findings from the case study have shown that shuttle trips by car in general, and to the train station in particular, are an important field of action for improving the environmental impact of intermodal trips. The study has also shown that car sharing enables people to live without a private car by using different transport modes for different purposes. As the majority of car sharers report needing a car only one to three times a month, they have a very small carbon footprint compared to the average car owner.

Mobility patterns are determined by local transport options as well as by personal routines. Hence, current changes due to new shared mobility options seem to have a considerable direct impact on how people organise their daily lives on the one hand and an indirect impact on their living costs on the other hand, since private cars have an important share of private household costs.

From an environmental perspective, any incentives to encourage people to choose alternative forms of transport over their private cars would seem to be particularly effective. Thus, understanding the behaviour and needs of multi- and intermodal travellers is an important step towards sustainable mobility. Acknowledging that most travellers still need a car every now and then, car sharing is an essential addition to public transport systems, supporting both public transport use and carbon-free mobility like walking and cycling.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to knowledge on the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities on retailers’ performance. An analysis using a comprehensive conceptualization of CSR reveals that CSR has positive implications for retailers’ firm performance and illustrates which CSR dimensions are the most important to focus on. It becomes clear that retailers must care about both downstream- and upstream-oriented CSR dimensions in the value chain. The paper highlights the impact of CSR communication activities for company success both in terms of general communication to the stakeholders and relating to in-store communications.

The authors conducted a survey among retailers. Data analysis was performed applying partial least squares structural equation modeling.

While CSR generally has positive effects on retailer performance – despite cost associated with CSR implementation, the authors show that diverse dimensions have different effects. Also, both downstream (customer-oriented) as well as upstream (suppler-oriented) activities count. Also, CSR communications, thus talking about what good a retailer does, is of high relevance.

This paper offers both theoretical implications on CSR dimensions in retailing as well as practical help for retailers on how and why to implement and communicate CSR activities.

This chapter provides an introduction to the world of family companies and family constitutions from a legal perspective. It first studies the legal types of business organizations that family firms have chosen across time and jurisdictions. It then illustrates how early predecessors of family constitutions evolved in the late Middle Ages and what modern family constitutions look like in different countries today. Further considerations are devoted to the governance framework of family firms. The chapter concludes by exploring the potential legal effects of family constitutions under German company and contract law.