In our day of YouTube and Facebook there are important ethical and legal issues arising in relation to publishing, communicating, and disseminating the images of not just celebrities but other public figures and ordinary citizens. What will the law and ethical standards determine a person’s expectations of privacy are when they walk down the street, attend a public event, or go online? These and other ethical and legal questions remain open in our fast-changing age with far-reaching implications for legislators and public policy makers, media and for-profit businesses, and the general public. This paper analyzes the issues, discusses settled cases, and compares the free-press-oriented American approach with the more privacy-oriented European approach.

The acceptance of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) for publicly traded U.S. companies is gaining momentum. IFRS is currently used in more than 100 countries, and it is estimated that approximately 150 countries will have adopted IFRS by 2012. U.S. companies, that have long followed the rules of the Generally Accepted Accounting Principle (GAAP) in America, now have to deal with differential accounting standards, for the time of transitioning at least, and potential conflicts of reporting standards for their businesses. This also entails an issue of maintaining the integrity and accountability of the entire reporting systems. This paper provides a summary of the GAAP-vs-IFRS accounting treatment for major topics. It also presents some of the conceptual differences between the two standards. Implications are rather significant and far-reaching as the issue affects not only accounting professionals but also policy makers, managers, and investors.

Gender gap, gender bias, and gender influence continue to be important issues in workplace, yet little is known about the effect of gender on the career development initiatives particularly in relation to other important attributes such as age. This study examines the effect of age-gender interaction on the process of attaining career progress. Statistical significance and magnitude is observed for the age-gender influence in terms of career success as measured by the completion time of certain professional designation. The results indicate that gender influence is age dependent - the effect is substantially higher for older individuals compared to younger people. This bears important social and policy implications since human capital/knowledge accumulation is believed to be the primary reason for earnings inequalities between male and female.

Values-based leadership must have a strong foundation in the socially acceptable morality of the corporate management and duly recognize the different and conflicting needs of corporate stakeholders. Yet, it should also address the issues of organizational politics, interpersonal dynamics at work, and strategic human resource management. This paper presents a comprehensive model of political behavior and its influence on individual and organizational growth, and tests the model using a Chinese sample of 283 employee–supervisor dyads. Need for achievement and need for power were found to be positively related to political behavior. An important implication is that when political behavior is carried out for the purposes beyond immediate self-interest, it becomes a potentially powerful force for constructive change. Leadership should therefore foster a positive outlook concerning the political nature of organizations by designing an organizational structure that encourages information flow, open communication, and community building.

Since mainstream for-profit organizations are still structured in such a way that their leadership forgets or ignores employees’ outside lives, balancing work and home demands continues to be a difficult issue for both the management and employees. We discovered and classified four types of boundary work tactics (behavioral, temporal, physical, and communicative) that individuals utilized to help create their ideal level and style of work-home segmentation or integration. We also found important differences between the generalized state of work-home conflict and “boundary violations,” which we define as behaviors, events, or episodes that either breach or neglect the desired work-home boundary.

Interpersonal conflicts and abusive behaviors in workplace are important issues for the management and employees alike. While they are influenced by the culture and behavioral standards of the organization, individuals' social competencies also play an important role. This study investigates the moderating effects of social competencies, specifically political skill, self-monitoring, and emotional intelligence, on the workplace conflict/abusive behavior relationship. Results indicated that interpersonal conflict in the workplace is associated with employee engagement in counterproductive work behaviors. Politically skilled people and high self-monitors were more likely to engage in abusive behaviors when experiencing high levels of interpersonal workplace conflict. It is suggested that competency characteristics be duly considered for personnel management as well as for corporate ethical and behavioral standards.

The service sector of the U.S. economy kept expanding over the recent decades yet many employees in the sector remained ununionized and poorly paid. Then in 2005 the Change to Win (CTW) Federation was formed as an alternative to the long-standing AFL-CIO. Utilizing National Labor Relations Board data for nine AFL-CIO affiliated unions and six that joined the CTW Federation, this article investigates union organizing patterns in order to ascertain if the CTW’s creation initiated any remarkable breakthrough in the overall U.S. labor movement and environment. The analysis indicates that the CTW formation does not constitute a historical breakthrough for the U.S. labor environment as did the AFL and the CIO early on. Unfortunately the CTW is neither organizing significantly different occupational groups than the AFL-CIO unions nor advocating any kind of new ground-breaking strategies for revitalizing the U.S. labor movement.

Digital piracy represents a significant threat to not only the businesses of digital service products but also the general public in terms of social and ethical standards. Yet, industry efforts to attenuate the practice so far have largely failed. We propose that one reason for this failure is the absence of a commensurably accepted model of the social psychological foundations underlying digital piracy behaviors. A modified version of Model of Goal Directed Behavior is advocated and empirically validated across both movie and music industries for this purpose. The results support the theoretical and empirical efficacy of the proposed model and highlight the importance of attitudes toward the act of digital piracy, the frequency of past digital piracy behaviors, and the motivations and intentions underlying digital piracy. We also offer five actionable recommendations to assist digital service firms in better addressing digital piracy. Increased social effort is called for to disseminate strong ethical messages about digital piracy.

This paper attempts to determine whether market participants see value in the corporate choice to begin publishing a standalone sustainability report and whether differences in market reactions are associated with the quality of the sustainability report. The paper finds, on average, no significant market reaction to the announcement of the release of the sustainability reports. However, in cross-sectional analyses, it is found that companies with the highest quality reports exhibited significantly more positive market reactions than companies issuing lower quality reports. Companies seeking value from their sustainability reporting should carefully consider the quality of their presentations.