We leverage insights and theories from the extensive inter-firm alliance literature to explore the effect of the sector of the partners on Firm–NGO alliance governance. Our analysis suggests that the sector of the partners has an important impact on alliance governance, not only because it constrains the availability of some governance mechanisms but also because it makes alternative mechanisms available or relevant to the partners. Specifically, we predict that B2N alliances will rely on contracts, a restricted scope, and non-equity hostages, (...) such as reputational hostages and stakeholder involvement, rather than equity, leading to limited protection against opportunism. As a consequence, B2N alliance partners will need to rely on trust-based governance mechanisms to a greater extent than B2B alliance partners, although trust will be harder to build in B2N alliances. (shrink)

In 1999, the Journal of Business Ethics published its 1 500th article. This article commemorates the journal's quest "to improve the human condition" (Michalos, 1988, p. 1) with a summary and assessment of the first eighteen volumes. The first part provides an overview of JBE, highlighting the journal's growth, types of methodologies published, and the breadth of the field. The second part provides a detailed account of the quantitative research findings. Major research topics include (1) prevalence of ethical behavior, (2) (...) ethical sensitivities, (3) ethics codes and programs, (4) corporate social performance and policies, (5) human resource practices and policies, and (6) professions – accounting, marketing/sales, and finance/strategy. Much remains to be done. (shrink)

Trust is a key ingredient of business activities. Scams are spectacular betrayals of trust. When the victim is a powerful organization that does not look vulnerable at first sight, we can suspect that this organization has developed an excessive trust, or over-trust. In this article, we take over-trust as the result of the intentional production of gullibility by the scammer. The analysis of a historically famous scam case, the Elf “Great Sniffer Hoax,” suggests that the victim is made gullible by (...) the scammer through a range of seduction and protection maneuvers that prevent the victim from developing doubts and suspicions. An integrated framework of the production of gullibility in organizations is proposed in order to further our understanding of over-trust. We discuss how these insights might be extended, beyond the case of scams, to more ordinary contexts of business activities. (shrink)