A Viewpoint on Research for Social Business Entrepreneurship

This Viewpoint essay outlines key considerations for research on entrepreneurship, and for social business entrepreneurship specifically, considering the wide range of forms and essentially heterogeneous nature of this broad set of businesses. Themes related to practical research and key questions are outlined, along with considerations for researchers as the social business entrepreneurship space continues to evolve.     

Libertarian Paternalism,Externalities, and the “Spirit of Liberty”: How Thaler and Sunstein Are Nudging Us toward an “Overlapping Consensus”

In their 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein use research from psychology and behavioral economics to argue that people suffer from systematic cognitive biases. They propose that policy makers mitigate these biases by framing people's choices in ways that help people act in their own self‐interest. Thaler and Sunstein call this approach “libertarian paternalism,” and they market it as “the Real Third Way.” In this essay, I argue that the book is a brilliant contribution to thinking about policy making but that “choice architecture” is not just a solution to the problem of cognitive biases. Rather, it is a means of approaching any kind of policy making. I further argue that policy makers must take externalities into account, even when using choice architecture. Finally, I argue that libertarian paternalism can best be seen as motivated by what Sunstein has celebrated in his work on constitutional theory: a humility about the possibility of policy‐maker error embodied in Learned Hand's famous aphorism about the “spirit of liberty” and an attempt to reduce social conflicts by searching for what John Rawls called an “overlapping consensus.”     

Development of an information sheet providing rapport advice for interpreters in police interviews

Abstract

The present paper reports the development of an information sheet designed to aid interpreters in police interviews in recognizing, conveying and inadvertently obstructing rapport-building efforts by police interviewers. The contents of this sheet were informed by past research defining rapport, and rapport uses in police interviews. We used a mixed experimental design to test the information sheet. One group (Intervention, n = 35) was randomly assigned to read an information sheet before responding to short vignettes of police interviewing foreign non-English speaking suspects about international crimes, while another (Control) group (n = 37) simply responded to the vignettes. Perceptions of rapport cues by the intervention group exceeded that of the control group. However, the groups performed equally well at identifying appropriate methods to convey/avoid obstructing rapport. Feedback from the intervention group on the helpfulness of the information sheet was largely positive. The findings were used to improve the information sheet which can be used to alert interpreters to the importance of rapport in suspect interviews.     

Community control and pricing patterns of nonprofit hospitals: An antitrust analysis

Traditional control of nonprofit hospitals by the communities they serve has been offered as justification for restraining antitrust enforcement of mergers that involve nonprofit hospitals. The community is arguably a constraint on a nonprofit's inclination to exercise market power in the form of higher prices; however, community control is likely to be attenuated for hospitals that through merger or acquisition become members of hospital systems--particularly those that operate on a regional or multiregional basis. We report findings from a study in which we examined empirically the relationship between market concentration and pricing patterns for three types of nonprofit hospitals that are distinguishable based on degree of community control: an independent hospital, a member of a local hospital system, and a member of a nonlocal hospital system. Study results indicated that when conditions existed to create a more concentrated market, (1) all three types of nonprofit hospitals exercised market power in the form of higher prices, and (2) hospitals that were members of nonlocal systems were more aggressive in exercising market power than were either independent or local system hospitals. The results have important implications for antitrust enforcement policy.     

ASSESSING THE IMPACTS OF THE SURFACE MINING CONTROL AND RECLAMATION ACT

Even a dozen years since the passage of the Surface Mining. Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) there is little agreement on how well i t has worked. The paper attempts to assess the impacts of SMCRA in six major surface coal producing states. Although i t is not possible to make an unqualified overall national assessment, the evidence presented in the paper indicates that in many (but by no means all) cases, surface coal mining is now carried out in environmentally less destructive ways then before the Act. However, the accomplishments have fallen far short of expectations. The situation in some states has gotten worse than before the Act. Overall, the impact of the Act on the ground has been mixed and has depended on the rigor with which the Act has been implemented in individual coal states.     

From national bourgeoisie to rogues,failures and bullies: 21st century imperialism and the unravelling of the Third World

The East Asian financial crisis, the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the launching of the war on terrorism can be seen as three aspects of a single historical moment that marks the passage from one strategy of US imperialism to another. No longer based primarily on financial globalisation as the means through which the power and control of the corporations and government of the USA is extended over the world, as it was in the 1990s, US strategy is now more openly based on the direct control of productive assets and territory. This historical moment has also marked the definitive end of the idea of the Third World and its associated ideology of Third Worldism. Although this end has, of course, been repeatedly proclaimed, and contested, over the past two decades, this article argues that the idea of the Third World, and the associated ideas of development and non-alignment, were predicated upon the core concept of the national bourgeoisie and associated notions of the inherently progressive potential of nationalism. It traces the historical emergence of this idea in the work of Lenin and its subsequent trajectory during its cold war heyday. I emphasise that the idea of a united and rising Third World had a greater reality as a hope than it had as an objective historical possibility. The present moment in US imperialism is one where even that hope cannot be sustained—thus the definitive end of the idea of the Third World.