McAfee professors are vigorously engaged in the process of discovery, broadening the bounds of social science research across business disciplines. At McAfee, we know that path breaking research and creative teaching go hand-in-hand.
JACKSON, Tenn. – Feb. 20, 2013– A $2 million gift to Union University from the Joe Porter family will establish the Porter Family Chair of Business and Economics, which will be held by longtime Union professor Walton Padelford. “We are thrilled to announce the appointment of Professor Walton Padelford as the Porter Family Professor of Business and Economics,” Union President David S. Dockery said. “We are incredibly grateful to the Porter family for their generosity in supporting this high-level academic position, and we offer our heartiest congratulations to Professor Padelford.” Porter is one of the owners of Akin & Porter Produce Inc. in Greenfield, Tenn. Padelford has taught economics at Union since 1980. He completed his bachelor’s degree from Mississippi College and his master’s degree and doctorate from Louisiana State University. He previously taught at Northwest Missouri State University and the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, and was a staff member with Campus Crusade for Christ. “Walt Padelford for three decades has distinguished himself as an outstanding classroom teacher and capable scholar in the field of economics,” Dockery said. “It is our joy to recognize him as the first person to hold this important academic chair in the Union community.” Padelford said he was honored to be the first holder of the Porter Family Chair of Business and Economics and grateful to the Porter family for making the endowed chair possible. “This endowed chair is also a prestigious addition to the McAfee School of Business Administration,” Padelford said. “As we pursue nationally recognized accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, this chair will place us in a higher tier of business schools across the nation.” Union officially announced the gift and the appointment of Padelford during its Founders’ Day chapel service Feb. 20. Media contact: Tim Ellsworth, news@uu.edu, 731-661-5215
For the second annual year, Professor Emily Lean has been selected to host the Management, Spirituality, and Religion (MSR) Research Incubator at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Bost this August. The Inclubator provides a forum for all established scholars, new faculty, and doctoral students who are interested in MSR research to share ideas, solicit feedback from leading experts in the field, and develop research project ideas that have the potential for publication in leading management journals. The MSR Research Incubator aims to provide advice and direction for those seeking to conduct research about how spiritual and religious traditions interface with organizational settings and the implications for managerial practices. It also provides an excellent opportunity for participants to foster personal and professional relationships and to form productive working partnerships for future research endeavors. The McAfee School of Business applauds Emily and her colleagues for their significant contribution to the MSR.
For about 10 years, Walton Padelford taught a business ethics class at Union University. At some point during that span, he began to question how effectively he was doing it. “Would it be possible for an atheist or a person from another tradition, like maybe a Hindu or Muslim, to teach this material and to do an excellent job in teaching it?” Padelford asked himself. “And in fact, to maybe live it better than I do, or anybody in my class? And I think the answer is yes.” Those questions led Padelford, the university professor of economics at Union, to think about what he was offering that was distinctively Christian about business ethics. And they led him to the ideas that would result in his new book, “Bonhoeffer and Business Ethics,” now available from BorderStone Press. Padelford’s fascination with Bonhoeffer and the dilemma he encountered in his business ethics class led him to use Bonhoeffer’s work as a template to think about the problem of real Christian discipleship in business. The book is available from Amazon.com or at the LifeWay Christian Store on the Union campus.
The Editorial Board of Christian Scholar's Review appointed Walton Padelford to a three-year term, beginning in summer 2011, as Associate Editor for Business and the Professions. This action was taken on the recommendation of a nominating committee after review of several highly qualified nominees. The Board agreed that the range of Dr. Padelford’s teaching, writing, and experience would enable him to work most effectively with the general editor, Don King, to solicit and identify valuable contributions to Christian scholarship from business and other professional fields.
Karen Miller’s recent publication in the Managerial Auditing Journal entitled “The Effect of IT Controls on Financial Reporting” has been selected for incorporation into an upcoming Auditing textbook published by Cengage. The authors selected this article as an end-of-chapter feature in the 8th edition of their text. According to the authors, this feature is designed to “incorporate relevant academic research” to help students think more broadly about the profession, facilitate an understanding of research, and to broaden the learning experience of students. Co-authors of the manuscript include Gerry H. Grant and Fatima Alali of California State University, Fullerton.
Forbes recognizes research by Daniel Slater in his article entitled, "The Future of the Planet in the Hands of MBAs: An Examination of CEO MBA Education and Corporate Environmental Performance," published in the Academy of Management Learning and Education Journal. Forbes praises Slater for actually measuring the performance of CEOs with an MBA when the argument of ethically vile CEO MBAs consisted only of "point of view" debates. Slater and his coauthors found that companies with CEOs with an MBA generally did better in terms of corporate environmental performance. These findings were inconsistent with the Harvard and Forbes debates raging after the fall of the investment banks.
Union's McAfee School of Business recognizes three professors with publications in Business Week's selected top twenty business journals used to rank MBA programs. Congratulations to Emily Lean, Walton Padelford, and Daniel Slater for the following publications: Emily Lean, 2008, "The Impact of Perceived Leader Integrity on Subordinate Ethical Intentions in a Work Team Environment", Journal of Business Ethics. Daniel Slater, 2009, "CEO International Assignment Experience and Corporate Social Performance", Journal of Business Ethics. Walton Padelford, 2009, "The Shaping of a Society's Economic Ethos: A Longitudinal Study of Individuals' Morality of Profit-Making Worldview", Journal of Business Ethics. Walton Padelford, 2010, "The Influence of Historical Socialism and Communism on the Shaping of a Society's Economic Ethos: An Exploratory Study of Central and Eastern Europe", Journal of Business Ethics. The School of Business faculty have publihsed many outstanding articles in other discipline specific top tier journals. Full articles and abstracts of these publications are available at www.uu.edu/sholarship.
Emily Lean, management professor, wins another prestigious award. The Management, Spirituality, and Religion Division of the Academy of Management (AOM) awarded Emily the Most Promising Dissertation Award for her proposal entitled “The Construct Development of Spiritual Leadership”. The AOM is a leading professional association for scholars dedicated to creating and disseminating knowledge about management and organizations. Founded in 1936, the AOM is the oldest and largest scholarly management association in the world. Today, the Academy is the professional home for approximately 20,000 members from 105 nations. The Management, Spirituality, and Religion Interest Group of the AOM focuses on interdisciplinary theoretical and applied research and pedagogy related to the relevance and relationship of spirituality and religion in management and organizational life. Submissions for this award came in from all around the world. In addition to Emily, finalists this year were from Fielding University in Santa Barbara, the University of Phoenix, and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.
David Austill, professor of accounting and business law at Union University, received a grant from the Fulbright Program to lecture, research and write in Bulgaria over the next academic year.
Two MSOBA professors receive recognition for the 2010 Howard Newell Innovative Teaching Award. Kevin Westbrook, marketing professor, won the award for an MBA project providing strategic guidance to the city of Millington for the use of their Civic Center. Emily Lean, management professor, received honorable mention for her work with an MBA project involving budgeting and utilizing sustainability. These professors challenged their students to go beyond the walls of the classroom to engage in learning experiences that benefit their community and their employers.
The Academy of Management has selected Emily Lean, Assistant Professor of Management, as part of a team to lead the first Management, Spirituality, and Religion (MSR) Research Incubator at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas in August 2011. Emily will be leading this workshop with Matthew Mitchell from Drake University and Gilbert TAN Yip Wei from Singapore Management University. The Research Incubator provides advice and direction for those conducting research about the interface of spiritual and religious traditions with organizational settings along with the implications for managerial practices.
The Academy of Management rewarded McAfee School of Business Professor Emily Lean and her co-authors with a very prestigious recognition this summer. The authors received recognition for the best paper of the year based on their 2008 publication in the Academy of Management Perspectives, a journal published by the Academy of Management. The article entitled “Coming into the Light: Intimate Partner Violence and its Effects at Work” confronts the effects of domestic violence in the workplace.
The Academy of Management presented the best paper of the year award at their 2009 Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois. The Academy of Management (www.aom.pace.edu) is an international management association composed of approximately 19,000 members spanning 108 nations. Members include scholars at colleges, universities, and research institutions as well as practitioners with scholarly interests from business, government, and not-for-profit organizations.
“I would simply like to say how grateful I am for such an unexpected blessing,” Lean commented. “To be nominated for such an award is an honor in itself, but to actually receive the award is a shock. I am happy and proud for myself but also for the recognition it brings to Union. Those in the management field understand what an honor this is for both myself, my co-authors, and our respective universities.”
The article focuses on how personal matters do not stay personal for long in today’s workplace. “OSHA regulations aside, managers are often unsure how to react once a employee’s relationship problems begin to spill over into the office,” Lean notes. “While it is NOT a manager’s job to try to counsel the abused employee, it is their duty to treat the employee with dignity and the situation with all seriousness. We’ve all heard stories of stalker girlfriends/boyfriends or overbearing spouses, but these things effect not only the employee in question but their coworkers as well. These issues can quickly progress from being a personal problem to being a production and security issue. The best advice for any person in this situation, manager or coworker, is to Recognize, Respond, and Refer.”
The American Accounting Association (AAA) task force on the impact of research has recognized research published by Karen C. Miller, Associate Professor of Accounting in the McAfee School of Business. The task force notes, "Karen Miller, Tonya Flesher, and Riley Shaw have published several articles on the complex and specialized tax issues surrounding corporate aircraft. Their research has been used by tax practitioners, businesses, and the IRS. A number of practitioners—both CPAs and attorneys—have contacted the authors with follow up questions generated from these articles. At least two businesses requested permission to post Miller and Flesher’s 2003 article on the business websites, and the 2008 article (co authored by all three) has proven useful to the IRS. This article discusses the income allocations and deduction limitations surrounding the personal use of corporate aircraft. An IRS agent who found this article particularly informative forwarded it to his boss, who then forwarded the article to the field agents dealing with corporate aircraft. Although written for a general audience and not a specific client, these research articles provide relevant and useful information for practicing accountants."
The AAA task force sought to recognize the importance of academic research on professional practice. The December 2009 issue of Accounting Horizons will highlight the tax research published by Karen and her co-authors. The article entitled, "The Impact of Academic Accounting Research on Professional Practice: An Analysis by the AAA Research Impact Task Force” recognizes this research and its impact on tax practice, tax policy, and compliance.
Complete references to these publications include:
Miller, Karen and Tonya Flesher. 2003. Deductibility of Business Aircraft. Journal of Accountancy 196:1 (July): 57-60.
Miller, Karen, J. Riley Shaw, and Tonya K. Flesher. 2007. Taxation of Personal Use of Corporate Aircraft: Should Income Equal the Deduction? The ATA Journal of Legal Tax Research 5: 99 115.
Miller, Karen, J. Riley Shaw, and Tonya K. Flesher. 2008. Personal Entertainment Use of Corporate Aircraft: Income Allocations and Deduction Limitations. Taxes–The Tax Magazine (May).
In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, Union's newest business professor, Emily R. Lean, and the McAfee SOBA Director of Research, Darin W. White, found that perceived team leader integrity may influence subordinate ethical intentions towards fellow team members, the team itself, and even the organizational as a whole.The study, as explained by Darin W. White, “involved over 240 MBA students who work and study together in cohesive teams for approximately two years. Team members were asked questions about themselves as well as their team leaders. Participants were also given several ethical scenarios and asked to identify their responses. Based on their answers, we were able to determine specifically how subordinates perceive their leader’s behavior and, in turn, what impact that may have on the subordinates behavior.”
Emily R. Lean acknowledged that, “While previous research has hinted at the possibility, this study is the first, to our knowledge, to actually prove the link between leader integrity and employee behavior. In addition, prior work researching the effects of leadership on employee behavior has looked at the effects of CEO or top management ethical behavior rather than at the team level, as in our study.”
“The findings from this study are very important because they suggest that the ethical behavior of one manager can impact not only those directly under the influence of the leader but the entire company as well,” White noted. “We hope to continue this line of research in order to fully understand how an employee’s impression of their leader’s integrity develops and how it may change over time.”
Dr. Walton Padelford and Dr. Darin White have spent the last three years studying how people form an ethical economic worldview. Their work was recently accepted for publication in the prestigious Journal of Business Ethics.According to the authors, the discussion of ethics and economics has a very long history across multiple disciplines. The founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, likewise had a keen interest in this topic. However, with the development of economic science, scholarly assessment has shifted toward positive analysis while normative analysis has been left mainly to philosophers. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen makes this point by stating; “If one examines the balance of emphases in the publications in modern economics, it is hard not to notice the eschewal of deep normative analysis, and the neglect of the influence of ethical considerations in the characterization of actual human behavior.”
One of the motivations for this study was that the business school needs to continually propound the proposition that there is a legitimate and virtuous sphere of profit-making. We have a feeling that the idea of virtuous profits is downplayed or ridiculed in the rest of the university. Indeed, Charles Breeden and Noreen Lephardt found their business students at Marquette University had a growing tendency to believe that “the market encouraged greed and materialism, a popular theme among Ethics and Theology instructors which are core curriculum requirements at this University.”
The business school has no interest in inculcating a mentality of greed. Greed may be a perversion of some of the virtues such as prudence or even love which may be a strong motivator in work life and pursuit of profits. In her book, The Bourgeois Virtues, Deirdre McCloskey comments; “…the economy cannot actually get along without a good deal of love. Over half of consumer purchases at point of sale, for example, are on behalf of children and husbands and mothers and friends. Love runs consumption. Feminist economists have been noting for some time that without such altruistic purchases, the human race would promptly die out. A theory based on selfishness alone therefore cannot work scientifically. And if it became the way the social world actually worked, the social world would collapse.”
The authors used student populations to try and get a feeling for how the public’s view of the morality of profit-making changed with changing economic conditions and news events. By utilizing the newly developed morality of profit-making scale (MPM), survey data was obtained. Specifically, we theorized that the news media’s copious negative coverage of the gasoline price crisis of 2006 would significantly impact individuals’ MPM worldview. The results show that respondents’ explicit attitudes toward MPM were significantly impacted. However, respondents’ more deeply-held, implicit economic ethical worldview was only slightly impacted. The authors argue that only patient, long-term explanation and argumentation can permanently affect a society’s economics ethos. Implications and future research directions for further business research were outlined.
A recent McAfee SOBA study to be published in the Journal of Services Marketing provides answers to critical customer service questions. Do people form judgments of fair treatment during encounters with service providers? If so, do these perceptions of fairness have any impact on their assessment of the quality of the services they receive? William R. Nance, Jr., McAfee SOBA Department Chair, and Darin W. White, McAfee SOBA Director of Research, conducted a multi-country study with individuals from Central and Eastern Europe and the United States to answer these questions. In addition, Nance and White wanted to determine whether an individual’s age and national culture moderate these perceptions.According to William R. Nance, Jr:
“While it has long been assumed that customer perceptions of fair treatment by service providers are related to service quality perceptions, there has been little research that explicitly examines this relationship.”
Previous research has established that justice is an influential antecedent of behavior and attitudes in many different settings. From both empirical and theoretical standpoints, this groundbreaking study bridges the gap between the separate but related literature streams of service performance and procedural justice.
The study found strong evidence to support the notion that fair treatment of customers affects service performance perceptions across both FLC position and culture.
Darin W. White said:
“The study has generated two action points which can easily be put into practice:”
*Businesses need to understand that customers’ age has important implications on expectations for fair treatment during service delivery. We found that expectations for fair treatment and service quality increase with age which points to the need for more effective design and implementation of services targeted at customers within each of the various stages of the family lifecycle.
*We found that national cultural factors impact expectations for both fairness and performance in services. Of particular interest is the unexpected finding that customers in Central and Eastern Europe had higher than anticipated expectations for interpersonal justice. Indeed, the CEE respondents’ expectations for a high level of interpersonal justice exceeded the expectations of customers in the U.S. In this regard, practitioners – especially those currently providing services in Western Europe and the U.S. but anticipating entry into the CEE Accession States – cannot assume that customers in the expanding CEE region will accept lower levels of the interpersonal interaction.
Dr. A. David Austill, Professor of Legal Studies & Accounting, and his research colleague, Dr. Mehmet Kocakülâh, have recently had their article entitled Balanced Scorecard Application in the Health Care Industry: A Case Study published in the Fall 2007 edition of Journal of Health Care Finance.Balanced scorecards became a popular strategic performance measurement and management tool in the 1990s by Robert Kaplan and David Norton. The balanced scorecard is a performance management and measurement tool that has gained popularity since its creation in the early 1990’s. All types of companies in different sectors have utilized the BSC, but healthcare organizations have been slower to adopt them. The healthcare industry faces a number of issues related to cost containment, performance measurement, effectiveness, and potential change to a new single-payer system. There has been a growing awareness that healthcare organizations need to improve their management effectiveness. Within the past decade a growing number of healthcare organizations have installed balanced scorecards that are tailored for their particular mission and vision. The article discusses balanced scorecards, their present use by health care organizations, argues for greater use by health care providers, and analyzes a case study of a regional Midwestern integrated healthcare system’s use of a balanced scorecard to improve effectiveness within the organization. Dr. Austill has practiced public accounting and law with large firms. His research interests are in law, taxation and accounting. In the past year he has written and presented research papers at international, national and regional law and accounting conferences. His current research projects include the business law education of accounting students, partner and LLC member withdrawals and dissociations and their right to receive the fair value of their ownership interests, sports law, mommy rights, and a proposal to overrule Quill Corporation v. North Dakota to allow state taxation of out-of-state mail order and Internet sales.
Business growth and ease of mobility have played a significant role in the increasing use of corporate aircraft through the 21st century. Along with the increased use of corporate aircraft, personal use of corporate aircraft has also been on the rise. With this increased use, the tax treatment of the personal use of corporate aircraft has become much more visible and controversial. Karen C. Miller, Union University Accounting Professor, tracks the changes in the law and focuses on the tax policy issues related to the equity in the reporting of income by the employee and the deduction claimed by the corporation in her new work published in the September 2007 edition of ATA Journal of Legal Tax Research. Her work addresses the three-fold problem related to the current inequities of the current and proposed laws: What amount should be included as compensation by the employee as a fringe benefit for the personal use of company-owned aircraft? How much should the employer deduct for the operating cost of the aircraft for personal use? Should these amounts, compensation and deduction, be equal? In addition, Professor Miller assesses the horizontal inequities imposed by the current laws upon shareholders, different types of employees, corporations, and private citizens.The current tax treatment of personal use of corporate aircraft violates the concept of horizontal equity, which provides that taxpayers in similar circumstances should be taxed equally. Private citizens pay tax on all of the income used to purchase personal flights. This situation is inconsistent with the preferential tax treatment afforded executives who use the company aircraft for personal purposes because the executive pays taxes on only a small portion of the actual cost of the flight. Since the executive does not pay tax on the actual cost of the personal use of the company aircraft, there is no incentive for the executive to limit his or her use. This exacerbates the tax inequity.
The AJCA of 2004 limits a company’s deduction for executive use of the business aircraft to the amount of income reported by the executive, which is usually substantially less than the actual cost. Therefore, the corporation’s shareholders are not only subsidizing the cost of the personal flight, the company is incurring non-deductible expenditures and may not deduct the actual costs of those flights. The current law regarding the personal use of business aircraft by company executives does not reflect the financial reality of this personal use and puts shareholders at a distinct financial disadvantage. Recent proposed law changes would protect corporate shareholders, requiring employees using company aircraft for personal purposes to report as income the actual costs of operating the aircraft for the personal flight. At a minimum, these proposed changes would restore the economic reality of the transaction, requiring the employee receiving the personal use to report the actual cost of that personal use and allowing the corporation a full deduction for the related operating costs.
For more information, contact Karen C. Miller at 731-661-5056 or kcmiller@uu.edu.
After 14 years of transitioning from a centrally planned economic system to a capitalistic market system, eight Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) joined the European Union. According to Dr. Keith Absher, Dean of the McAfee School of Business Administration, the expansion of the European Union has "created immense challenges and opportunities for retailers as they seek to expand into the new eastern regions." As a result, an unprecedented number of retailers are exploring opportunities for internationalizing their operations.“In order to be successful in these new member states, retail strategists must have the answers to several key questions,” says Dean Absher
- Do the preferred attributes in a customer’s selection of retail stores differ between the founder member states of the European Union and the CEE accession states?
- Can a retailer pursue a standardized retailing mix strategy when entering CEE countries or is it necessary to make significant adaptations to the strategy?
- What factors differ significantly between the compared western and eastern EU cultural groups?
- What similarities exist between the compared western and eastern EU cultural groups?
- What are the salient and non-salient attributes in selecting retail stores in the CEE accession states?
Dean Absher and his co-author Dr. Darin White have spent the last two years thoroughly investigating answers to these questions in one of the first ever empirical studies to examine the diversity of retail preferences across the newly expanded EU. Their findings will be published in the April 2007 edition of the European Journal of Marketing.
Utilizing a well established retail customer decision criteria scale, the authors collected data from 1,221 eastern and western EU customers. They found that CEE shoppers hold very high expectations of what they desire in a retail store. Indeed, their expectations were higher than those of founder member state customers on 21 of the 22 dimensions measured. In addition, the findings provide further support for the notion that retailing strategies for one country cannot be effectively extended to other countries without adaptation.
It is apparent that retailers should thoroughly evaluate new target markets, especially when they are distant and unfamiliar. Drs. White and Absher conclude that retailers should pursue country-adapted strategies when entering the new CEE accession states.
For more information about this story contact Dean Keith Absher at kabsher@uu.edu or 731.661.5367.
The morality of capitalism has been debated since Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Yet, according to Union University economist Dr. Walt Padelford, the modern business school has taken a strictly pragmatic approach in this debate.“There is an interesting contrast between the self-consciously ‘non-ethical’ character of modern economics and the historical evolution of modern economics largely as an offshoot of ethics,” says Padelford.
“Not only was the so-called father of modern economics’, Adam Smith, a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, but the subject of economics was for centuries viewed as a branch of ethics. The fact that economics used to be taught at Cambridge until fairly recently simply as a part of ‘the Moral Science Tripos’ is no more than an instance of the traditional diagnosis of the nature of economics,” says Padelford.
He feels strongly that it is crucial for business school faculty to continue to develop a moral argument in favor of free markets.
That is precisely what Padelford has done in his recent article entitled “The Morality of Profit Making: A Scale Development” published in The Journal of Business & Economics Perspectives.
Dr. Darin White, Director of Academic Research for the McAfee School of Business and co-author says, “This research can be used to continue to refine the moral argument in terms of the legitimacy of the free market system so as not to rely exclusively on the pragmatic argument that “capitalism works. This argument is not enough to capture the imagination of ethically minded individuals.”
For more information about this story contact Dr. Walton Padelford, University Professor of Economics, at wpadelfo@uu.edu or 731.661.5362.
