Assessing the impact of free-roaming dog population management through systems modelling

Free-roaming dogs can present significant challenges to public health, wildlife conservation, and livestock production. Their own welfare may also be a concern, as free-roaming dogs can experience poor health and welfare. Dog population management is widely conducted to mitigate these issues. To ensure efficient use of resources, it is critical that effective, cost-efficient, and high-welfare strategies are identified. The dog population comprises distinct subpopulations characterised by their restriction status and level of ownership, but the assessment of dog population management often fails to consider the impact of the interaction between subpopulations on management success. We present a system dynamics model that incorporates an interactive and dynamic system of dog subpopulations. We identify that methods incorporating both fertility control and responsible ownership interventions (a reduction in abandonment and an increase in shelter adoptions) have the greatest potential to reduce free-roaming dog population sizes over longer periods of time, whilst being cost-effective and improving overall welfare. We suggest that future management should be applied at high levels of coverage and should target all sources of population increase, such as abandonment, births, and free-roaming owned dogs, to ensure effective and cost-efficient reduction in free-roaming dog numbers.

Abandonment of dogs in Latin America: Strategies and ideas

In this article, we gathered information from postgraduate theses and scientific articles published in several databases using inclusion criteria that had been made in Latin America, in countries with similar economic conditions, and also in the USA to present a point of comparison. The objective of this review is to broaden the readers' understanding of the causes of the increasing numbers of stray dogs and the reasons why people abandon pets in the streets, specifically in Latin America. It also discusses adoption and responsible ownership, identifies what failed in promoting positive human-dog interaction, and suggests strategies to address this problem. It concludes that adoption alone is not an effective solution but that it is necessary to offer education and awareness programs for owners, organize sterilization campaigns, and develop and apply – with the corresponding authorities – measures to ensure animal welfare that will provide benefits for society and improve animal quality of life. The role of veterinarians is fundamental in education and in disseminating the necessary information to orient people before they acquire a pet and prevent animal abandonment to resolve this problem.

Applying Responsible Ownership to Advance SDGs and the ESG Framework, Resulting in the Issuance of Green Bonds

This study aimed to contribute to the strand of literature encompassing governance, sustainability, and stakeholder theory by addressing an inchoate element of responsible ownership: collective action by different stakeholders. Our study’s originality rests on the introduction of an ownership strategy as a governance mechanism for collective action and responsible ownership in order to implement the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) framework. Using a twofold empirical methodology—studying of archival data and qualitative case work—we provide empirical evidence from a case study of a Nordic energy company showing that applying an ownership strategy helped to strengthen the approach to SDGs and ESG while leading to positive benefits: in this case, the issuance of green bonds. Our theoretical contribution is the addressing of a gap in the literature exploring how an ownership strategy can be a uniting point for collective action, based on the hypothesis that an ownership strategy provides an important reinforcement of a “virtuous cycle”. Policymakers who are interested in promoting long-term commitment of different stakeholders with a focus on sustainability and improved agency should encourage the formulation of an ownership strategy that explains the owners’ commitment to the environment, social causes, and/or governance guidelines. Therein lies the practical contribution of this work. In this study, we found that an ownership strategy with these elements helped to strengthen the firm’s commitment to SDGs and ESG.

Strategic and Organizational Change

Nowadays, family businesses, the predominant form of business worldwide, face an increasingly changing environment boosted by megatrends such as globalization, digitalization, artificial intelligence, climate change and sustainability. Along with this, are factors that play at a firm level such as stricter rules concerning transparency and compliance or the increasing importance of Corporate Social Responsibil- ity (CSR). Therefore, new strategies and organizational changes are necessary to allow for greater adaptation to the new context. This special issue provides insights on these questions from a variety of perspectives. The work of Hernández-Linares and López-Fernán- dez expands the current thinking on this process of adaptation by exploring the combined effects of three strategic orientations (entrepreneurial, learning, and market orientations) on the family firm ́s performance. The authors provide interesting contributions in terms of highlighting the importance of strategic orientations for value creation in enterprise organizations. They also provide empirical evidence that the family char- acter of the firm determines the relationship between strategic orientations and business performance, and offer some results on the effect of market orientation on firm performance in family firms versus non-family firms. Those differences in strategies are further ana- lysed within the setting of the business dimension in which financial and economic decisions are made. The contribution by Terrón-Ibáñez, Gómez-Miranda and Rodríguez-Ariza, discusses the influence of that di- mension in their performance, comparing family and non-family firms. This interesting analysis of financial performance provides useful results. The study showsthat, unlike non-family firms, there is an inverted U- shaped relationship between the size of family SMEs and the value of certain economic–financial indicators, such as the return on assets, operating margin and employee productivity. This means that although the increase in the dimension of the family organizations is positively related to its performance, there are lim- its from which the value of certain economic–financial indicators can be negatively affected. The next paper contributes to the discussion of the family business’s role in the private health sector. Reyes-Santías, Rivo-López and Villanueva-Villar, set out to identify the historical evolution of the family business in this sector, attempting to determine the variation and its contribution to the private health sector during the 1995-2010 period. The findings of this discussion provide family firms with an almost 60% survival level in this sector. Along with this, the au- thors provide some guidelines for future research con- cerning this higher degree of survival, why family firms are leading the concentration process taking place in the sector, as well as their strategies for super-spe- cialization in the services offered especially by family businesses in healthcare. The effect of family ownership and the character- istics of the board of directors on the implementation level of Enterprise Risk Management is an important topic. The article by Otero-González, Rodríguez-Gil, Durán-Santomil and Tamayo-Herrera certainly adds to the discussion. In particular, their research shows that family businesses are less interested in implementing ERM, except when shareholders have greater control of the company and when professional investors are present in the company. Besides, the importance of a board of directors’ characteristics of in terms of risk taking is confirmed by observing that larger boards en- courage risk managers to be hired. The paper by Lorenzo-Gómez looks at the barriers to change that are specific to the characteristics of family business, considering both the barriers that af- fect the perception of the need to undertake changes and the availability of resources to face those chang- es, and the barriers to implementing these changes within already consolidated organizations, where new routines are created to replace the existing ones. Thefindings suggest that the factors affecting these barri- ers include the generation at the head of the family business; the influence of interest groups, particularly in terms of the duality between the company and the family; and the participation level of professionals from outside the family. The final contribution by Aragon-Amonarriz and Iturrioz-Landart offers an interesting discussion on how family-responsible ownership practices enhance social responsibility in small and medium family firms. Their results reveal the positive relationships between the elements of family-responsible ownership in terms of succession management, financial resource allocation, professionalism and social responsibility, and ultimate- ly with the socially responsible behaviour of family SMEs. The challenges surrounding family business owners and the nuances around strategic and organizational decision making are together an area ripe for future research. The editors look forward to seeing future de- velopments on these topics that pay special attention to the influence of family characteristics and dynamics on the strategic and organizational change of family firms, and that draw on both quantitative and quali- tative research methodologies for the wider develop- ment of the field. Acknowledgements. The papers published in this issue were presented at the “II Workshop of Family Business: Strategic and Organizational Change” at Ourense, Galicia, Spain, June, 13-14, 2019. The conference was organized by GEN group research (http:// infogen.webs.uvigo.es/) and the Chair of Family Business of the University of Vigo, and was sponsored by the AGEF (Galician Family Business Association), Inditex Group, IEF (Spanish Family Firm Institute), and with ECOBAS group as collaborator. Thanks for their invaluable support. We are also very thankful of all other participants at the conference. Katiuska Cabrera Suárez, University of Las Palmas Elena Rivo-López, co-director of the Chair of Family Business, University of Vigo Santiago Lago-Peñas, co-director of the Chair of Family Business, University of Vigo

How do family responsible ownership practices enhance social responsibility in small and medium family firms?

This paper aims to measure the influence of the family responsible ownership practices on the socially responsible behaviour of family small and medium firms. To reach this purpose, we define six hypothesis and we apply an empirical testing of an integrative model. Based on a sample of 84 family SMEs, we use structural equation modelling to test for possible relationships within and between the constructs. This study reveals the relevance of the family responsible ownership practices as a driver that influences social responsible practices in family SMEs. The results confirmed that positive relationships exist between each of the following three antecedents: a) responsible management succession, b) responsible financial resource allocation and c) professionalism and social responsibility among family SMEs. Additionally, a positive relationship between family responsible ownership practices and family firm social responsibility was found.

The benefit stance: responsible ownership in the twenty-first century

Ownership in the global equities markets is dominated by large institutions that manage the savings of beneficiaries with long investment horizons. These asset managers rely on incomplete investment models that betray the interests of their beneficiaries and threaten their collective future. The models encourage individual companies to compete without regard for health of the critical social and environmental systems that support the long-term value of those beneficiaries’ diversified portfolios and lived experience. These naïve models ignore the growing cost of profit-driven negative externalities. This article examines the latest models of benefit corporation law, a new form of governance that overturns the rule of shareholder primacy, and argues that their principles should be expanded to cover the entire chain of investing, from savers to funds to asset managers and finally to the real economy.

Ownership strategy: A governance mechanism for collective action and responsible ownership

A new strand of corporate governance literature on ownership is developing the next generation of the concept of active ownership: responsible ownership. This paper aims to contribute to this strand of literature by addressing an inchoate element of responsible ownership: collective action by owners. We introduce an ownership strategy as a governance mechanism for collective action and responsible ownership and ask how an ownership strategy improves corporate governance. Using data from semi-structured interviews with owner representatives, board members, and non-executive insiders, together with observation and documentary analysis, we find support for the theoretical construction and an answer to the research question. Specifically, we find that the ownership strategy functions as a collaboration pact, which cultivates long-termism, and that the outcome is improved agency, i.e. that both the relationship between owners and directors and between directors and management is improved due to better alignment. The findings indicate that an ownership strategy establishes a much-needed long-term focus and commitment of owners while creating a sense of security and understanding among the members of the board of directors, i.e. that they are working with the will of their owners. As such, it suggests new avenues of research for corporate governance literature.

239 Stray and abandoned dog overpopulation management- Israel’s unique system

Dog overpopulation is a major problem worldwide, which impacts animal welfare and health, as well as public health. In Israel, a unique governmental database is managed in order to enforce mandatory dog registration and rabies yearly vaccination policy. In addition, since 2012, a unique online searchable database has been gathering most homeless pets offered for adoption from non-profit organizations and municipal shelters (http://Yad4.co.il). Our objectives were (1) to investigate the registered dog population in Israel and to assess its association to the abandoned dog population; and (2) to reveal the risk factors for a dog to be adopted or to stay at the shelter. Data analyses included 758,288 registered dogs and 22,545 adoptable dogs. Analyses revealed that only 214,101 out of the 343,872 dogs that are registered as “active” are known to have owners. Approximately 40,000 dogs “disappear” from the database every year, which means that some of them may be abandoned. Multi-Variate Linear regression strengthened it by revealing that the number of abandoned dogs increased by the numbers of active registered dogs and dogs which had “disappeared” from the database in the previous year (P < 0.05). Among the registered dogs, 8% were younger than one year, but only 1.7% of the abandoned dogs were that young. Among these dogs, the risk factors to stay at the shelter were when the dogs were described as: “mix-breed”, “male”, “suitable for senior” or “for athletes” (P < 0.05). In conclusion, a governmental national database is an important dog population management tool, with the potential to predict the number of abandoned dogs. Since most abandoned dogs are older than one year, promoting responsible ownership would be vital. Moreover, a national online database, such as Yad4 website, may successfully improve dog adoption rate, while dogs’ description online significantly impacts the adoption chances.