Bringing the Family Logic in: From Duality to Plurality in Social Enterprises

Social enterprises combine activities, processes, structures, and meanings associated with multiple institutional logics that may pose conflicting goals, norms, values, and practices. This in-depth multi-source case study of an ecological social enterprise in Malaysia reveals how the enactment of the family logic interacts with the market and ecological logics not only in conflicting but also in synergetic ways. By drawing attention to the institutional logic of the family in social entrepreneurship, this study highlights the heterogeneity of social enterprises. The findings have implications for research with social enterprises and family-owned firms in relation to the ethical obligations of these organizations and the interactions of multiple logics.

Climate change and the different roles of physicians: a critical response to "A Planetary Health Pledge for Health Professionals in the Anthropocene"

The article critically responds to "A Planetary Health Pledge for Health Professionals in the Anthropocene" which was published by Wabnitz et al. in The Lancet in November 2020. It focuses on the different roles and responsibilities of a physician. The pledge is criticised because it neglects the different roles, gives no answers in case of conflicting goals, and contains numerous inconsistencies. The relationship between the Planetary Health Pledge and the Declaration of Geneva is examined. It is argued that the Planetary Health Pledge should have supplemented the Declaration of Geneva instead of changing it.

Monetary Policy in a Developing Country: A Case of Pakistan

The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has to fulfil multiple objectives in Pakistan’s monetary policy. The choice of policy objectives is an old theme that acquired a renewed importance after the financial crisis of 2007–2009. Most of the textbooks do not discuss the debate around objectives, rather they discuss monetary policy objectives from the lens of a developing country. The choice of objectives should be seen in the context of the country’s overall level of economic development. With historical illustration of Pakistan during the 1970s and 1980s, the case has shown how the credit-starved sectors were helped through government-directed credit. With the opening of the trade and financial sector, the economic liberalization reforms increased the private sector’s role, and authorities adopted a more market-based approach towards monetary management. Various small businesses and entrepreneurs are faced with credit constraints. Private sector financial institutions cannot relax these credit constraints given their concern with creditworthiness, a condition that small businesses and entrepreneurs cannot satisfy. The SBP Act states that it has to pursue potentially conflicting goals of economic development and stable prices. The conflicting goals create tension in the case of whether SBP should control credit supply to various sectors of the economy or determine the cost of credit through interest rate targeting. It compares the two intermediate targets: monetary and interest rate. Finally, it also highlights the difficult trade-offs faced by policymakers in developing countries.

Stochastic Market Games

Some of the most relevant future applications of multi-agent systems like autonomous driving or factories as a service display mixed-motive scenarios, where agents might have conflicting goals. In these settings agents are likely to learn undesirable outcomes in terms of cooperation under independent learning, such as overly greedy behavior. Motivated from real world societies, in this work we propose to utilize market forces to provide incentives for agents to become cooperative. As demonstrated in an iterated version of the Prisoner's Dilemma, the proposed market formulation can change the dynamics of the game to consistently learn cooperative policies. Further we evaluate our approach in spatially and temporally extended settings for varying numbers of agents. We empirically find that the presence of markets can improve both the overall result and agent individual returns via their trading activities.

Bayesian Experience Reuse for Learning from Multiple Demonstrators

Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) is a powerful approach for incorporating advice from experts in the form of demonstrations. However, demonstrations often come from multiple sub-optimal experts with conflicting goals, rendering them difficult to incorporate effectively in online settings. To address this, we formulate a quadratic program whose solution yields an adaptive weighting over experts, that can be used to sample experts with relevant goals. In order to compare different source and target task goals safely, we model their uncertainty using normal-inverse-gamma priors, whose posteriors are learned from demonstrations using Bayesian neural networks with a shared encoder. Our resulting approach, which we call Bayesian Experience Reuse, can be applied for LfD in static and dynamic decision-making settings. We demonstrate its effectiveness for minimizing multi-modal functions, and optimizing a high-dimensional supply chain with cost uncertainty, where it is also shown to improve upon the performance of the demonstrators' policies.

Service Priority Climate and Service Performance Among Hospitality Employees: The Role of Emotional Labor and Workload Pressure

Frontline hotel employees face a complex organizational environment that constantly makes multiple demands, creating a persistent trade-off between service as a key element of the organization’s strategy and other competing or even conflicting goals. This study proposes an integrated and unique way of discerning the relationship between service climate and service performance through the prism of surface and deep acting emotional labor and suggests a new dimension of the service climate—the service priority climate. Specifically, we examined employees’ use of emotional labor strategies as a mechanism that explains the relationship between service priority climate and service performance. We also investigated whether workload pressure influences this relationship. Using a multilevel, multisource study, we surveyed a sample of 245 hotel employees working in 39 departments and their direct managers. The results demonstrated that when employees regarded service as a priority compared with other competing goals, they used more deep acting emotional labor strategies, resulting in better service performance. However, this was apparent only when workload pressure was low. Implications for hospitality organizations are discussed.