Dark Sides of Business and Higher Education Management, Volume II

Agata Stachowicz-Stanusch, Gianluigi Mangia

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781631575662
• eBook ISBN: 9781631575679
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Contemporary management studies usually focus on positive and desirable solutions that increase the organizational effectiveness and performance. As a result, graduates of higher business schools are totally unaware of the risk associated with management misconduct that often results in corrupt scandals, erosion of public trust to their organizations, or even the collapse of profitable corporations. The last decade, in fact, has been abundant in numerous examples of corruption scandals in modern organizations and instances of management misconduct that have eroded public faith (such as Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia, Arthur Andersen, and Parmalat). Due to repeated misconducts and a highly active dark side, scholars started paying more attention to the so-called Òdark sideÓ of organizations, as something no longer exceptional to organizational life. This book attempts to shed light on the reality of challenges for business practices and higher education management that stem from misconduct occurring in various aspects of business and educational environment.

PART I

Theorizing in the Shadow (of Higher Education Management)

CHAPTER 1

Light in the Darkness of Business and Higher Education Management

Agata Stachowicz-Stanusch and Gianluigi Mangia

Contemporary management studies usually concern positive and desirable solutions that increase the organizational effectiveness and performance. That is why graduates of higher business schools, equipped with idealistic views on business environment, need to face the dark side of business practice without the appropriate preparation. Their unawareness of the risk associated with management misconduct results in corrupt scandals, erosion of public trust to their organizations, or even the collapse of profitable corporations. Underestimation of unethical behaviors may lead to severe consequences.

This book attempts to shed the light on the practical challenges for business practice and for higher education management that come from misconduct occurring in various aspects of business and educational environment.

This second volume of the book is divided into three parts.

The first part is the opening one in the form of this editors’ introduction.

The second part “Shedding Lights on the Shadows” opens with Leixnering and Mayrhofer’s chapter “Facebook Voyeurism: Blind Spot or Dark Side of Human Resource Management?” In this chapter, the authors analyze this phenomenon and shed light on the question whether Facebook voyeurism is a blind spot or even a dark side of human resource management (HRM). By collecting sources from different fields of literature such as management and legal studies, sociology, psychology, and philosophy, the authors show that Facebook voyeurism in HRM is a surprisingly under-researched phenomenon and thus a particular blind spot. In particular, authors explicate what do Facebook voyeurs do wrong from a moral perspective, if and how social network sites (SNSs) content improve HR decisions and how could various concepts of privacy guide HRM.

Del Mar et al. in the chapter “University Student Plagiarism in the Digital Age and the Professors’ Role in Detecting and Reporting,” focus on the university professors’ perceptions by examining the role they play in this phenomenon and the actions they undertake when faced with cases of plagiarism. Their study is based on the results of a qualitative study involving in-depth interviews with professors from a range of specializations within the areas of management and economics.

In his chapter “Selling Science Through University Entrepreneurship: Debates and Implications for Emerging Economies,” Debabrata Chatterjee discusses about institutional changes in the field of higher education. These changes have enlarged professors’ role beyond teaching and research to include faculty research commercialization and entrepreneurship in various forms—science parks, joint ventures with industry, business incubation centers, and so on. Although in some instances it has spawned hi-technology industries in certain clusters, its effect is debated. Rising importance of science-based innovations, changes in higher education and research funding policies, growing importance of global university rankings, and normative pressures on universities to spawn science-based industrial clusters are some factors that have contributed to this trend. However, the impact of academic research commercialization is debatable. While its success in developing science-based industry is doubted, evidence suggests that it might adversely impact basic research, which in turn might lead to lower innovations in the long term. The essay concludes by suggesting that brokering organizations, such as public R&D institutions, may act as intermediaries to translate university science for industry, rather than universities themselves taking on this role directly through academic entrepreneurship.

The last part of the book “Individuals: Behaviors and Perceptions” opens with the chapter “Whistling Past the Graveyard of Our Own Demise: How Neoliberalism, Corruption, Status Hierarchies, and The Imperium Threaten Higher Education.” In this chapter, Duncan Waite discusses the situatedness of the professor and the professorate, his or her position as “dominated dominant.” The discussion, then, is based on the focus on individual and collective actions, taking into account the organizing principles, processes, and systems that we construct, employ, and are a part of. In addition, those more macro or global forces, processes, and systems that affect us and our work are discussed, such as neoliberalism and The Imperium.

Mameli et al. in their chapter “Inside the Dark Sides: A Clinical Experience,” discuss the clinical experience of training on the managerial role in public organizations through the parallel between Sci-Fi narratives and the training experience. Based on more than 1,500 hours of training over a 48-month period, this chapter also provides the possibility to explore the concept of Dark Sides from a clinical perspective. This approach is based on an understanding of the relationship between individuals and their context that gives the possibility to explore both at conscious and unconscious level the representations of the Dark Side as experienced by the participants, giving way to a reflection on what can be done to get out of these Dark Sides, or better, to act within them.

The chapter by Hinna et al. “Organizational Corruption in the Education System,” is focused on the theme of corruption as a social phenomenon that decreases social and economic wealth and as dark side of human behavior in society and business. For these reasons, corruption has an obvious impact on people’s daily lives, but it is also a challenging topic for the scientific debate, because of the gap in the knowledge of its causes, making possible strategies to contrast and to prevent corruption uncertain. Starting from the differences between public and private organizations and taking into account peculiarities of an education system, the article’s main object is to identify antecedents of corruption within school organizations. Therefore, this article identifies a set of organizational variables that reflects the determinants of corruption within the private and public sectors, as within the education system; it then identifies specific tools that can be put in place to fight corruption in the education system.

In “Human Resource Management in UK Higher Education: Business Schools and Their Dark Side,” Tom Burgess applies Palmer’s novel approach that organizational wrongdoing is normal rather than abnormal. The wrongdoing arises from changes in the psychological contract and in failings in the HRM of academics in UK university business schools. To frame Palmer’s theoretical perspective, the chapter uses Bauman’s lens of liquid modernity to view the contextual changes in society that are buffeting universities. Key societal pressures, such as new public management and the government’s research assessment exercises, are described before discussing the management of academics and wrongdoing within the business school context. The chapter uses secondary data; in particular, a case study assembled from media reports of recent events in one UK management school, to illustrate the discussion.

This book was created thanks to many authors from all over the world. They present us examples of “dark” practices in the business and in the education management environment. We hope that their theoretical and practical contribution into organizational social irresponsibility, corruption, and unethical behavior will be priceless and inspiring struggling with dark sides of business and higher education management.

PART II

Shedding Lights on the Shadows

CHAPTER 2

Facebook Voyeurism: Blind Spot or Dark Side of Human Resource Management?

Stephan Leixnering and Wolfgang Mayrhofer

WU Vienna University of Economics and Business

Introduction

How does a beautiful naked woman on a horseback relate to human resource management (HRM)? Or, more practically: What may HRM benefit from pondering on such a situation? A lot, we think.

Image that woman—let’s call her Lady Godiva—sitting on a white horse and riding through the town’s streets. You—let’s call you Tom—are considering a brief look at her. Wouldn’t it be nice to peep just for a second? Oh, it’s not what I might think, you argue: she promised to do you a great favor and to save you a lot of money. And to prove her good intentions and her honest attitude, she was willing to literally disclose her true nature. Nevertheless, Lady Godiva asked you to not peep at her in order to keep her dignity—you are aware of that! However, you now want to briefly check if she sticks to her word. But suddenly you’re struggling—you feel caught, even though Lady Godiva hasn’t yet recognized you. You are feeling that she wouldn’t approve of you watching her. While trying to collect your thoughts, you ask yourself: If she does not want anybody to look at her, why on earth is she broadcasting herself in that way? You are weighing your options.

Figure 2.1 Lady Godiva (Collier1897). What should you do now— peep or not?

This synopsis of the more than 600 years old legend of Lady Godiva and Peeping Tom nicely captures the very essence of a situation that more and more human resource (HR) managers find themselves in. When they have to decide on somebody’s selection, promotion, or dismissal, they try to gather as much relevant personal information about the candidate as possible to support their decision. Since social media allow people to share private information online, HR managers become attracted by sources like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And as soon as they are about to “check” someone online to find something that they do not know yet, they are getting close to Peeping Tom’s reflections.

Academic interest in tackling the wicked issue that we would like to call “Facebook voyeurism”—the increasing danger of HR managers becoming online peepers by profession—has been rather scarce. In this chapter, we want to shed light on whether the phenomenon marks a blind spot or even a dark side of present HRM. We argue that the phenomenon of Facebook voyeurism is highly relevant to the field of HRM. Collecting and building on various sources from the fields of management and legal studies, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and arts, we develop a more comprehensive perspective and offer a multifaceted analysis of the phenomenon. We will further demonstrate that even though the phenomenon is new, it is only a present and concrete instance of a rather abstract and old problem.

Overall, this chapter urges HRM scholars to address three essential issues related to the use of social media: the benefit of the use of social media in HRM, the conceptualization of privacy, and the role of ethics. As these issues are in dire need of future research, we will conclude the chapter with suggesting avenues for future academic research and discussion.

The Emergence of Social Network Sites

After its launch in 2004, Facebook emerged as the emblem of social media and became the world’s most visited website with more than one billion active users every month (Chauhan, Buckley, and Harvey 2013; Day 2013). Being the most prominent of so-called social network sites (SNSs), it provides

web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semipublic profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. (Ellisonand Boyd 2013, 211)

Basically, it allows for online flows of personal information including all kind of data such as photographs, video clips, gossip, and trivia ( Herbert 2011). Today, SNSs account for about 80 percent of all online content and for nearly one-quarter of the time that Internet users spend online (Comscore 2011). Those numbers indicate that individuals increasingly present themselves online and in fact, put themselves on display; and by doing so, they also demonstrate their willingness to disclose personal information, share it with others, and make it available to broader audiences. As a consequence, scholars increasingly see evidence for the fact that SNSs heavily alter our communication habits, shape our attitudes, and influence our online and offline behavior as well (Liu 2007; Mazer, Murphy, and Simonds 2007). And although people may immensely enjoy the opportunities that SNSs provide, they are also becoming more and more aware of adverse consequences that intensive online presence might entail. In a worldwide survey, 36 percent of all respondents said that they were concerned about their job prospects because of “social networking pages leaving a digital trail of information thereby eliminating plausible deniability” (Herbert 2011, 2).

The Discovery of SNSs as an HRM Tool

The Internet has made it increasingly easy to engage in amateur data-mining (Zimmer 2007)—even without using SNSs. “Everybody’s googling”: You can find, collect, and aggregate personal details of someone’s life by simply entering their name in the search engine. SNSs make it even more convenient to trace people’s “friends, dates, potential employees, long-lost relatives, and anybody else who happens to arouse their curiosity” (Herbert 2011, 4). It is indeed very likely to assume that the main use of Facebook is simply social searching (Lampe, Ellison, and Steinfield 2006). In a study of 2008, users readily admitted that they used Facebook for checking up people they knew as well as others they did not. The report also says that more than 90 percent of all respondents regularly check up their friends, and 50 percent trace whom their ex-partners are dating (Foregger 2008). Labeled as “peep culture,” this phenomenon was claimed to have replaced “pop culture”: Instead of celebrities, people now tend to watch others they know or even complete strangers in the pursuit of entertainment and attention (Niedzviecki 2009). SNSs actively contribute to the formation of such an attitude since they encourage users to put as much of their private lives as possible online and to maximize the audience as well as its access to personal content (Herbert 2011).

It is relatively undemanding to find online information about people: Profiles are public, and privacy settings are rarely changed in many cases (Zimmer 2007). Even if access to private information is often limited to people that have been accepted as “friends,” this can be overcome easily. IT-security company Sophos showcased this by setting up an online profile of a comic frog called FreddiStaur (an anagram of “ID fraudster”) and asking randomly chosen Facebook users to accept Freddi as a friend in order to get access to private content. The result testifies how easy it is to obtain personal information from other users: 44% percent of all contacted users responded to Freddi, and almost all of them provided access to private data such as photos, hobbies, and employer details (Herbert 2011).

The ubiquity of SNSs and their content make them a potential target for HR managers keen on getting additional information for their individual-related decisions. To fulfill its basic task—providing the organization with the right number of people with adequate qualifications at the right time and location—HRM requires, inter alia, information about individuals. In particular when hir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Theorizing in the Shadow (of Higher Education Management)
• Part II: Shedding Lights on the Shadows
• Part III: Individuals: Behaviors and Perceptions
• About the Authors
• Index
• Adpage