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Abstract This chapter examines the organization, management and propagation into foreign countries of the Wat Phra Dhammakaya (Dhammakaya Temple) movement, which is a newly arisen Theravada Buddhist group in Thailand. At the branch temple in Japan, most of the followers are Thais living in Japan; so far the recruitment of Japanese has not been very successful. However, there is another group of Theravada Buddhists in Japan, the Japan Theravada Buddhist Association, which has more than 2000 Japanese members. What has caused this gap in the successful propagation of Theravada Buddhism to the Japanese? This chapter will discuss this question by focusing on the management strategies of the two organizations.
Keywords: Wat Phra Dhammakaya, management strategy, resource strategy, competitive strategy, domain strategy, layers of Theravada Buddhism
Propagation to the Japanese and analysis of the management strategy used
Due to the progress of globalization, the propagation of religion has accelerated in many directions. In recent years, the expansion of traditional religions and new religious movements from foreign countries into Japan has been striking. This chapter examines a case that is an example of this trend: Wat Phra Dhammakaya (Dhammakaya Temple), a branch of Thai Theravada Buddhism, and its propagation in Japan.
In June 2009, I requested permission to conduct research on the Tokyo branch of Wat Phra Dhammakaya. I requested information about their missionary work among the local Japanese population, and was interested in the difficulties of propagating their work in a different culture. The chief monk of the branch temple in Tokyo declined my request, saying that the activities of Dhammakaya Temple in Japan were directed to Thai people living in Japan and that they had no plans to conduct missionary work among the Japanese either at that time or in the future. It therefore seemed slightly strange to me that a few days after receiving this reply, a short ordination course to enter the priesthood was advertised in the official temple blog, as well as in a newspaper of religious affairs in Japan (Chūgai Nippo 2009). The course was targeted at foreigners, including Japanese, and was to be held in Thailand.
Some Japanese NRMs, such as Perfect Liberty Kyōdan, World Messianity, Sūkyō Mahikari, are well-known for their gigantic sacred places. A common element among these sacred places is the pursuit of beauty. Scattering traditional or novel (sometimes bizarre) buildings and structures, these sacred places appropriate Japanese aesthetics. The Church of World Messianity is a Japanese new religion that started proselytization in 1955. The religion established its sacred place, Guarapiranga, in the suburb of Sao Paulo in 1995. Since then numerous people, not only its followers but also non-Messianity followers, have visited Guarapiranga. This paper examines the significance of this gigantic and well-maintained sacred place or the propagation and internalization of the doctrine by followers.
Keywords: Church of World Messianity, sacred places, Guarapiranga, proselytization, Japanese aesthetics, Japanese NRMs
Introduction
Some of the new religious groups in Japan, including Perfect Liberty Kyōdan, Church of World Messianity [Sekai Kyūsei Kyō] and Sūkyō Mahikari, are well-known for their huge sacred places. A common element among these sacred places is beauty. The sacred places, which combine traditional or novel (or sometimes even bizarre) buildings with natural scenery, cleverly apply a Japanese aesthetic of beauty. The Church of World Messianity (hereinafter called Messianity) is a Japanese new religion known for its practice of jōrei, meaning ‘purification of the spirit’ in Japanese, the foundation of all its activity.
Messianity has actively been proselytizing in Brazil since 1955. According to a census in 2000 (IBGE N.d.), the number of its followers is 109,310. There are 410,000 according to Messianity's website in Japan (Izunome 2008).
In 1995, Messianity founded its extensive and well-maintained sacred place, Guarapiranga, in the suburbs of Sao Paulo. Many Brazilians, both adherents and non-Messianity followers, have visited the site since then. Messianity calls the 320,000 m2 site beside Lake Guarapiranga ‘heaven on earth’ [paraiso terestre], and ‘sacred place’ [solo sagrado]. It is a space that incorporates natural features such as the lake and forest. A woman in her 30s who visited there told me it is ‘Beautiful, just beautiful! I have no words to explain’. Many followers responded in the same way when asked about their impressions on visiting Guarapiranga for the first time.
From a coopetition perspective, we differentiate between a multinational enterprise's product-similar subsidiary network and product-different subsidiary network in a host country. We argue that the product-similar network will have a curvilinear (inverted U-shaped) effect on foreign subsidiary performance, whereas the product-different network will produce a monotonic (positive) effect. Moreover, we introduce host-country economic advantage and intangible resource of the subsidiary as moderators into the relationship between subsidiary network and performance. Using longitudinal panel data of foreign subsidiaries, we find evidence that when host-country economic advantage is large, and the level of intangible asset intensity is high, the inverted U-shaped effect of product-similar subsidiary network is less pronounced. Moreover, host-country economic advantage and intangible asset intensity both enhance the positive effect of product-different subsidiary network. However, the moderating effect of intangible asset intensity is opposite to our prediction.
Achieving ambitious targets to address the global tuberculosis (TB) epidemic requires consideration of the impact of competing interventions for improved identification of patients with TB. Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) and benefit-cost analysis (BCA) are two approaches to economic evaluation that assess the costs and effects of competing alternatives. However, the differing theoretical basis and methodological approach to CEA and BCA is likely to result in alternative analytical outputs and potentially different policy interpretations. A BCA was conducted by converting an existing CEA on various combinations of TB control interventions in South Africa using a benefits transfer approach to estimate the value of statistical life (VSL) and value of statistical life year (VSLY). All combinations of interventions reduced untreated active disease compared to current TB control, reducing deaths by between 5,000 and 75,000 and resulting in net benefits of Int$3.2–Int$137 billion (ZAR18.1 billion to ZAR764 billion) over a 20-year period. This analysis contributes to development and application of BCA methods for health interventions and demonstrates that further investment in TB control in South Africa is expected to yield significant benefits. Further work is required to guide the appropriate analytical approach, interpretation and policy recommendations in the South African policy perspective and context.
We show that initial public offerings (IPOs) have nontrivial positive spillover effects on local labor markets, business environments, consumer spending, real estate, and migration. We mitigate endogeneity concerns about unobserved heterogeneity with restrictive geographic fixed effects coupled with a matching procedure. We show that it is the listing decision, which encompasses both a wealth and liquidity shock, that induces economic spillovers. Conditional on an IPO occurring, we estimate that an additional $10 million in IPO proceeds is associated with an extra 41 jobs and 0.7 new establishments locally.
Two cost-benefit analysis methods developed from differing economic situations and analytical objectives in the 1960s and 1970s. The Trade Policy Approach of Ian Little and James Mirrlees analyzed international competitiveness of projects producing private goods and physical infrastructure in markets severely distorted by trade protectionism; it was adopted in 1975 by the World Bank; the multilateral regional development banks followed suit. The Public Finance Approach of Arnold Harberger developed from comparative statics analyses of public projects and policies in the United States and was adopted at the US Agency for International Development and in several Latin American countries. The original Trade Policy Approach included social analysis too tedious for everyday application, leading an efficiency-only version to emerge and be popularized by teaching materials from Price Gittinger and colleagues in the World Bank’s Economic Development Institute. It proved the right method for World Bank use until Washington Consensus reforms, the GATT and WTO reduced price distortions, and slowly restored private international financial flows gave private industry access to international private investment capital. Official Development Assistance (ODA) portfolios responded by refocusing on public goods and market failures, leading to decreased utility of the Trade Policy Approach and decreased use of cost-benefit analysis at the World Bank. A 1990s drive in the World Bank to switch from the Trade Policy Approach to the increasingly relevant Public Finance Approach resulted in an internal manual and operational guidelines, but not a book from a distinguished university press, commonly presumed to signal official Bank policy. It is time for that long-overdue book to be published.
The profound influence of Thomas Donaldson and Thomas Dunfee’s integrative social contracts theory (ISCT) on the field of business ethics has been challenged by Andreas Scherer and Guido Palazzo’s Habermasian approach, which has achieved prominence of late with articles that expressly question the defensibility of ISCT’s hypernorms. This article builds on recent efforts by Donaldson and Scherer to bridge their accounts by providing discursive foundations to the hypernorms at the heart of the ISCT framework. Extending prior literature, we propose an ISCT* framework designed to retain ISCT’s practical virtue of managerial guidance while answering the demands of Scherer and Palazzo’s discursive account. By subscribing to a suitable portfolio of discursively justified hypernorms, we argue, companies unlock the valuable moral guidance of ISCT*, which says to treat these hypernorms as unequivocal outer bounds to the pursuit of business and as a starting point to tailor local norms through discursive stakeholder engagement.
This article introduces the impact of debt misvaluation on merger and acquisition activity. We show the potential for debt misvaluation to help explain the shifting dominance of financial acquirers (private equity firms) relative to strategic acquirers (operating companies). Fundamental differences in governance and project coinsurance between the two types of acquirer would interact with debt misvaluation, resulting in variation in how assets are owned that depends on debt market conditions. We find support for our theory in merger data using a novel measure of debt misvaluation.
Research on the knowledge sharing has exploded over the past decades due to trends and integration of knowledge and talent management in modern workplace. However, knowledge hiding has been left unexplored; moreover, efforts to foster knowledge sharing remain because employees are unwilling to share their knowledge for several reasons. Drawing on psychological ownership and social exchange theory, this article investigated the nexus between perceived organizational support, psychological entitlement, knowledge hiding behavior, and extra-role behavior, and the mediating role of knowledge hiding behavior. Utilizing survey data collected from 375 employees in Jordanian commercial banks, a structural equation modeling was applied to analyze the data. Results from structural equation modeling show that (1) perceived organizational support has a positive impact on extra-role behavior, (2) knowledge hiding behavior has a negative impact on extra-role behavior, (3) psychological entitlement has a positive impact on knowledge hiding behavior, and (4) knowledge hiding behavior mediated the relationship between psychological entitlement and extra-role behavior. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Benefit-cost analyses of education policies in low- and middle-income countries have historically used the effect of education on future wages to estimate benefits. Strong evidence also points to female education reducing both the under-five mortality rates of their children and adult mortality rates. A more complete analysis would thus add the value of mortality risk reduction to wage increases. This paper estimates how net benefits and benefit-cost ratios respond to the values used to estimate education’s mortality-reducing impact including variation in these estimates. We utilize a ‘standardized sensitivity analysis’ to generate a range of valuations of education’s impact on mortality risks. We include alternative ways of adjusting these values for income and age differences. Our analysis is for one additional year of schooling in lower-middle-income countries, incremental to the current mean. Our analysis shows a range of benefit-cost ratios ranging from 3.2 to 6.7, and net benefits ranging from $2,800 to $7,300 per student. Benefits from mortality risk reductions account for 40% to 70% of the overall benefits depending on the scenario. Thus, accounting for changes in mortality risks in addition to wage increases noticeably enhances the value of already attractive education investments.
Chinese firms are grappling with the four paradigm shifts around electric, connected, shared, and autonomous vehicles that are roiling the rest of the global auto industry. This article, which follows my earlier MOR article about the auto industry (Teece, 2018a), looks briefly at the development of capabilities in these fields by Chinese firms. It then analyzes the prospects for Chinese firms to use them to gain a stronger foothold in the global market, and for multinationals to continue to prosper in China. The paradigm shifts are creating new entry points for Chinese firms to capture value in the industry, and some potential global contenders have demonstrated solid dynamic capabilities in electric vehicles (Geely), shared vehicles (Didi Chuxing), and autonomous vehicles (Baidu). However, multinationals are also moving forward in the same fields and have strong complementary assets such as respected brands and well-honed dynamic capabilities.
There is limited research that addresses the inclusion of individuals with autism in the workforce. Autism employment in information technology (IT) is a new phenomenon and there is no established theory to draw from to investigate this phenomenon. In this paper, we review the existing literature on autism employment and present a theoretical framework to study information technology workplace readiness to equitably include individuals with autism. Our proposed framework extends Annabi and Lebovitz’s organizational interventions mitigating individual barriers theoretical framework to include Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior constructs. The framework will contribute to advancing the knowledge and understanding of the needs of individuals with autism, the knowledge and attitudes of neurotypical information technology employees, and organization and employment characteristics. Ultimately, this work will lead to discoveries that broaden participation of individuals with autism in the information technology industry and beyond.
This study examines how competitive and cooperative relationships within R&D consortia influence member firms’ innovation output. We propose a U-shaped relationship between the presence of market competitors for a member firm and the firm's joint R&D output with other consortium members, and examine how the relationship is mediated by interactions with other members at the firm level and moderated by collaborative efforts at the consortium level. Using a unique sample of 320 firms from 52 R&D consortia in China, we find support for our predictions. This multi-level study extends our understanding of competition and cooperation in multi-party networks and provides insights for creating a balance between the two forces that is conducive to innovation.
Considering the mixed results of the relationship between job insecurity and job performance, this study investigated the interaction effect of job insecurity and job embeddedness on job performance and examined the mediating role of affective commitment from the perspectives of conservation of resources theory and social exchange theory. A survey of 725 contract employees from two Chinese private manufacturing companies revealed that when employees had high levels of job embeddedness, job insecurity was significantly and positively related to job performance. In contrast, job insecurity was significantly and negatively related to job performance when there were low levels of job embeddedness. Furthermore, the results indicated that affective commitment mediated the interaction effect. The above conclusions not only illustrate the important role of job embeddedness in the relationship between job insecurity and job performance but also provide beneficial ideas and information to organisations and employees for managing job insecurity.