Harvey S. James

University of Missouri | Mizzou · Division of Applied Social Sciences

Williamson argues that a principal will only trust an agent when there are safeguards to ensure the agent has an incentive for trustworthiness. However, such circumstances are devoid of vulnerability and possibility for betrayal. Williamson claims that this is not trust at all. I argue that a principal can be calculative in her decisions to trust a...

Promoting ethical behavior in business requires an understanding of why and when seemingly good people do unethical things. Research on this issue consists of theoretical models of moral decision-making and empirical studies of ethical sensitivity, attitudes and behaviors of people in various contexts. These studies reveal that explanations of unet...

The (un)fairness of agricultural markets is frequently invoked, especially by farmers. But fairness is difficult to define and measure. In this paper we link fairness and power with the concept of constrained choice to develop a framework for assessing fairness in agricultural markets. We use network exchange theory to define power from the depende...

This paper uses data for 53 countries from the World Values Survey in a multilevel regression analysis that seeks to disentangle individual, institutional and other-regarding factors affecting ethical decision-making. The dependent variable is an index of how intolerant people are of unethical conduct. The explanatory variables indicate the perceiv...

Purpose This paper seeks to determine whether family ties and structure correlate with the ethical and moral values that are important underpinnings of economic activities. Design/methodology/approach The analysis uses data from the World Values Survey (WVS). Given the multilevel nature of the data in a cross-country setting, the paper utilizes a...

Purpose The authors review the small but growing literature linking cognitive biases to food safety problems and foodborne illness outbreaks. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted a search of peer-reviewed articles utilizing empirical methods published since the year 2000 focusing on food safety or foodborne illnesses/outbreaks and cog...

The severity of the COVID-19 pandemic on overall welfare depends on the resilience of microeconomic units, particularly households, to cope and recover from the shocks created by the pandemic. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where the pandemic has been less pervasive, the pandemic is expected to increase food insecurity, vulnerability, and ultimately povert...

Since its origins as an academic newsletter, Agriculture and Human Values has evolved to be one of the leading journals publishing critical scholarship of the food and agricultural system. This essay illustrates and comments on the evolution of the scale and scope of research published in the journal over the years.

Purpose This paper aims to explore the relationship between prudence in risk attitudes and patience of time preference of Chinese apple growers regarding off-farm cold storage of production and marketing in non-harvest seasons. The authors also consider the effect of farmer participation in cooperative-like organizations known as Farm Bases (FBs)....

Awareness of healthy food, population growth, increasing incomes, and urbanization raise the global demand for fruit, where the second position goes to apples. However, their supply is insufficient, implying the lost revenues and exacerbating nutritional food insecurity. To help growers, traders, and consumers cope with such a challenge, this resea...

Cognitive biases play an important role in creating and perpetuating problems that lead to foodborne illness outbreaks. By using insights from behavioral ethics, we argue that sometimes people engage in unethical behavior that increases the likelihood of foodborne illness outbreaks without necessarily intending to or being consciously aware of it....

We consider whether participation in cooperative organizations known as Farm Bases correlates with a farmer's risk attitudes in China. Specifically, we seek to determine if farmers see cooperative-like organizations as a means of reducing risk or as a way of accessing riskier opportunities. Using data from a risk experiment involving 348 apple farm...

This book is an exploration into ethical tensions that new technology creates, with a particular focus on agricultural biotechnology and genetically modified (GM) food. There are four main arenas where new technologies generally, and agricultural biotechnology in particular, create ethical tensions, fault lines and pressure points. These are: publi...

Purpose As the prioritization of family goals depends on the resolution of family conflict, this study's purpose is to explain how a dominant coalition (DC) of parental family members prioritizes their family economic and non-economic goals when faced with different types of family conflict. Design/methodology/approach A conceptual framework is de...

The paper studies theories relating to trade credit contracts as well as their applications and limitations, via review and synthesis of the trade credit literature. Using keywords and search phrases, the literature was identified from key economics, business and finance domains. Trade credit contracts are not complex, this can be explained by fact...

Agricultural trade is complicated owing to perishable goods and high requirements for safety and quality, especially by animal products. Intensifying their exports is a major priority in the context of augmenting competitive negotiations and providing global food security to cover a shortage of an animal protein intake. To address such challenges,...

This article examines the factors influencing demand for student loans from Ghana’s Student Loan Trust Fund (SLTF) and the loan debt burden at completion using a sample of 400 final-year students in two higher education institutions in the country’s Upper West Region. The results show that both the loan take up rate and the loan debt burden among s...

This article examines the factors influencing demand for student loans from Ghana’s Student Loan Trust Fund (SLTF) and the loan debt burden at completion using a sample of 400 final-year students in two higher education institutions in the country’s Upper West Region. The results show that both the loan take-up rate and the loan debt burden among s...

We propose a framework for assessing claims of unfairness by agricultural producers. By employing concepts from network exchange theory and considerations of power and dependency, we show that judgments about fairness can be made after considering the structure and context of the network and the way context influences expectations of network actors...

Although an extensive literature examines how moral character and environmental context relates to ethical awareness, judgment and behaviour, very little work focuses on the ethics of farmers. Understanding farmer ethics is important because farmers face unique pressures and constraints that affect their ethical judgments and behaviours. Research s...

We propose a framework for assessing claims of unfairness by agricultural producers. By employing concepts from network exchange theory and considerations of power and dependency, we show that judgments about fairness can be made after considering the structure and context of the network and the way context influences expectations of network actors...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the role and importance of trust in a type of Chinese farmer cooperative organization called “Farm Bases” (FBs), considering the extent to which trust affects their performance and how the relationship between trust and FB performance is affected by perceptions of risk and uncertainty and other consid...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants and motives for supply of trade credit among agro-food manufacturing firms in African countries. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses a subsample of food manufacturing firms from World Bank Enterprise Survey in eight African countries in 2014. Two-limit Tobit models are specifi...

This book is an exploration into ethical tensions that new technology creates, with a particular focus on agricultural biotechnology and genetically modified (GM) food. There are four main arenas where new technologies generally, and agricultural biotechnology in particular, create ethical tensions, fault lines and pressure points. These are: publi...

Purpose Agribusiness managers oftentimes find it difficult to gain practical experience in an area they have had very little practice. Habitually, they rely on their own business acumen, and tacit knowledge to navigate unfamiliar territory. What does the manager do when the problem is ill-formed, fuzzy and messy? This paper aims to integrate socie...

The Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) Agreement between Ukraine and the EU has led to the following question: What new opportunities are unveiled for the agricultural sector? The aim of this article is to determine the promising trends in Ukrainian agriculture’s export potential considering the potential adverse effects from highly com...

In Ghana, farmer-herder conflicts have become widespread and increasingly assume a violent dimension. Competition over access to and use of land and water resources is at the center of the conflicts. However, competition does not automatically result in conflicts. The conflicts are driven by triggering activities of both farmers and herders. This s...

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis advances an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and environmental pollution. Scholars have estimated turning point incomes for various pollutants within and across countries. However, the majority of these studies were conducted for developed countries. Very few studies have focuse...

Ecosystem service provision in agriculture may require cooperation between farmers. Trust fosters cooperation in many economic and social interactions and is important to the success of traditional agricultural cooperatives. Little is known about how trust affects farmers’ willingness to cooperate to provide an ecosystem service, what types of trus...

We empirically test separation of ownership and control (SOC) and the interaction of SOC with farmer effort on farm success using data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Resource Management Survey. We use a two-stage least-squares approach with instrumental variables that proxy for participation constraints in binding incentive...

Fresh water and arable land are essential for agricultural production and food processing. However, managing conflicting demands over water and land can be challenging for business leaders, environmentalists and other stakeholders. This paper characterizes these challenges as wicked problems. Wicked problems are ill-formed, fuzzy, and messy, becaus...

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis advances an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and environmental pollution. Scholars have estimated turning point incomes for various pollutants within and across countries. However, the majority of these studies were conducted for developed countries. Very few studies have focuse...

Food sampling has become a prominent promotion tool in Chinese supermarkets which aims at attracting consumers and inducing purchases. The study focuses on probing latent factors that influence consumer preference for sampling. Based on an in-person survey yielding 1,139 usable responses conducted in Nanjing City of China, a simultaneous equation m...

How do individual characteristics and the business environment affect the ethical judgment of entrepreneurs? We build on literatures in stakeholder and cognitive theory to examine the effects of situational complexity and novelty on an entrepreneur’s ethical judgment. Our conceptual framework shows how confirmation biases and inward biases affect t...

An important literature examines the effect of environmental quality on self-reported measures of well-being. Some studies have focused on objective indicators of environmental quality, while other studies have explored how perceptions about environmental quality are correlated with happiness. However, there is little research examining the relatio...

An entrepreneur’s creation of value and moral leadership is primarily an individualised phenomenon. The objective of this study is to develop a socio-cognitive model where an entrepreneur’s enactment of valuable opportunities and a moral awareness for others operate within a complex social setting. We develop a ‘practiced’ concept of ‘habitual agen...

The (un)fairness of agricultural markets is frequently invoked, especially by farmers. But fairness is difficult to define and measure. In this paper we link fairness and power with the concept of constrained choice to develop a framework for assessing fairness in agricultural markets. We use network exchange theory to define power from the depende...

Working paper on power and fairness. Journal review in progress.

Natural pest control is an important ecosystem service that is rapidly declining in the United States. Farmers may be able to increase the provision of natural pest control by working together. However, little is known about US farmers' willingness to cooperate to control pests. In this study, we survey 229 Missouri crop farmers to explore farmers'...

Generalized morality reflects ethical norms in society about the inappropriateness of behaviors that can cause harm to others. Generalized morality may be an important factor affecting the economic performance of countries. An indicator of generalized morality is constructed from data from the World Values Survey. One question examined is whether g...

We empirically examine the reporting on biotechnology in Kenyan and international newspapers between 2010 and early 2014. We identify news articles that reported on biotechnology and analyze their use of words to determine whether there is a balance in the reporting of perceived risks and benefits. We also consider how the sources used in news arti...

Promoting ethical behavior in business requires an understanding of why and when seemingly good people do unethical things. Research on this issue consists of theoretical models of moral decision-making and empirical studies of ethical sensitivity, attitudes, and behaviors of people in various contexts. These studies reveal that explanations of une...

Genetically modified (GM) cassava is currently being developed to address problems of diseases that threaten the food security of farmers in developing coun-tries. The technologies are aimed at smallholder farmers, in hopes of reducing the vulnerability of cassava production to these diseases. In this paper we examine barriers to farmers' voice in...

In the spring of 2013, project leaders who received funding from the John Templeton Foundation's program ''Can GM Crops Help to Feed the World?'' met in England to discuss progress on funded projects and to identify common objectives and research interests. The collection of essays in this special symposium is one out-come of that meeting. This int...

While the growth of family firms is widely recognized as important to the prosperity of free-market economies (Family Enterprise USA, 2011), a growing body of stakeholder research finds that family business ethics is important to advancing a society’s moral progress. Yet, due to limits in cognition, family businesses cannot attend to moral issues t...

According to New Institutional Economics, transactional activities, governance structures, institutions, beliefs, and values are related hierarchally. Each element must be aligned with the adjacent level for transaction costs to be minimized. This framework is applied to the question of balancing costs and access in the provision of rural health ca...

There is increasing concern for environmental degradation caused by agricultural activity. Although large-scale agribusinesses are generally implicated, farmers themselves are often seen as culpable. We investigate whether farmer identity is an important factor affecting their attitudes toward the environment and farm management and conservation pr...

The research examining bioscience networks has been studied from two perspectives. One view comes from economics and the other sociology. We examine the technical (material flows) and people aspects (information sharing) of interdependency in the context of economic exchanges in a bioscience network. The empirical contributions are the techniques u...

We review research on power, dependency and the concentration of agrifood industries and report updated concentration figures for selected agrifood sectors. We then utilize network exchange theory to identify principles of dependency and network relations and describe network relationships within the broiler, beef and commodity crop sectors. We arg...

After briefly explaining the context for questioning whether the agrifood industry suffers from a lack of free and fair competition, this introduction has three objectives. First, to assess the meaning of adequate and fair competition. Second, to summarize the contributed essays published in this volume. Third, to comment about what the analyses te...

We investigate how the length of time a country's regime was autocratic between 1920 and 2000 is correlated with economic growth and per capita income. We find that the longer a country was within an autocracy, the lower is the country's economic performance, even after controlling for other factors. We also find the length of time a country is not...

Generalized morality reflects ethical norms in society about the inappropriateness of behaviors that can cause harm to others. Generalized morality may be an important factor affecting the economic performance of countries. A measure of generalized morality is constructed from data from the World Values Survey. One question examined is whether gene...

This study empirically examines the effects of farm organization, with particular emphasis on separation of ownership and control, on farmer effort and farm success using a structural equation model and data from the 2005-2010 Agriculture Management Resource Survey. Contrary to expectations of existing theory, the results show that farms in which o...

There are a number of agricultural farming practices that are controversial. These may include using chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, and planting genetically modified crops, as well as the decision to dehorn cattle rather than raise polled cattle breeds. We use data from a survey of Missouri crop and livestock producers to determi...

We review research on power, dependency and the concentration of agrifood industries and report updated concentration figures for selected agrifood sectors. We then utilize network exchange theory to identify principles of dependency and network relations and describe network relationships within the broiler, beef and commodity crop sectors. We arg...

The adoption and diffusion of contract farming and vertical integration in modern agriculture has varied widely across regions, commodities, or farm types. This paper lays out a framework for understanding the evolution of organizational practices in U.S. agriculture by drawing on theories of the diffusion of technology and organizational complemen...

This paper uses data from the 2005–2006 wave of the World Values Survey to answer the question of whether ethical decision-making affects a person's happiness. Regression analyses focusing on the four largest economies in North and South America (the United States, Canada, Mexico and Brazil) reveal a generally positive relationship between ethics a...

In this paper we consider the question of whether middle-scale farmers, which we define as producers generating between 100,000and 250,000 in sales annually, are better agricultural stewards than small and large-scale producers. Our study is motivated by the argument of some commentators that farmers of this class ought to be protected in part beca...