The central focus of this research is: The growing corporate espionage activities due to fierce competition lead to highly controlling security measures and intensive employee monitoring which bring about distrust in the workplace. The paper examines various research works on trust and distrust. It highlights the conflictful demands managers face. They have to deter espionage activities, but at the same time, build trusting relationships in the workplace. The paper also describes various operations, personnel, physical and technical countermeasuresto combat corporate espionage (...) together with three espionage case examples which illustrate the importance of some of these countermeasures. Various authors'' trust and distrust arguments are used to assess the cases. The paper ends with suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Adapted from Chan's (2000) model depicting success of litigation, this paper argues that with the application of various legislation, health maintenance organizations' (HMOs') violations of service fairness to each group: enrollees, physicians, and hospitals give rise to each group's lawsuits against the HMOs. Various authors (Bowen et al., 1999; Seiders and Berry, 1998) indicate that justice concepts such as distributive, procedural, and interactional justice can be applied to the area of service fairness. The violation of these underlying justice principles with (...) HMOs' service unfairness to enrollees, physicians, and hospitals is examined. A general synopsis of the ethical issues in the managed care industry is provided. The various lawsuits launched by each group: enrollees, physicians, and hospitals together with the key statutes used are discussed. This paper also highlights the provisions and ramifications of the 11 April 2000 landmark agreement that Aetna made with Texas Attorney General John Cornyn to settle the 1998 lawsuit brought against the company. Lastly, the current ethical issues in the managed care industry are further discussed. The value of this paper can be adapted to the study of organizations' service fairness violations in other industries or in the educational, governmental, and not-for-profit sectors both nationally and internationally. (shrink)