Proceedings

sector ranked by market capitalization at 31 st December 2008. These
improvements, however bear an inner limitation regarding the relative small
size of our target sample;
(b) A more complex approach for the results aggregation was needed to establish
the value system of the sample companies, because the presentation of the
corporate values met some specific characteristic that should be considered:
i. The corporate values are presented in a hierarchical manner. The first
corporate value presented is the most important for the respective company;
ii. No company chooses the same value more than once. This means that every
value have a specific weight and importance in the corporate value statement;
iii. Every corporate value is chosen by at least one company. This creates the
premises of a wide variety of corporate values – a total of 42 items in our
corporate values distribution. This characteristic is important because it
considers the willing of one company to choose or not to choose a specific
value;
iv. The number of corporate values presented differs from company to company.
As discussed earlier, the companies in our sample presented up to 7 different
corporate values in their corporate values statement.
Since all these characteristic are met in the process of the corporate values
assessment, we consider that the methodology that applies at their aggregation is the
preferential voting system which can be defined as an electoral system in which voters
rank parties or candidates on the ballot paper in order of their choice (Reynolds,
Reilly and Ellis, 2008). The companies choose a specific value from the entire range
of existing values based on inner considerations, it is a preferred corporate value and
they give it a ‘vote of confidence’ detrimental to another value which is not preferred
thus receiving a ‘vote of no confidence’. The system enables voters (the companies)
to express their preferences between candidates (the corporate values) rather than
simply their first choice. For this reason, it is often known as ‘preferential voting’
(Reynolds, Reilly and Ellis, 2008).
The Alternative Vote, the Borda Count, the Single Transferable Vote and the
Supplementary Vote are all examples of preferential voting systems. Considering the
four characteristics of the corporate values mentioned above, we consider that the
preferential voting system that applies for our goal is the Borda Count.
The Borda Count is a candidate-centred preferential system used in either single- or
multi-member districts in which voters use numbers to mark their preferences on the
ballot paper and each preference marked is then assigned a value using equal steps.
For example, in a ten-candidate field a first preference is worth one, a second
preference is worth 0.9 and so on, with a tenth preference worth 0.1. Because it
sometimes elects broadly acceptable candidates, rather than those preferred by the
majority, the Borda Count is often described as a consensus-based electoral system,
rather than a majority one (Reynolds, Reilly and Ellis, 2008).
The process of data collection met all the conditions and criteria discussed above, as it
follows: on the basis of content analysis, we ranked the corporate values with 1 for the
first company choice, 2 for the second choice and so on, till the last choice, which was
ranked with 7. On our way of consulting more corporate values statements of different
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