Can the majority lose the election?

One may believe that plurality voting guarantees that the preferences of a majority of the population are implemented. It is shown that by selecting platforms consisting of stances on binary issues the implemented stances may be misaligned with the population. In a model where parties are free to enter, a party preferred by only a minority can win. In these equilibria a third party pulls votes from the one representing the majority of the population. The result is shown to hold regardless of the number of issues, whether individuals vote sincerely or strategically, and allowing for coalitions.     

Can University Leaders Manage the Tensions Between the Practice of Innovation and the Traditions of the University?

The practice of innovating within a university causes tension because it is not well understood, is perceived as risky, and is seen as a threat to established power, which makes it difficult to know where to house it for maximum effect. The tension can be reduced by focusing on the similarities of innovating and teaching, inviting faculty and staff to serve as early adopters, and having senior administrators be the budgetary and political champions for innovation initiatives.     

Would the Bundesbank have prevented the Great Inflation in the United States?

Policy counterfactuals based on estimated structural VARs routinely suggest that bringing Alan Greenspan back in the 1970s United States would not have prevented the Great Inflation. We show that a standard policy counterfactual suggests that the Bundesbank—which is near-universally credited for sparing West Germany the Great Inflation—would also not have been able to prevent the Great Inflation in the United States.The implausibility of this result sounds a cautionary note on taking the outcome of SVAR-based policy counterfactuals at face value, and raises questions on the reliability of such exercises.     

In Search of the Impactful and the Interesting: Swings of the Pendulum?

In this article we reflect on our time as editors of JMS during the period 2003–09. First we describe the context as we saw it on assuming editorship of the Journal and the actions that we took to improve the quality of scholarship published in the journal in order to set JMS on the trajectory to become a world‐leading Journal. We articulate our view of what quality means in this context and observe that we eschewed the USA–Europe divide. Rather, to be publishable, all papers had to meet the highest standards relative to their epistemological assumptions. Finally, we address two important challenges facing the Journal, and indeed management research in general, and consider what they mean for the future of JMS, notably in relation to open access publishing and to provide greater practical relevance. We conclude that the latter represents a swing of the pendulum towards the kinds of papers published in the early years of JMS but that recent developments in JMS provide new conceptual frameworks and empirical methods that contribute to enhanced insights for practice.     

The wisdom of the few or the wisdom of the many? An indirect test of the marginal trader hypothesis

The Marginal Trader Hypothesis (Forsythe et al. 1992, in American Economic Review 82(5): 1142–1161) posits that a small group of well-informed traders keep an asset’s market price equal to its fundamental value. Forsythe et al. base this claim on evidence from U.S. presidential prediction markets. We test the Marginal Trader Hypothesis by examining a decision task that precludes marginal traders. Specifically, students are asked to predict the class average for a given exam. We show that performance on our task is similar to that reported for the Iowa Electronic Markets, and that accuracy is unrelated to academic performance and does not correlate across tasks.     

Integrated enterprise management: a look at the functions, the enterprise, and the environment--can you see the difference?

The performance of an organization is paced by its use of resources, including its ability to acquire, access, and use knowledge. A high-performance organization, more than likely, has structured its resources around process linkages and is characterized by a horizontal organization chart, teams and teamwork, empowerment, and operational excellence. Organizational researchers hypothesize that performance improves with fuzzy internal boundaries, cross-functional participation, and goals anchored in the interests of customers and other external stakeholders. This article looks at the competitive need for more integration of resources and greater sharing of knowledge, the integrated nature of work within emerging types of organizations, how expanded views can improve the marketplace centering of processes and individuals, and how combining a model of integration and individual work challenges thinking and actions in the new environment.     

Has the Internet changed the wage structure too?

By using recent Current Population Survey (CPS) data sets, this paper investigates whether workers who use the Internet at work earn a higher wage than otherwise similar workers who do not use the Internet at work. Estimates suggest that there was a substantial premium to Internet use in 1997 of about 8%. However, this premium disappeared very quickly thereafter, and there are grounds to believe that it is now negative. This result is in stark contrast with that for computer use.     

Implications of the EU Information and Consultation Directive and the Regulations in the UK – prospects for the future of employee representation

The EU Directive on informing and consulting employees (I&C Directive) is now established on the employment relations agenda with the provisions coming into force in the UK in April 2005. The I&C Directive potentially has far reaching consequences for the way UK employers inform and consult employees over a wide range of organizational issues, with the potential to transform the UK industrial relations environment. The initiatives contained in the I&C Directive and the subsequent introduction of the Information and Consultation of Employees (ICE) Regulations will take place in an employment relations environment in a period of significant change. Pressures of globalization have intensified competition in product and labour markets, emphasizing the need for greater efficiency and productivity. This has led to a greater focus on the link between employee participation practices and business strategy and organizational performance in search of an elusive (or illusory) fit? This paper is a commentary on the origins and rationale of this new legislation in the UK context, drawing on existing knowledge and academic debates in the area. In addition, the paper discusses the potential implications of the I&C Directive and the likely impact of the ICE Regulations on UK representative voice arrangements.     

The Research on the Methods to Confirm the Key Control Points of the Internal Accounting Control

The control points are the key issue of the internal control, and the key control points mean the control joints that play an important part in the process of the operation. If these key control points are not well controlled, the process of the operation disposal will be mistaken and cannot reach the goal. However, for the confirmation of the control points, many studies only do qualitative research from the important aspect instead of quantificational research. They are devoid of a series of scientific methods. This paper advances quantificational methods to confirm the key control points from two aspects of job evaluation and mathematics model.     

Is the UK government pursuing the correct fiscal plan?

• The Autumn Statement saw the Chancellor reaffirm his objective of achieving a budget surplus in the next Parliament and he followed this by introducing a binding target to balance the structural current budget by 2017–18.
• But this places even more policy weight on the ‘output gap’ – a variable which cannot be measured with any certainty and which, as a concept for dictating policy, has serious flaws. If the OBR is too pessimistic on spare capacity, the outcome will be an unnecessarily tight fiscal squeeze.
• Meanwhile, a fiscal surplus requires that another sector of the economy runs a deficit. So committing to this objective implies more control over the public finances than governments actually enjoy.
• Returning the public finances to the black would be positive for fiscal sustainability. But it could have some undesirable consequences if the counterpart to a stronger fiscal position is, as expected, the household sector moving further into the red.
• Furthermore, our detailed analysis of the government's latest spending plans concludes that the scale of the planned cuts to departmental spending will be impossible to deliver, particularly given the commitments to protect spending on health, international development and parts of the education budget.
• As such, in a departure from our normal practice, our UK macroeconomic forecasts assume that the planned spending cuts will be reined back, regardless of who wins the next election.

     

The Relationship between the Firm Size and the Quantity of Accountants Employed by the Firm： An Analysis of the 436 Listed Firms in the Chinese Shenzhen Stock Exchange

There are 9.56 million accountants in China, who are working in different size firms and nonprofit organizations. The objective of this article is to examine the quantitative relationship between the firm size and the quantity of accountants working for the firm. In this paper, the employees, sales revenues, and total assets in a firm are employed to measure firm size. The authors collect and analyze the data of 436 listed firms from the Chinese Shenzhen Stock Exchange. The result of this study indicates there is a positive relationship between the firm size and the quantity of accountants employed by the firm. The study also establishes the multiple regression equation, which can be used to predict the quantity of accountants of listed firms. And it provides a way to predict the quantity of accountants of legal organizations.     

The Study of the Application of the Gray Relevancy Analysis to the Value Chain Based Cost Control

Cost problem is always a bottleneck which ties to the development and the competition ability in the enterprise of our country, especially in state-owned enterprise. Practice proves that traditional cost control can not satisfy the needs of enterprises. Enterprises are seeking better cost control approach with great efforts in order to calculate and control cost more accurately, and require cost control system has more strong functions. This paper analyzes value chain based cost control approach, and applies the gray relevancy analysis to the approach rightly.     

Firms’ innovation performance and the role of the metropolitan location. Evidence from the European periphery

ABSTRACT

This paper assesses the role of metropolitan location in explaining firms’ innovation performance while accounting for other internal and external determinants of innovation. Using micro-level dataset and controlling for firm-specific, sector-specific and region-specific features, we identify a nuanced effect of location within metropolitan areas on the innovative performance of companies The results prove to vary for the different measures of innovation output of firms and in particular there is no metropolitan advantage detected for binary self-declared measures of innovations. The advantage is detected for the count-based quantity of innovation measures which is shown to critically depend on the higher performance of metropolitan-based firms in patenting and licencing. The interlinkages between location and firm-size matter and the results are asymmetric with particular benefits arising for micro-firms in their patenting and licencing.     

Analysis on the Background of Applicability of the Conservatism Convention

＂Conservatism＂ is a widely accepted accounting convention in the industrialized world, but it has long been slated and prohibited under the orthodox ideological influences. To date, the conservatism convention has not been fully adopted or implemented although the governments have made substantial efforts to reform its accounting system to bridge the gaps between the accounting practices in recent years. The study findings will facilitate a proper assessment of the future development of accounting standards and practices.     

Why are the Pentagon and the CIA in Hollywood?

The CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense are both engaged in programs to influence the content of movies produced by Hollywood studios. Although they claim their only purpose in these ventures is to guarantee the accuracy of how military and intelligence activities are conducted, it is clear that their agenda goes beyond that goal. Their true aims include ensuring that movies project a positive image of the relevant government agencies. However, the CIA and DoD differ in their understanding of what constitutes good publicity. Films scrutinized and supported by military agencies are primarily evaluated according to whether they provide a vehicle for showing the technical and organizational competence of the Pentagon. To that end, films based on comic book characters or extraterrestrial invaders are viewed positively because they show the war‐fighting capacity of the military without having to name any actual enemy. The CIA, by contrast, prefers to support films that enable citizens to develop a stronger sense of patriotism in a world of moral ambiguities. As a result, the CIA is much less fearful of revealing the dark side of its undertakings, as long as a given movie presents a story that shows the value of the CIA in protecting the security of the nation.     

Self-directed work teams: the wave of the future?

Although teams are currently a popular means of solving work force needs in health care, there has been little use of self-directed work teams--autonomous units without a front-line manager and empowered to control their own work. This article analyzes key differences between self-directed work teams and traditional teams, looks at three cases in which self-directed work teams were implemented, and discusses some of the barriers to the formation and use of self-directed work teams.     

Is the division of labour limited by the extent of the market? Evidence from French cities

This paper provides supportive evidence to the notion that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the (local) market. We first propose a theoretical model. Its main prediction is that scarce specialists occupations are over-represented in large cities. Using census data for French cities, we find strong empirical support for this prediction.     

Management is the solution: Now what was the problem? On the fragile basis for managerialism

This paper critically investigates the impact and meaning of managerialism in a pharmaceutical firm by exploring its shaky basis. Managers’ explanations of the failure in research leading to new products showed considerable variety. This reflects the absence of any shared understanding of research inefficiencies and difficulties to determine the roots of the problems. Despite this people blame bad management and put hope to improved responsibility of managers. The study highlights the ambiguity of causes of the research inefficiencies and how this is suppressed as well as exploited by the introduction of a vague managerialist agenda.