Off‐Farm Work,Intensity of Government Payments,and Farm Exits: Evidence from a National Survey in the United States

The last three decades have witnessed the continued exit of households from primary agriculture in the United States, where the average annual gross exit rate has averaged 10% per year. Understanding exit behavior is one key to future farm structure, management of abandoned land, depopulation of rural areas, and agricultural policy, including government program payments. This study empirically estimates the determinants of exit decisions of farm households. Particular attention is given to the roles of intensity of government payments and off‐farm work decisions of farm couples in the exit decision. Using a large farm‐level survey and controlling for endogeneity, results indicate that farm households with reduced intensity of government payments are more likely to exit farming. Households where the operator spouse works off the farm are more likely to exit farming. Additionally, households with older farmers, with the farm operator and spouse raised on a farm, and households operating farms located in Northern Great Plains are more likely to exit farming.     

Tradespace exploration of in-space communications network architectures

Making architectural decisions in long lifecycle systems is challenging because the time between system definition and end of operations can span multiple decades, resulting in shifts in stakeholder needs and major advances in technologies. Space-based communications using relay satellite constellations is one such example, requiring substantial up-front planning to define capabilities and size capacity due to the large investment of time and resources. Additionally, there are numerous viable system architectures. In this paper, we build on existing methods to develop a graph-based decision method to assess and explore architectural flexibility in the future evolution of long lifecycle systems. The tradespace graph defines edges between similar architectures, quantifies the switching cost between architectures, using graphs to analyse the potential system evolution pathways. In a test case on NASA communication satellites, we find that hosting government communications payloads, in particular optical payloads, on commercial satellites could reduce cost and increase flexibility of the NASA network.     

经济社会转型升级中加快现代信息服务业发展研究

现代信息服务业是国民经济和现代服务业的重要组成部分。加快现代信息服务业发展是经济社会转型升级的必然选择。文章在分析我国现代信息服务业发展现状及问题的基础上，探讨了经济社会转型升级需要现代信息服务业推动，并从科学制定发展规划、加强人才培育与引进、优化产业结构等方面提出了加快现代信息服务业发展的对策。     

So,you want to be an entrepreneur? Lessons from the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities

Based on helping dozens of military veterans refine their ideas for starting a business, we identify and discuss a series of potential pitfalls that aspiring entrepreneurs—veterans and civilians alike—must avoid in order to be successful. Potential entrepreneurs must not confuse the pursuit of hobbies and self-employment with the act of creating a business. People who wish to build a business around public speaking or consulting need to firmly establish why customers should be willing to pay for their advice. Individuals that seek to develop a new non-profit organization must have a viable value proposition even though they are not pursing a profit motive. Overall, the entrepreneurial ventures that are most likely to succeed are those that (1) are based on a sustainable business model, (2) leverage the entrepreneur's unique experiences and attributes, and (3) are built around a process or system that enables the venture to prosper even if the entrepreneur leaves the venture.     

A field experiment investigating age discrimination in four European labour markets

In a field experiment investigating age discrimination, pairs of men, aged 27 and 47, inquired about employment as waiters in towns across England, France, Germany and Spain. Statistically significant discrimination against the older waiter was found in all four countries, but it was considerably higher in France and Spain than in England and Germany.     

Collective self-governance in a marine community: expedition cruise tourism at Svalbard

Collective self-governance is gaining attention in the literature for maintaining the quality of key attractions and promoting sustainable tourism. The long-term success of collective self-governance is dependent on both its internal organization and its embeddedness in external state and non-state regulations. This paper presents the marine community concept, consisting of a policy and a user community, as a framework for investigating the internal and external dynamics of collective self-governance and its ability to steer toward sustainable cruise tourism. As methodology, a case study design was chosen which was primarily studied by means of interviews with a spectrum of relevant actors concerning expedition cruise tourism at Svalbard. By applying the marine community to Svalbard expedition cruise tourism governance, we draw the following conclusions: (1) collective self-governance complements governmental regulation through access to knowledge, conflict resolution and rule-compliance based on disclosure, traceability and trust; (2) collective self-governance's increasing role in the policy community alienates the expedition crew from the user community; and (3) informational overflow by co-existence of collective self-governance and state-governance challenges sustainable cruise tourism. Collective self-governance would, therefore, benefit from reflection, especially regarding the role of the user community that functions as an intermediary between state and self-governance regulations.     

Erratic strategic decisions: when and why managers are inconsistent in strategic decision making

While decision makers in organizations frequently make good decisions rooted in stable and consistent preferences, such consistency in outcomes is not always the case. In this study, we adopt a psychological perspective of judgment to investigate managers' erratic strategic decisions, which we define as a manager's inconsistent judgments that can shape the direction of the firm. In a study of 2,048 decisions made by 64 CEOs of technology firms, we examine how both metacognitive experience and perceptions of the external environment (hostility and dynamism) could affect the extent to which managers make erratic strategic decisions. The results indicate that managers with greater metacognitive experience make less erratic strategic decisions. The results also indicate that in hostile environments managers make more erratic strategic decisions. But contrary to our expectations, in dynamic environments managers make less erratic strategic decisions. Similarly, hostility and dynamism interact in their effect on erratic strategic decisions in that the positive relationship between environmental hostility and erratic strategic decisions will be less positive for managers experiencing high environmental dynamism than those experiencing low environmental dynamism. These results have important implications for strategic decision‐making research. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

From Supply Chains to Supply Ecosystems: Implications for Strategic Sourcing Research and Practice

Traditionally, sourcing decisions such as what to buy and from whom to buy it were viewed as clerical in nature. Today, however, many executives view sourcing decisions as strategic and these decisions are being made from more prominent positions within firms. Indeed, over time more companies are embracing the concept of strategic sourcing—making acquisition decisions with the intent of creating value and achieving a competitive advantage. In this article, we introduce the Special Topic Forum articles on strategic sourcing and performance. Each offers important implications for strategic sourcing research and practice. An overall implication is that some traditional supply chains appear to be giving way to supply ecosystems, which represent a set of interdependent and coordinated organizations that share common adaptive challenges and that collectively shape the creation and nurturing of a sourcing base that contributes to competitive advantage and superior performance. We offer several theoretical perspectives that hold promise for explaining supply ecosystem functioning and outcomes. In terms of practice, firms need to adapt their strategic sourcing to this evolution or run the risk of being weakened.     

Nation Branding for Survival in North Korea: The Arirang Festival and Nuclear Weapons Tests

The article problematises a popular view in nation branding literature that equates nation branding with states’ attendant advertising campaigns. Instead, this article adopts a broader perspective that nation branding can also operate as a policy aimed at enhancing the sense of ontological security among states and as a practice to strengthen the position of the ruling regime by targeting particular audiences within a broader ‘strategic narrative’. From this perspective, this article aims to shed new light on non-liberal capitalist countries’ – specifically North Korea’s – attempts at nation branding policies in terms of various nation branding strategies. In so doing, Clifford Geertz’s anthropological concept of ‘theatre state’ is introduced as an important metaphor to broaden the existing understanding of nation branding by highlighting the unique characteristics of North Korea’s policies of nation branding and nation building. It is argued that great national spectacles such as the Arirang Festival and military demonstrations provide North Korea with a useful platform for participating in the identity competition among other nation states, as well as in the fierce recognition game against the rest of the Korean national community. Obviously, these strategic performances have contributed to communicating with the outside world, deliberately seeking more respect from others, but have simultaneously operated as nation building processes. Therefore, this work concludes that such staged events are sophisticatedly designed to enhance North Korea’s complex interest of nation branding, and, more importantly, argues that techniques and practices of nation branding are neither historically new nor confined to Western liberal capitalist regimes.     

Natura naturans,natura naturata

In this paper, which is concerned with philosophical methodology as it might affect social science and ethics, the endeavor is to explore the depth and implications of Buchanan’s interest in Spinoza. After establishing their connection, the paper explores the parallels between Spinoza’s “dualism” and Buchanan’s own dualism and how that can shed light on Buchanan’s distinction between constitutional and operational modalities. Given their analogous perspectives, the paper then considers the possibility of dimensional shifts in the dualism, such that what was once a constitutional perspective becomes operational and how that ability to shift might affect various research agendas in the social sciences and ethics. Finally, we raise the question of how separate are the two levels and can they be brought together. In a Spinozistic framework, they ultimately would collapse into a monism, but the conclusion here is that for Buchanan there must always be a gap between them. As a result, the effort to resolve the tension between the dimensions may signal future research agendas in ethics and political economy.