Clinical budgeting: Experimentation in the social sciences: A drama in five acts

Clinical budgeting systems are increasingly being introduced into the British National Health Service. This paper examines in some detail the testing of one particular budgeting system. It discusses the aims, execution and evaluation of the test. The paper is written as a play partly for reasons of clarity and entertainment but also and, more seriously, to reflect recent concerns in the sociology of scientific knowledge whereby attention is drawn to the parallels between analysts' and participants' attempts to render a definitive view of the social world.     

Belief when evidence does not support theory

Marketing has looked to other scientific disciplines to supplement its understanding of motivation. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs theory is frequently uncritically cited in texts, even though most evidence has failed to support its validity. Science requires that theory be supported by empirical facts. Maslow's theory is briefly summarized, along with a review of the related literature. Reasons are given and empirically supported for the continued popularity of Maslow's theory in marketing despite lack of scientific support. A cautionary note for the continued development of marketing theory concludes the presentation. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Shifting the goal posts for design management in capital goods projects: 'design for maintainability'

Two case studies of capital goods projects, both of which were faced with new forms of demand for their products, are reported in this paper. In both cases, the contracting organisations involved were adjusting to new customer requirements for the long-term provision of the services associated with the capital goods they normally produced, rather than for the capital goods themselves. While both contracting organisations recognised the need to re-focus their equipment design efforts, to reflect the need for long-term service reliability (both contracting organisations were tied to penalties associated with agreed service levels), they nevertheless responded differently to this challenge, and their differing responses reflected the differing natures of the extended networks which comprised both projects and the organisational architectures in which the projects were themselves embedded. The paper explores the differing opportunities and barriers to the management of design in complex projects presented by these two case studies. In so doing it points to the conclusion that successful design management in complex projects can depend upon the successful management of the (multiple) contexts in which design takes place.     

A Cultural Hedonic Framework for Increasing the Consumption of Unfamiliar Foods: Soy Acceptance in Russia and Colombia

It is important to understand how a country's cultural influences may affect the introduction of a new or unfamiliar food. In this paper, we present a cultural hedonic framework that uses a culture's context (low versus high) and its view toward food consumption (hedonic versus utilitarian consumption) to assess the difficulty of introducing an unfamiliar food to this market. This framework is then applied to determine the most effective means to stimulate soy consumption in Russia and Colombia. General guidelines show how the cultural hedonic framework can be used to provide insights into distribution, message positioning, and marketing strategy for other foods and products in a variety of situations.     

U-commerce: Expanding the universe of marketing

This article introduces several new concepts that lay the conceptual foundation for thinking about next-generation marketing based on ubiquitous networks. U-commerce, orüber-commerce, is predicated on the characteristics of network ubiquity, universality, uniqueness, and unison. It is proposed that the keys to managing network-driven firms are the concepts of u-space and attention analysis. The implications for next-generation marketing in the u-space are explored, with a research agenda identified for scholars and managerial implications recognized for practitioners. Richard T. Watson is the J. Rex Distinguished Chair for Internet Strategy and the director of the Center for Information Systems Leadership in the Terry College of Business, University of Georgia. He has published in leading journals in several fields as well as authored books on data management and electronic commerce and given invited seminars in nearly 20 countries. He is vice president of communications of AIS and recently finished a term as a senior editor ofMIS Quarterly. He is a visiting professor at Agder University College, Norway, and a consulting editor to John Wiley & Sons. Leyland F. Pitt is a professor of marketing in the School of Marketing, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia. He is also adjunct professor of marketing at Kingston Business School, United Kingdom; the University of Lulea, Sweden; and the Ecole Nationale Ponts et Chaussees in Paris. He has also taught marketing and electronic commerce on M. B. A. and executive programs at schools such as Warwick Business School, London Business School, the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University, and the Graham School of Continuing Studies at the University of Chicago. Dr. Pitt is the author of more than 100 papers in scholarly journals, and his work has appeared in publications such asCalifornia Management Review, Sloan Management Review, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Information Systems Research, Journal of Advertising Research, Communications of the ACM, andMIS Quarterly (for which he also served as associate editor). Pierre Berthon is an associate professor of marketing at Bentley College. He has held academic positions at Columbia University, Henley Management College, Cardiff University, and University of Bath. His teaching and research focus on electronic commerce, market information processing, organization and strategy, and management decision making. George M. Zinkhan is the Coca-Cola Company Chair of Marketing at the University of Georgia. After receiving his doctorate at the University of Michigan, he served on the faculty at both the University of Houston and the University of Pittsburgh. His main research focus is on the areas of communication, advertising, and electronic commerce. His recent coauthored books includeElectronic Commerce: A Strategic Perspective (2000) andConsumers (2002).     

LEVERAGE,RISK-SHIFTING INCENTIVE,AND STOCK-BASED COMPENSATION

Outstanding risky debt provides risk-shifting incentives for managers fully aligned with stockholders. Earlier research shows that the risk-shifting incentive can be eliminated by using a stock-based compensation design to align managers' and stockholders' interests. I show that stock options as well as compensation designs that align managers' and bondholders' interests eliminate the risk-shifting incentive. Although a stock-based compensation design is not a unique mechanism to eliminate the pure risk-shifting incentive, it is essential where managers of levered firms are known to consume a portion of the investment outlay as perquisites.