Collaborative projects (social media application): About Wikipedia,the free encyclopedia

Collaborative projects—defined herein as social media applications that enable the joint and simultaneous creation of knowledge-related content by many end-users—have only recently received interest among a larger group of academics. This is surprising since applications such as wikis, social bookmarking sites, online forums, and review sites are probably the most democratic form of social media and reflect well the idea of user-generated content. The purpose of this article is to provide insight regarding collaborative projects; the concept of wisdom of crowds, an essential condition for their functioning; and the motivation of readers and contributors. Specifically, we provide advice on how firms can leverage collaborative projects as an essential element of their online presence to communicate both externally with stakeholders and internally among employees. We also discuss how to address situations in which negative information posted on collaborative projects can become a threat and PR crisis for firms.     

Energy policy: European,national, regional?

When it comes to energy policy, EU countries go their own way with little regard for other member states. What strategies exist in the EU Commission to coordinate and integrate energy markets? Are these strategies consistent with national plans currently in action? Is it too late to establish a unifi ed energy policy? What can be achieved in a unifi ed energy policy given the considerable differences in resource endowment and political preferences in energy strategies? Can the effectiveness of EU energy policy objectives be enhanced through policy coordination at the regional scale? This Forum seeks to provide answers to these questions.     

Headquarters to subsidiary transfer effects on marketing strategy exploitation

The transfer of locally created marketing strategies worldwide represents a key competitive advantage for multinational corporations (MNCs). Although a research topic of much interest, empirical content of past studies is scarce. Absorptive capacity studies typically test direct effects of either the transfer capacity of the strategy's initiator or the recipient's ability to process and exploit the strategy on related learning outcomes. Mixed findings allow the possibility of more complex relationships. This study examines the relationships between MNC headquarters and marketing units located in subsidiary firms using a sample of 213 marketing managers. The study systematically explores linear, interaction, and quadratic effects within a structural equation modeling paradigm. The findings indicate that the relationship between a MNC headquarters' transfer capacity and a subsidiary marketing unit's processing capacity on the strategy's exploitation is one of mediation and moderation. The subsidiary marketing unit's processing capacity is a key mediating variable and headquarters' transfer capacity moderates the effects of this variable on the exploitation of the marketing strategy by the subsidiary's unit.     

Making customer relationship decisions: Analytics v rules of thumb

This article explores how customer management decisions are made in the leading Nordic retail banks and whether these decisions are driven by mainstream analytical approaches to customer lifetime value available through the banks' CRM systems, or by rule of thumb heuristics. The results indicate that the use of managerial heuristics is surprisingly widespread and, counter-intuitively, that rule of thumb heuristic-based decision making frequently outweighs measures such as customer lifetime value with regard to customer management decisions. The implications are considerable because if successful banks are making widespread use of heuristics, managers and academics would benefit from understanding the conditions under which heuristic decision making can be more successful than an analytic approach. This understanding, in turn, may highlight a limitation of CRM systems and point to a more flexible approach to customer management decisions in which experience-based managerial heuristics modify data from formal CRM systems.     

Global Sustainability Governance and the UN Global Compact: A Rejoinder to Critics

This article takes the critique by Sethi and Schepers (J Bus Ethics, 2013, in this thematic symposium) as a starting point for discussing the United Nations (UNs) Global Compact. While acknowledging the relevance of some of their arguments, we emphasize that a number of their claims remain arguable and are partly misleading. We start by discussing the limits of their proposed framework to classify voluntary initiatives for corporate sustainability and responsibility. Next, we show how a greater appreciation of the historical and political context of the UN Global Compact puts several of their claims into perspective. Finally, we demonstrate that the alleged promise–performance gap rests on a selected and one-sided reading of the initiative. We close by pointing to some challenges that the initiative needs to address in the future.     

The nucleolus of large majority games

Members of a shareholder meeting or legislative committee have greater or smaller voting power than meets the eye if the nucleolus of the induced majority game differs from the voting weight distribution. We establish a new sufficient condition for the weight and power distributions to be equal, and we characterize the limit behavior of the nucleolus in case all relative weights become small.     

The Value of Urban Green Space in Britain: A Methodological Framework for Spatially Referenced Benefit Transfer

A meta-analysis of studies valuing urban greenspace in the UK is undertaken to yield spatially sensitive marginal value functions. A geographical information system (GIS) is used to apply these functions to spatial data detailing the location of such greenspace resources in five British cities. Changes in monetary values are computed for the six future scenarios used in the UK National Ecosystem Assessment for the period 2010–2060. Different degrees of substitutability between urban greenspaces are considered. These findings are then extrapolated to all major British cities to obtain per household and aggregate valuation estimates for each scenario both with and without distributional weights. While subject to a number of shortcomings in both data availability and methodology, this represents the first systematic and comprehensive attempt to value marginal changes in urban greenspace while accounting for spatial heterogeneity.     

Mobility management outside metropolitan areas: case study evidence from North Rhine-Westphalia

In recent years ‘mobility management’—a means of promoting modal shift and alternatives to the journey—has gained importance in continental Europe. Especially in metropolitan areas this approach is seen as a way of improving the effectiveness of traffic system management measures. This paper outlines some key options and constraints of transferring mobility management to rural regions, drawing on evidence gathered from a research and demonstration project currently underway in rural regions of North Rhine-Westphalia. Basic conditions for implementing mobility management in rural regions as well as preliminary findings are presented.     

Social Movement Theory,Collective Action Frames and Union Theory: A Critique and Extension

The publication of John Kelly's Rethinking Industrial Relations in 1998 spawned a growing interest among researchers in exploring how social movement (SM) theory can be used to inform union research, particularly in the context of revitalization/renewal debates. Our starting proposition is that this approach can be extended through an engagement with the larger corpus of SM theory. We focus in particular on the ‘collective action frame’ concept. Drawing on examples used by SM scholars, we illustrate how these concepts can be used to extend and enrich union theory and pose new questions concerning the role of unions.     

Institutional Features of Schooling Systems and Educational Inequality: Cross‐Country Evidence From PIRLS and PISA

Educational opportunities determine the intergenerational mobility of human capital and affect the distribution of earnings on the labour market. This paper aims at explaining cross‐country differences in educational opportunities by features of schooling systems. The theoretical model predicts that a greater differentiation of the schooling system as indicated by streaming and a large share of private schools decreases educational opportunities while more instruction time increases educational opportunities. The empirical results that are based on a difference‐in‐differences estimation approach to control for country‐specific effects support these hypotheses.