Diffusion and management of electronic data interchange: barriers and qpportunities in the uk pharmaceutical and healthciare industries

This paper is based on evidence from a survey, conducted during 1992, investigating the adoption of electronic data interchange (EDI) amog neraly 20 furms in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sector within the UK. In particular, it focuses on the factors behind the adoption and diffusion of EDI, and the barriers to its uptake and spread. It also analyzes some of the strategic, organizational and managerial issues behind its implementatio and development. The survey highlights the relatively slow rate of adoption of EDI within this sector and key problems that inhibit its uptake. These include issues of costs, standards and the increasingly fragmented nature of purchasing and logistics that results from reorganization within the UK healthcare system.     

对轿车激动人心的崭新诠释——梅赛德斯-奔驰2003CLS概念车

梅赛德斯的工程师和设计师们在CLS概念车上创造出了令人称奇的成功,他们将豪华轿车的舒适性、方便性和每日的驾驶实用性完美地结合起来,为下一代豪华轿车的发展确定了方向。     

Evaluating small firm performance in local context: A case study of manufacturers in Columbus,Ohio

This research approaches corporate restructuring from a place-based perspective, departing from firm or industry-specific analysis and focusing instead on the performance and problems of a local economy. The study systematizes data from a survey of small manufacturing firms in Columbus, Ohio, offering a methodology that can be used for comparative analyses of sectors within or among communities.We link the performance of firms and local context using a sampling strategy that represents local industry mix. We recognize the multidimensional character of performance and employ several indicators, stated in both static and dynamic terms. We use these indicators to identify patterns of firm performance, relative to both national and local standards. Discriminant analyses reveal variables that account for differences among groups of firms, identified by level of performance, industry, and mode of labor-management relations.Results indicate that small manufacturers in Columbus are relatively uncompetitive. The few high performing firms are investing more in labor than in capital, but most firms are investing more in capital than labor. These findings are consistent with American corporate tradition that deemphasizes workers. Effective restructuring entails more than technical change, which enables competitiveness but does not itself engender it.This project was funded by the Ohio State University Committee on Urban Affairs, #724520.     

Postauditing capital assets and firm performance: An empirical investigation

The argument presented in this paper is that the adoption of sophisticated postaudit procedures should be associated with improved firm performance. Based on a matched-pair experimental design, utilizing the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test and a newly developed statistic to test for a change point, empirical evidence is provided to support this argument.     

The effect of zoning on land value

Two types of zoning are identified: externality zoning, which is designed to achieve a Pareto efficient pattern of land use, and fiscal zoning, which is designed to accomplish some other objective. (The latter, for instance, may be aimed at minimizing the tax rate in a community.) The paper shows that it is not in general possible using a priori theory to predict the sign (positive or negative) of the effect of either of these forms of zoning on aggregate land value in a community. It is shown, however, that under plausible assumption it can be argued that zoning as currently practiced in many U. S. communities probably has the effect of lowering aggregate land values in the communities doing the zoning.     

Job suburbanization,zoning and the welfare of urban minority groups

This paper poses a model of the effects of job suburbanization and suburban exclusionary zoning on the welfare of blacks and other urban minority groups. It explores the circumstances under which blacks take suburban jobs and whether they are made better off if they do so. The possibilities that blacks outcommute from central area ghettos and that they relocate to suburban housing near the jobs are each considered. A hypothetical governmental project to subsidize the creation of 10,000 suburban jobs for blacks is explored in a cost-benefit framework, stressing the effects of suburban exclusionary zoning on the project's feasibility.     

The Economic Significance of User-Generated Feedback

This paper examines the impact of user-generated feedback on price at a price comparison site or shopbot. It employs a modified hedonic price function to explore the use made by current potential consumers of the experience of past actual consumers in evaluating quality attributes that were not observable when the product was initially launched on to the market. Using a database of daily observations on 211 digital cameras traded on NexTag.com, we find that the product’s star rating, reflecting all the available individual assessments of the product, has a significant negative impact on the discount on the manufacturer’s recommended selling price at which the product is offered.     

Frontiers, Intersections and Engagements of Ethics and HRM

This essay, and the special issue it introduces, sets out to reignite ethical interrogations of the theory and practice of Human Resource Management (HRM). To cultivate greater levels of boundary-spanning debate about the ethics of HRM, we develop a framework of four tenors for scholarly work: the ethical-declarative, the ethical-subjunctive, the ethical-ethnographic, the ethical-systemic. Each of these tenors denotes particular grounds for ethical critique and encourages scholars to consider the subjects and objects of their enquiry, the disciplinary scope of their work and the limits to subsequent claims about ethics and HRM. We provisionally locate each of the papers comprising the special issue with regard to one, or more, of these tenors.