Global influences on UK manufacturing prices: 1970-2000

We introduce the first consistent series of domestic-product and related import price indices at the industry level for the UK, using the data to analyse both domestic and international determinants of UK manufactured product prices. Foreign influences on UK prices in domestic markets are always present, but domestic cost movements dominate. We show that the pass-through of world-price, tariff and exchange rate changes into product prices is partial in general and varies markedly between product categories. Standard tariff and exchange rate theories overstate price responses to global pricing determinants and fail to allow for variation between industrial sectors. Such theories can mislead when used for policy analysis and prediction.     

Predictors of customer service training in hospitality firms

Small hospitality firms have a reluctance to embrace business improvement activities in general and customer service training in particular. In a survey of 255 hospitality firms, this study investigated a range of predictors for owner–managers to adopt specific customer service training activities, in a series of regression equations. It was found that, in general, those firms that placed more importance on customer service training were willing to take up more training activity. In addition, it was found that predictors for specific customer service training activities, such as benchmarking best practice or mystery shopping, varied between types of activity and with a general intention to consider customer service training.     

Bainbridge Festive Foods

Lara Owens and Kathleen Pegram were starting to worry about their newly acquired business, Bainbridge Festive Foods. Bainbridge, a supplier of specialty jams, jellies, and pickles, sold its product through many outlets but relied heavily on a relationship with Cracker Barrel (a restaurant usually accompanied with a country gift store). Many issues face Bainbridge Festive Foods and its new owners. This case offers the opportunity to examine a small agribusiness facing many common issues: reputation (food quality and safety), change in ownership, reliance on one outlet, and a price structure that had not been examined since the firm's inception.     

Managerial Rationale for Entry and the Relation to Performance and Small-Business Lending

In a survey of banks founded from 1994–2002, we find over 85% of respondents think their small-business market was underserved, 72% felt the market needed more competition, almost half indicated they were likely to start a bank because takeover activity displaced them, and 75% entered due to a market merger. Markets of banks started by displaced managers or following a merger have performance and lending characteristics similar to comparable banks, but larger changes in asset growth rates. Managers who responded that small-businesses were underserved have higher numbers and amounts of small-business loans 3 years after entry. Managers responding that entry was due to mergers eliminating community banks have lower ROA, but larger changes in market ROA. Markets had smaller changes in ROA when entry was to provide competition or when managers thought the small business market was underserved.

Durkheim and the Limits of Corporate Culture: Whose Culture? Which Durkheim

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Durkheimian perspectives on management. P. Dahler-Larsen uses such a perspective to critique theories of corporate culture. He is particularly critical of corporate culture’s claim that the locus of morality can exist in organizations. This, he argues, is inimical to Durkheim’s view of morality as a societal phenomenon. This paper argues that this criticism of corporate culture is limited on two counts. First, it is limited in its failure to deal with those proponents of corporate culture who are themselves critical of culture as a form of ideological control. Secondly, it is based on only one of several possible readings of Durkheim. In his later work, Durkheim analyses the construction and destruction of social solidarities. A Durkheimian reading of organizational culture and the related phenomenon of the learning organization allows us to develop a view of management and organization in which culture is conceived as a heterogeneous rather than homogeneous.     

The Effect of Substitute Assets on Yields in Financial Markets

We examine the link between volume and liquidity in money markets where there are close substitutes. We find that the size of the market, as a proxy for trading volume, affects yield spreads over T-bill rates. We examine the bankers acceptances market, when market size declined by half over the decade of the 1990s. Controlling for interest-rate levels, day-of-the-week, calendar, term structure, credit spread, time-series, and cross-equation effects, we find that the substitution effect does not eliminate the impact of market-size changes on rates, but it does preserve the hierarchy of rates across instruments.