Of warnings and waiting: an examination of the path of information for two communities hit by Typhoon Haiyan

Abstract

Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines in 2013, causing billions in damage, and taking thousands of lives. Media and researchers claimed that people did not have enough information about the storm, or did not understand the information given to them, and therefore did not evacuate. This research departs from the assumption of a knowledge deficit: it asks how people understood warnings and how information flowed from the government. This research focuses on Guiuan, a municipality that sustained heavy damage and loss of life, and the entry point of many typhoons in the Philippines. Guided by Stuart Hall’s Encoding-Decoding Theory, the researcher carried out focus group discussions with citizens and interviews with local government officials from one coastal and one inland village. Through systematic qualitative analysis of interviews and discussions, the researcher found that participants from different locations in the same municipality understood warning information differently, based on unique epistemological frames. While local government framed people as deficient in knowledge, the citizens actually called upon their previous experiences with storms in order to make evacuation decisions. However, they could not project worse scenarios from previous experience and needed a phenomenon to match an experience in real time before making an evacuation decision. These findings imply that disaster imagination, disaster memory, and disaster knowledge are all distinct concepts, and future research should examine how specific contexts frame risk. Early warning systems for storms must also take into account unique epistemological frames as a means to localize communication and engage communities in the decision-making process.     

Industrial salespeople's views on motivation

Much has been written on the subject of motivation but, until now, no one has conducted a survey of industrial salespeople to ask them what motivates them. This article reports the results of such a survey and offers recommendations.     

Stochastic search variable selection in vector error correction models with an application to a model of the UK macroeconomy

This paper develops methods for stochastic search variable selection (currently popular with regression and vector autoregressive models) for vector error correction models where there are many possible restrictions on the cointegration space. We show how this allows the researcher to begin with a single unrestricted model and either do model selection or model averaging in an automatic and computationally efficient manner. We apply our methods to a large UK macroeconomic model. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Parent cultural control of foreign subsidiaries through organizational acculturation: a longitudinal study

Organizational acculturation refers to changes in the work values of host-country employees in foreign subsidiaries. Although many multinational corporations practise cultural control of global operations, organizational acculturation has attracted very little academic research. In the present study, the subjects are Hong Kong Chinese managers employed in subsidiaries of multinational corporations from a European country. Longitudinal research was conducted over three years among an 'acculturation' panel, a control panel and a benchmark panel. The findings showed that organizational acculturation may have occurred in some of the work values measured. Implications of these findings for international firms are discussed in detail.     

Contracting with Private Knowledge of Production Capacity

We analyze the design of procurement contracts when the supplier is privately informed about both his innate production capacity (K) and his innate unit cost of production. We identify conditions under which the supplier will strategically employ an inefficient production technology to expand output above K. We also show that when the buyer employs the simple fixed‐price cost‐reimbursement (FPCR) contracts in the setting examined by Rogerson (2003), the supplier has no incentive to exaggerate K. Furthermore, the buyer can secure with FPCR contracts at least 75% of the surplus she secures with fully optimal contracts.     

Business failure in an age of globalisation: Interpreting the rise and fall of the LG project in Wales, 1995–2006

Abstract

In 1996, the South Korean conglomerate LG announced a £1.67 billion investment in Wales to manufacture consumer electronics and semiconductors. The project was to be Europe’s largest inward investment project, and LG was offered the UK Government’s most generous grants. However, the semiconductor plant was built but never entered production, while the consumer electronics facility closed in stages up to 2006. This article responds to calls for a ‘new business history’ by using the ill-fated investment as a case study of business failure, arguing that narrow firm-specific factors do not fully explain LG’s failure in Wales. The article finds instead that analysis of distorted institutional environments in South Korea and Wales, linked to rent-seeking behaviour by LG, provides a fuller answer.     

Designing optimal gain sharing plans to promote energy conservation

We analyze the optimal design of gain sharing plans to promote energy conservation. We show how the optimal plan varies as industry conditions and the regulator??s information change. We demonstrate the importance of allowing the energy supplier a choice among plans, some of which offer the prospect of both pronounced financial gains for superior performance and substantial losses for inferior performance.     

DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL INNOVATION PARTNERSHIPS: DO THEY MATTER FOR INNOVATION OUTCOMES OF SOUTH AFRICAN FIRMS?

This paper studies the impact of the diversity of domestic and international innovation partnerships on the innovation outcomes of South African firms. A number of competing hypotheses are formulated and tested empirically using a sample of South African firms in manufacturing and services by applying Ordinary Least Squares regression analyses. Results show that having an innovation partnership, particularly an international partnership, is beneficial to innovation outcomes. However, it also emerges that too diverse a set of international partnerships is detrimental to innovation outcomes. The paper concludes with a discussion and a number of proposals for future research.