Price Rigidity and the Selection of the Exchange Rate Regime

We evaluate and qualify Friedman's, 1953, “case for flexible exchange rates” in the presence of sticky prices in a two country model. We find that a flexible regime performs indeed better when the degree of nominal price rigidity is high while a bilateral peg does better when prices are fairly flexible. This result obtains independent of whether monetary policy is activistic or not and is mostly due to the negative relationship between employment and productivity shocks when prices are relatively sluggish (Gali, 1999). A unilateral peg tends to produce the lowest level of world welfare but it sometimes represents the best monetary arrangement for the pegger. JEL Classification Numbers: E32, E52, F33, F42     

Institutionalization of Tipping as a Source of Managerial Control

This paper explores, investigates and analyses the rationale, approach and outcomes of the attempts by management to control the behaviour of front–line service workers through the institutionalization of customer tipping. It presents evidence generated from an in–depth case study of a highly successful UK restaurant group to suggest that the management of tipping is a way of controlling the behaviour of front–line service workers. However, rather than view such control as purely exploitative and one–sided, it is argued that there is a degree of 'mutual instrumentality', in that the findings suggest that workers voluntarily and consciously submit to subjugation for purely instrumental benefits.     

Measuring Market Orientation: Exploring a Market Oriented Approach

This paper demonstrates that applications of existing approaches to measuring market orientation are myopic, non-comparative and over-reliant on the views of single respondents. Consequently, a multi-perspective, multi-informant approach for measuring market orientation is generated which focuses on gauging customers', competitors' and intra-organizational members' perceptions of the market orientation of an organization. To evaluate the psychometric properties of this approach an application of this design in a survey of manufacturing industry is subjected to tests for inter-rater reliability, scale reliability, content validity, criterion-related validity and construct validity. The conclusion of this evaluation is that the developed measure is both a reliable and valid means of gauging market orientation. The paper concludes with a series of implications for both theorists and practitioners.     

Managing organisational culture: insights from the hospitality industry

Despite the widespread criticism of the culture management approach by respected academics, recent surveys indicate that managers are continuing to engage in planned cultural interventions. Indeed, reports demonstrate that managing organisational culture is one of the most popular forms of managerial intervention, with one survey concluding that over 90 per cent of organisations engage in planned cultural change. This study describes and analyses organisational culture interventions in four companies within a single industry. It argues that the conceptualisation of organisational culture and culture change should be differentiated in ways that recognise the significance of contextual factors. It presents an analysis of interventions in the hospitality industry and delineates four insights from this sector that are pertinent to the theory and practice of managing cultural change.     

Resource allocation in the nationalized energy sector of the United Kingdom

Resource allocation in the energy sector of the United Kingdom is a difficult area to plan, because demand and supply projections need to embrace both the large private sector oil industry and the public sector fuel industries. In addition, relationships between the latter are complex as they involve both competition and co-ordination. One approach to the problem has been to find common ground in the concept of marginal cost pricing, but there are practical difficulties in application. Government has encouraged the use of analytical techniques, such as corporate planning, by the fuel industries as a means of co-ordination in areas where market mechanisms may no longer always be effective.     

A Comparison of Relations Between Security Market Prices, Returns and Accounting Measures in Japan and the United States

We examine associations between accounting measures of earnings and stock returns in Japan over varying window lengths and compare them to those for the United States. Our results are consistent with the view that Japanese investors utilize less accounting information in their pricing of equities than do their U.S. counterparts. This was particularly evident in the 'boom' period of the mid to late 1980s when the fundamental values conveyed by accounting measures appear to have been largely ignored. The association increases with the inclusion of 1991, suggesting a return to more emphasis on fundamentals with the recent decline in stock prices.