The use of co-nomination to identify expert participants for Technology Foresight

The United Kingdom has been carrying out a major exercise in the field of Technology Foresight, involving fifteen panels engaged in wide consultation about the future of their areas. The objectives of the Programme are to help set priorities for publicly funded science and technology and to create new working partnerships between science and industry. The paper describes the process by which members of the panels, and those whom they subsequently consulted, were identified. A survey-based technique known as co-nomination was employed, whereby respondents were asked to identify suitable participants and at the same time to profile their own expertise. The process was repeated with those nominated. The patterns of expertise thus revealed are themselves of interest and are used to construct a map of the inter-relationship between the fields covered by the panels.     

Strategies for successful organizational downsizing

This article reports the results of a study of 30 organizations that engaged in downsizing over a four-year period. Three questions were investigated: (1) What general strategies are used by organizations to downsize? (2) What are the effects of downsizing on organizational performance? (3) What are downsizing's “best practices?” or, What are the differences between organizations that effectively downsize and those that do not? Three main strategies for downsizing are explained, the managerial actions to overcome the negative effects of downsizing are enumerated, and the best practices of successful downsizing firms are presented.     

DIGITAL MEDIA AND THE ECONOMICS OF CRIME

Digital crime is an area where the application of the economics of crime is complex. In a nutshell, the essential economic problem of digi-crime is the impact of technological progress making transactions costs of enforcement potentially too high, partly because of the low costs of copyright infringement due to technological advance, for there to be substantial amounts of deterrence from punishment.     

Trade unions and productivity: theory and evidence

Recent work by economists has generated new theories of the impact of trade unions on productivity. This article gives an exposition of these theories and assesses the extent to which they are supported by empirical evidence.     

The Amplifying and Buffering Effects of Virtuousness in Downsized Organizations

Virtuousness refers to the pursuit of the highest aspirations in the human condition. It is characterized by human impact, moral goodness, and unconditional societal betterment. Several writers have recently argued that corporations, in addition to being concerned with ethics, should also emphasize an ethos of virtuousness in corporate action. Virtuousness emphasizes actions that go beyond the “do no harm” assumption embedded in most ethical codes of conduct. Instead, it emphasizes the highest and best of the human condition. This research empirically examines the buffering and amplifying effects of virtuousness in organizations. The study hypothesizes that virtuousness has a positive effect on organizations because amplifying dynamics make subsequent virtuous action more likely, and buffering dynamics reduce the harmful effects of downsizing. The study reveals that two types of virtuousness – tonic and phasic – are associated with these effects.     

The Sun Also Rises: Productivity Convergence Between Japan and the USA

The growth process for a technological leader is different from that of a follower. While followers can grow through imitation and capital deepening, a leader must undertake original research. This suggests that as the gap between the leader and the follower narrows, the follower must undertake more genuinely innovative R&D and possibly face a slower overall growth rate. The results of a dynamic panel equilibrium-correction model of productivity growth suggest that the productivity gap with the USA had a strong effect on the growth of Japanese manufacturing, and that changes in R&D intensity also made a significant contribution. Moreover, the effect of the productivity gap was significantly higher in industries that had higher R&D intensities, higher levels of human capital, and were more open to exports. This paper is based upon Chapter 5 of my D.Phil. thesis at the University of Oxford. It was partly written while I was a Visiting Scholar at the Foundation for Advanced Information & Research, Tokyo, and was supported by a Sanwa Bank Foundation Research Fellowship and ESRC grants R000234954 and R000237500.