Resource utilisation Efficiency: A South African Provincial Evaluation

The objective of this paper is to analyse the utilisation of production capacity and total under‐utilisation in order to identify weak‐performing industries across the nine South African provinces. Detecting inefficiencies within the different provinces will help to identify where sound managerial or government intervention is required, which can contribute to the future success of the New Growth Path Framework and the Strategic Integrated Projects. Using a multistage data envelopment analysis model at the subnational level, several categories of production factors are explored: intermediate demand, labour, capital, as well as taxes and subsidies. The results emphasise South Africa's weak infrastructure and the failure to effectively promote stability in managing factor inputs. The results further illustrate that industry scale efficiency for water and electricity are poorest across all provinces, highlighting the current water and energy supply concerns in South Africa and problem areas associated with the National Development Program.     

It's a secret: Marketing value and the denial of availability

Marketing thrives on secrets, yet surprisingly little formal attention has been paid to how the marketing of secrecy and the secrecy of marketing can play a significant role in contemporary organizations. We draw upon the fields of organizational studies, psychology, and marketing to develop a typology of secrets that reflects their marketing value and their knowledge value. Marketing secrets can have value to the firm (strategic value), to the customer (marketing value), or to both parties. Based on these two dimensions, we identify four different types of marketing secrets: (1) appealing secrets have high strategic value, as well as high marketing value; (2) mythical secrets mean little to the firm but a lot to the customer; (3) plain secrets are critical to the firm but are irrelevant to customers; and (4) weak secrets have neither strategic value nor marketing value. Our typology enables academics to formulate research questions regarding secrecy in marketing, and serves as a guide for practitioners in the construction of strategies that can exploit the strategic value of secrets by ‘romancing’ them, and increase their knowledge value by ‘educating’ the secrets.     

浅析文化企业人力资源创新——基于美术文化企业人力资源管理现状分析

竞争日益激烈的文化市场竞争使越来越多的文化企业尤其是美术文化企业开始意识到仅仅重视文化本身和营销并不能使其保持优势,只有将人力资源与企业本身结合,才能衍生出企业独特的优势。本文试图通过美术文化企业人力资源管理的现状,探讨人力资源管理在企业中的作用,并探讨实现人力资源最优化的创新策略。     

Innovation forecast: Un-avoidable and context dependent

In order to mobilize the necessary resources for innovation forecasts are unavoidable. However, a forecast is never a neutral or objective assessment. Given an interdependent business landscape, there are at least two major context-related aspects that affect an innovation forecast. First, the actor that makes the forecast is embedded into a specific context. Secondly, the potential innovation stems from a specific environment, and will during the innovation journey be related to other environments in a producing and a using setting, and thus to other investments in place. In this paper we examine the development of one innovation and the forecasts made by three different economic actors. There is an interesting variation in the forecasts that can be explained as a variation of contexts of the actors. The contexts influence the way that the forecasts are done and especially in terms of what the context of the innovation is assumed to be. The empirical findings suggest that the results of the innovation forecast are highly dependent on the actors' abstraction of the business landscape which in turn is affected by the contexts of the actors.     

Improving data quality during ERP implementation based on information product map

ABSTRACT

Poor Data Quality (DQ) is amajor culprit in the failure of ERP implantation. Previous DQ solutions focus more on technical approaches, ignoring the importance of seeking the root causes. Therefore, this paper proposes aprocess-driven DQ monitoring framework by Information Product Map (IPMAP). First, IPMAP is applied to visualizethe manufacturing process of critical information products. Then, the potential deficiencies that may arouse DQ problems are examined from the aspects of process and human. Finally, the corresponding DQ improvement strategies are put forward and validated in case study. The results indicate that the framework provides helpful guidance for promoting ERP DQ.     

Introduction: human resource management in Africa

This article introduces the special issue that seeks to spur the debate on the challenges of managing people in organizations in Africa. The debate on HRM in Africa has proceeded with tentative steps and now clearly needs to be located firmly within the international management context. It is not the purpose of this special issue to discover or develop an over-arching model of HRM. That has been attempted elsewhere. Our purpose is to bring together the various threads that characterize the on-going debate and hopefully move towards a more specific research agenda which captures the complexity of managing on the African continent. Some of these threads include the formulation of new perspectives on HR research, finding common ground with diverse disciplines and tackling enduring problems like ethnicity and discrimination.     

The Effectiveness of Two Online Persuasion Claims: Limited Product Availability and Product Popularity

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of two online persuasion claims: limited product availability (e.g., only 3 items left) and product popularity (e.g., 94% of consumers bought this product after viewing this site). The popularity claim appeared to enhance quality perception, particularly among highly risk-averse consumers, and purchase intention. We attribute these findings to the quality signaling effect and the bandwagon effect of the claim. On the other hand, the limited availability claim exerted no influence: low message credibility and the lack of psychological reactance are deemed to be possible reasons for the insignificant effect of the claim.     

How important is improving food availability for reducing child malnutrition in developing countries?

Do increases in the food supply per person in a country, i.e., national food availability, contribute substantially to reductions in malnutrition among its children? This paper sets out to answer this controversial question using panel data from 63 developing countries over 1970–1996. This paper gives evidence in support of a statistically significant and strong positive impact of national food availability on child nutrition, finding that increased food supplies have resulted in significant reductions in malnutrition since the 1970s despite population increases over the period. However, per‐capita food supplies have a declining marginal impact: their effect is quite strong for countries with very low food availability (e.g., most countries in sub‐Saharan Africa and South Asia), but weak or non‐existent for those with high levels (e.g., most countries in the Near East and North Africa). Further, non‐food factors, such as women's education and status and the quality of health environments, are also important determinants of children's nutritional status. Depending on the state of food availability in any particular geographic area and relative costs, these factors may merit greater priority in policies to reduce malnutrition.     

福建省人力资源开发研究

通过对福建省人力资源现状及其原因的分析，提出必须从控制人口增长，实施科教兴省战略，创立良好环境，发展创新体系，建立健全相关法规等方面措施来做好福建省的人力资源开发。     

Structures of commitment in mode use: a comparison of Switzerland, Germany and Great Britain

Travellers commit themselves to particular behaviours through the ownership of cars and season tickets. They trade a large one-off payment for low or zero marginal cost at the point of use. It can be assumed that these commitments influence travel behaviour. To the knowledge of the authors there is no literature which addresses the choice between the commitment to the one or the other mode and its impacts on travel behaviour.The paper presents models using structural equation modelling to test a-priori hypotheses on the paths linking car-availability, season-ticket-ownership and modal usage. Modal usage is operationalised as the number of trips by car, public transport, or as the distances travelled by car or public transport. The models are based on three different surveys: Switzerland, Germany and Great Britain. The results confirm the dominance of car-availability, which drives the other variables, but the relationships are more complicated than generally assumed.