Partnership Between Local Government and the Local Community In The Area of Social Policy

The article describes the background and history of one project aimed at developing a strategic social plan in the city of Eger. This initiative was based upon partnership between the municipal government, the local community and civil organizations in Eger. It offers an important perspective upon the potential, in the transitional nations of eastern and central Europe, for public-private partnership as an effective mechanism both to map social needs and to develop policies to address these needs. It also offers one particular approach to the development of such partnerships - the decision conferencing model. Such an approach takes public-private partnerships into an arena beyond that of policy implementation alone.     

Steering customers to the online channel: The influence of personal relationships,learning investments,and attitude toward the firm

Understanding the consequences of customer steering is a key challenge of multichannel customer management. Although many firms are faced with the question whether customers should be steered to the online channel to realize the potential benefits of this channel, little is known about the circumstances under which customers will be unreceptive to the online channel and displeased if they are steered. This research addresses this critical gap and examines the impact of customer steering with assortment modifications on customers' online migration decisions and overall satisfaction in three experimental studies. The results highlight the importance of three contingency factors: personal relationships in the current channel, learning investments into the online channel and attitude toward the steering firm.     

Unsettling Neoliberal Rationalities: Engaged Ethnography and the Meanings of Responsibility in the Dominican Republic and Mexico

Neoliberal urban environmental governance is premised in part on the development of collaborative arrangements between state and non‐state actors through which residents in informal settlements are encouraged to participate in their own governance. The neoliberal rationality of participation is implemented through governmental techniques such as responsibilization, whereby residents are rendered responsible for provision of basic environmental services previously seen as the responsibility of government authorities. However, neoliberal urban governance is incomplete, fragmented and fractured, affording room for maneuvering and innovative social agency, whereby residents mimic, reinterpret, negotiate and contest neoliberal subject formations. In this article, we discuss how engaged scholarship can facilitate such alternative productions of neoliberal subjectivities through the development of ‘knowledge encounters'. We draw on cases of solid waste management and environmental risk governance in the informal settlements of Los Platanitos, Santo Domingo Norte, Dominican Republic, and Gaviotas Sur, Villahermosa, Mexico, to suggest that knowledge encounters facilitated through engaged ethnography furnish stages for alternative conceptions of responsibility, whereby residents negotiate neoliberal techniques of governance through diverse forms of acquiescence, reconfiguration and contestation.     

Optimal Monopolist Export Pricing with Dynamic Demand and Learning Curve Effects

This paper addresses incomplete exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) and pricing-to-market (PTM) by proposing an optimal control model of dynamic monopolistic pricing on a foreign market, which accounts for dynamic demand effects (such as diffusion or saturation) and learning curve effects. It is shown how the optimal dynamic export pricing results in partial or full ERPT in the long-term equilibrium. Moreover, transitional price dynamics are illustrated, which may explain dumping, i.e., temporary prices below unit costs, and (asymmetric) short-run overshooting dynamics of the optimal export price level as a reaction to exchange rate changes.     

The Significance of the New Venture's First Sale: The Impact of Founders' Capabilities and Proactive Sales Orientation

Initial sale success in the market with a new product is a critical milestone for a new venture. Failure at the introduction stage of a new product could have lethal consequences for the venture. In the present study, the authors investigate the role of a new venture company's first successful sale in the venture's future commercial success. The authors develop and test a model of the impact of the founders' entrepreneurial and commercial capabilities and proactive sales orientation on the significance of the first sale and sales growth of a new venture. Using survey data and partial least squares estimation, the results reveal that the founders' commercial capabilities have a positive effect on proactive sales orientation, while their entrepreneurial capabilities positively moderate the effect of commercial capabilities. Further, the results reveal that a proactive sales orientation positively affects the significance of the first sale and that value‐based selling approach positively moderates the effect of proactive sales orientation. Finally, the results reveal that the significance of the first sale is positively related to sales growth. Thus, the authors conclude that combining the founders' commercial and entrepreneurial capabilities strengthens proactive sales orientation and that, in turn, a proactive sales orientation particularly increases the significance of the first sale when new venture companies practice value‐based selling. Research has convincingly demonstrated proactive selling behavior to be one of the most powerful predictors of sales performance. Value‐based selling is a sales approach to identify, quantify, communicate, and verify value of a new product to the customer. Our findings suggest that founders who possess both strong commercial and entrepreneurial capabilities engage considerably more in proactive sales practice as compared with founders that only possess strong commercial capabilities. Hence, rather than hiring specific sales expertise, founders should develop their proactive, value‐selling capabilities.     

Wer ist politisch aktiv im Social Web?

The Internet—so it has been hoped—makes political information of all kinds more accessible to citizens, facilitates participation in politics and thus promotes democracy. But who really consumes political information on the Internet, and who actively participates in online political discussions? Are people participating now who were not in the past? Or are they still the “usual suspects”—e.g., highly educated and politically interested citizens? This article uses data from a survey of almost 3,000 Austrians, 14 years and older, for a secondary analysis to examine the characteristics of those (a) who follow political online communication in Austria and (b) who actively contribute to it. Our results show that political content on the Internet (still) mostly attracts the politically interested.