Service Competitiveness – An Anglo-US Study

This article reports on the latest in a series of international comparisons of management practices and performance outcomes of industries in various countries. Here, it is the service industries in the UK and the US which come under the microscope. Among the companies surveyed, there were more world-class performers in the US than the UK, but also more low performers. The concluding part of the article is diagnostic – the authors also suggest measures which could improve performance.     

A classification and evaluation of research in operations management

It is important that the first issue of a new journal devoted to research in a given subject area examine the general nature of research in the field at present, and indicate what type of research might be beneficially undertaken in the field in the future. It is also desirable for a new journal to consider the ways in which it will judge the general quality of its articles in the aggregate, relative to established journals in similar disciplines. That is, what criteria can and should be used, say five years hence to determine if the journal is a strong one? It is the purpose of this paper to consider these distinct, but interrelated questions. This will be done by classifying some recent OM research, commenting on what appear to be broad areas where more work might be done, and then suggesting some measures we might want to think about for evaluating papers published by the JOM in the future.     

Leader Ethical Decision-Making in Organizations: Strategies for Sensemaking

Organizational leaders face environmental challenges and pressures that put them under ethical risk. Navigating this ethical risk is demanding given the dynamics of contemporary organizations. Traditional models of ethical decision-making (EDM) are an inadequate framework for understanding how leaders respond to ethical dilemmas under conditions of uncertainty and equivocality. Sensemaking models more accurately illustrate leader EDM and account for individual, social, and environmental constraints. Using the sensemaking approach as a foundation, previous EDM models are revised and extended to comprise a conceptual model of leader EDM. Moreover, the underlying factors in the model are highlighted—constraints and strategies. Four trainable, compensatory strategies (emotion regulation, self-reflection, forecasting, and information integration) are proposed and described that aid leaders in navigating ethical dilemmas in organizations. Empirical examinations demonstrate that tactical application of the strategies may aid leaders in making sense of complex and ambiguous ethical dilemmas and promote ethical behavior. Compensatory tactics such as these should be central to organizational ethics initiatives at the leader level.     

Joint Optimization of Product Price, Display Orientation and Shelf-Space Allocation in Retail Category Management

We develop a model that jointly optimizes a retailer's decisions for product prices, display facing areas, display orientations and shelf-space locations in a product category. Unlike the existing shelf-space allocation models that typically consider only the width of display shelves, our model considers both the width and height of each shelf, allowing products to be stacked. Furthermore, as demand is influenced by each product's two-dimensional facing area, we consider multiple product orientations that capture three-dimensional product packaging characteristics. That enables our model to not only treat shelf locations as decision variables, but also retailers’ stacking patterns in terms of product display areas and multiple display orientations. Further, unlike the existing studies which consider a retailer's shelf-space allocation decisions independent of its product pricing decisions, our model allows joint decisions on both and captures cross-product interactions in demand through prices. We show how a branch-and-bound based MINLP algorithm can be used to implement our optimization model in a fast and practical way.     

Using an integrated business experience to take the place of “introduction to management” in an integrated curriculum

Management education is an oft-criticized subject, with practitioners and scholars alike offering suggestions for improvement. A gap still exists in how management theory is introduced to students. The authors describe how their business school redesigned its undergraduate curriculum with an embodiment of three distinguishing characteristics: experiential learning, integration, and demonstration of achievement. The authors illustrate how they incorporate introduction to management theory within several courses and describe how this coursework relates back to their curriculum’s three characteristics. They conclude with a brief discussion of how their integrated curriculum allows for upper-level Bloom’s taxonomy cognitive processes, and further reinforcement and eventual mastery of management theory in third- and fourth-year courses.     

Relational marketing throughout the history of commercial exchange: Blind spots in marketing’s origin story

Abstract

Although marketing is commonly theorized to have originated at the dawn of exchange itself, few scholarly articles explore the history of marketing beyond this cursory recitation of the commonly accepted origin story of the field. The evolution of complex commercial exchange is presented as a natural outgrowth of the development of human society as opposed to the willful and intentional efforts of early merchants. Using disparate and archaic sources, this article synthesizes historical accounts and archival information to show that entrepreneurs have always practiced relational marketing from prehistoric eras and continued to do so throughout pre-industrial and post-industrial eras when the bulk of the literature claims that the scale of modern production rendered relational marketing ineffective and nearly obsolete. In doing so, we add to the virtually non-existent literature documenting entrepreneurial marketing in the early, pre-industrial history of commerce.