Why adopt now? Multiple case studies and survey studies comparing small,medium and large firms

While a number of factors have been highlighted in the innovation adoption literature, little is known about whether different factors are related to innovation adoption in differently sized firms. We used preliminary case studies of small, medium and large firms to ground our hypotheses, which were then tested using a survey of 94 firms. We found that external stakeholder pressure and non-financial readiness were related to innovation adoption in SMEs; but that for large firms, adoption was related to the opportunity to innovate. It may be that the difficulties of adopting innovations, including both the financial cost and the effort involved, are too great for SMEs to overcome unless there is either a compelling need (external pressure) or enough in-house capability (non-financial readiness). This suggests that SMEs are more likely to have innovation “pushed” onto them while large firms are more likely to “pull” innovations when they have the opportunity.     

Sustaining Collusion Via a Fuzzy Trigger

Probability theory is the standard economic representation of uncertainty, although it is not always an accurate one. Fuzzy logic is an alternative representation that does not require individual beliefs regarding the explicit functional form of uncertainty. This paper applies fuzzy logic to an oligopoly trigger pricing game. The fuzzy trigger pricing game reverses the standard cyclical price war prediction; collusion-sustaining price wars are most likely to occur during times of high demand. The fuzzy model also predicts that markets with relatively volatile prices are more likely to undergo collusion-sustaining price wars. The predictions are consistent with available empirical evidence.     

Regulatory Uncertainty and Financial Contagion: Evidence from the Hybrid Capital Securities Market

This paper examines the negative market impact that resulted from the insurance regulators’ potential reclassification of 140 hybrid capital securities in spring and summer 2006. It illustrates how financial contagion can spring from a regulatory policy change that lacks transparency. We investigate the impact of the uncertainty surrounding the regulators’ true classification criteria by measuring the effect of the reclassification announcements on hybrid new issue volume, cumulative average abnormal returns, bid‐ask spreads, and yield spreads. The financial contagion adversely affected the entire hybrid capital securities market for six months. The effect was most pronounced among those hybrids that were eventually reclassified as common equity equivalents. It was greater for Yankee Tier 1 hybrids, which had been more popular with insurance firm investors prior to the reclassifications, than among non‐Tier 1 hybrids.     

The Economic Importance of Methyl Bromide: Does the California Strawberry Industry Qualify for a Critical Use Exemption from the Methyl Bromide Ban?

Methyl bromide has been applied to California strawberries for forty years. However, it will be banned in the United States and other developed countries in 2005. Critical use exemptions provide a mechanism that allows its continued use after this date for industries that do not have technically and economically feasible alternatives, and are consequently subject to significant market disruption. Integrating scientific and economic results from a multidisciplinary research project, we evaluate whether California strawberries are eligible for a critical use exemption.     

Price floors and technical inefficiency in India's sugar processing industry

In India, cane is processed into sugar by cooperatives, public enterprises, and private (for‐profit) firms. The Indian government sets a unique floor price for each processor that is increasing in the firm's effectiveness in converting cane into sugar. The floor price binds for public and private firms but not for cooperatives, which rebate profits to members. We argue that this price floor policy creates a disincentive for private and public firms to be technically efficient in converting cane to sugar. In support of this hypothesis an analysis of 593 Indian sugar factories from 1992 to 2007 reveals statistically significant differences in technical efficiency, with cooperatives being the most efficient and public firms least efficient. We estimate welfare losses due to the technical inefficiency attributable to the price‐floor policy and argue that it can be eliminated by enacting policy to base price floors upon quality of the cane input received by a factory.     

The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh: a case study on the workings of the Private Finance Initiative

Non-elected faith representatives are increasingly involved in public policy decisionmaking. Yet, little is understood about who they represent and on what basis. Drawing on political theory and primary research data, this article examines what, in democratic terms, is going on when a faith leader sits on a local strategic partnership, a service advisory body, or a neighbourhood board. It shows that, despite very real limitations, faith representatives complement traditional electoral representation by bringing new and ‘authentic’ voices and expertise. ‘Representative claims’ are legitimized in part through faith leaders' involvement in dense (and often marginalized) community networks, but also through their very ‘untaintedness’ in relation to traditional electoral processes.     

Participation in Community Leisure Programs: Experiences and Perspectives of Children with Developmental Difficulties and Their Parents

Children with developmental disabilities participate in more solitary, sedentary, and home-based leisure activities than active physical pursuits or community-based activities. Clinical experience suggests that children with less well-recognized developmental difficulties also have compromised leisure experiences; however, this has not been fully investigated. This study engaged 20 school-age children with developmental difficulties in a community-based circus program, designed in collaboration with occupational therapists. The program included activities such as trampolining, trapeze, and acrobatics. Semi-structured interviews with children and parents explored children's leisure experiences both at circus and more broadly. Qualitative content analysis revealed that friendships, having fun, and being physically active were highly valued aspects of leisure. The coaching style and “just right” level of challenge within programs were identified as central to children's engagement and sense of competence. Participating in a supported leisure program such as circus appeared to promote children's engagement in community leisure, at least in the short term.     

Can green behaviors really be increased for all employees? Trade‐offs for “deep greens” in a goal‐oriented green human resource management intervention

This study explores the complex interaction between psychological and goal‐relevant boundary conditions that influence levels of individual engagement in a green human resource management (HRM) intervention designed to encourage employee green behavior (EGB). Data were collected from 1,112 employees in an automobile manufacturing plant. Consistent with goal‐setting theory, the level of feedback received predicts EGB. However, a three‐way interaction demonstrates how employees with high levels of autonomous motivation do not gain the expected benefits of high feedback and high goal commitment in the enactment of EGB. Instead, only those with weak autonomous motivation are affected by these goal‐related constructs. Findings suggest that both goal‐setting and self‐determination theories are relevant to green HRM interventions. Managers should consider that interventions that are effective for employees who do not have strong autonomous motivation towards the environment may not be effective for those who do.     

Conceptualising and implementing two community gardening projects on the Cape Flats,Cape Town

Two community gardening projects in the Cape Town Metropole, South Africa, were studied in terms of how their intended outcomes were conceptualised by programme stakeholders, and how programme implementation was perceived by the intended beneficiaries. Following a broadly qualitative approach, data collection methods included individual and group interviews, participant observation, and reviews of programme records. A model of short-term, medium-term, and long-term outcomes, as perceived by programme management and staff, was elicited. Gardeners generally were positive about the service delivery of the programme, and identified the provision of food for their households as the major change that the programme introduced in their lives. They achieved some savings on household food purchases, and improved their nutrition somewhat. They also reported some income generation, but they perceived it as too little. Finally, respondents were very positive about a range of social benefits obtained from participating in the projects.     

Introduction to the Special Issue: Subterranean Geopolitics

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship in political geography and allied disciplines such as Anthropology and Architecture has used registers such as the elemental and volumetric to explore the calculative, material, technical, and atmospheric interventions in, on, through and beneath the earth’s surface. In this special issue, our contributors engage in a ‘subterranean turn’, as they drill down, dive into, travel through and speculate with underground and underwater domains. Although varied in their geographical environments and locales, and diverse in their time-frames, the papers speak to four themes that constitute a ‘subterranean geopolitics.’ First, the subterranean is conceptualised as volume with distinct material qualities including height, pressure, depth and shape. There are multiple undergrounds on offer. Second, the subterranean is integral to nation-state building and geopolitical strategies of control, enclosure and exclusion. Third, there is evidence of and for subterranean infrastructures aplenty. States and other actors want to design, experiment and plan with the underground and underwater environments. Finally, the subterranean is never divorced from calculative, legal and technical regimes of regulation, and the cultivation of expertise – scientific, military, engineering – is a crucial element in these contributions to subterranean geopolitics. Taken together, the nine papers in this special issue offer a rich array of case studies including the nineteenth-century volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean (Hawkins 2018 Hawkins, H. 2018. A volcanic incident’: Towards a geopolitical aesthetics of the subterranean. Geopolitics. online published 25th September 2018. doi:10.1080/14650045.2017.1399877.[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]), subterranean nationalism in the South Atlantic (Benwell), lead mining in nineteenth-century English Peak District (Endfield and Van Lieshout 2019 Endfield, G., and C. Van Lieshout. 2019. Water and vertical territory: Teh volatile and hidden historical geographies of Derbyshire’s lead mining soughs, 1650s–1830s. Geopolitics. online published 9th October 2018. doi:10.1080/14650045.2018.1486299.[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]), a transnational gas pipeline running through Italy (Barry and Gambino 2019 Barry, A., and E. Gambino. 2019. Pipeline geopolitics: Subaquatic materials and the tactical point. Geopolitics. online published 14th March 2019. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2019.1570921.[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]), subterranean security in Israel/Palestine (Slesinger 2019 Slesinger, I. 2019. A cartography of the unknowable: Technology, territory and subterranean agencies in Israel’s management of the gaza tunnels. Geopolitics. online published 8th February 2018. doi:10.1080/14650045.2017.1399878.[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]), natural gas infrastructure (Forman 2019 Forman, P. 2019. Security and the subsurface: Natural gas and the visualisation of possibility spaces. Geopolitics. online published 17th October 2018. doi:10.1080/14650045.2018.1513918.[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]), deep sea mining off Papua New Guinea (Childs 2019b Childs, J. 2019b. Extraction in four dimensions: Time, space and the emerging geo(-)politics of deep-sea mining. Geopolitics. online published 14th June 2018. doi:10.1080/14650045.2018.1465041.[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]), US military planning in and under Greenland’s inland ice (Bruun 2018 Bruun, J. 2018. Invading the whiteness: Science, (sub)terrain, and US militarisation of the Greenland ice sheet. Geopolitics. online published 17 November 2018. doi:10.1080/14650045.2018.1543269.[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]), and managing the shipping routes of the English Channel (Peters 2019 Peters, K. 2019. Deep routeing and the making of ‘Maritime Motorways’: Beyond surficial geographies of connection for governing global shipping. Geopolitics. online published 1st February 2019. doi:10.1080/14650045.2019.1567499.[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]).