The role of the entrepreneurial encounter in the emergence of opportunities: Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to explore the conceptual potential of the Deleuzian notion of the encounter in order to better understand the genealogy of opportunities. We adopt a processual perspective of opportunities. In order to translate this notion to the domain of entrepreneurship, we analysed and interpreted Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club. This film follows the creation of the first club in the United States that illegally allowed HIV-positive people to supply themselves with foreign antiretroviral drugs from Mexico or Japan. The article highlights encounters in this process that disturb the entrepreneur’s belief systems and allow him or her to be open to potential opportunity. It finally explores how the encounter may improve our understanding of the political becoming of opportunities within the entrepreneurial process.     

Demographics,personality, contact,and universal‐diverse orientation: An exploratory examination

This study explores relationships between race, gender, agreeableness, openness to experience, contact, and a measure of attitudes toward diversity—universal‐diverse orientation (UDO). UDO consists of three attitudinal components: realistic appreciation (a cognition), comfort with difference (a feeling), and diversity of contact (a behavior). Results suggest that race, agreeableness, and openness relate to UDO attitudes, primarily due to the relationships of these variables with the behavioral component—diversity of contact. Identifying characteristics of tolerant people (e.g., agreeableness) and training managers in skills related to those characteristics may improve contextual performance and make managers better role models within the organizational context. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

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.     

Judo Strategy: 10 Techniques For Beating A Stronger Opponent

The idea of judo economics, building on analogies with the sport of judo, has been around for at least 20 years. But taking these ideas further to judo strategy means that a framework of strategic principles can be developed to help companies put stronger opponents on the mat.     

The Effect of Earnings–Announcement Timing on Earnings Management

This paper examines whether firms which delay earnings announcements engage in earnings management. The cross–sectional version of the modified Jones 1995 model is used to estimate 'normal' accruals. Prior research has documented that, on average, delayed earnings announcements are associated with negative earnings surprises. Our evidence suggests that the market anticipates unfavorable earnings news when it observes reporting delays. As a consequence, late reporters appear to make the most of a bad situation by employing income–decreasing accruals in big–bath–type earnings management and in contractual renegotiations. We find that the magnitude of income–reducing abnormal accruals is related to the reporting lag.     

Performance Measurement in Government Service Provision: The Case of Police Services in New South Wales

The NSW Government is implementing a financial framework which is designed to encourage government service providers to become more efficient and effective. NSW Treasury is using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to measure the efficiency of major government service providers, such as police, courts and hospitals. This paper outlines the progress in implementing the new financial framework and illustrates the way NSW Treasury will use DEA to help improve the efficiency of government service providers by describing an analysis of the NSW Police Service. The results suggest that NSW police patrols (local police districts) could, on average, reduce input usage by 13.5 percent through better management, and by 6 percent if the patrols could be restructured to achieve the optimal scale. Results also indicate that differences in operating environments, such as location and socioeconomic factors, do not have a significant influence upon the efficiency of police patrols.     

Teams, Firms and the Evolution of Profit Seeking Behavior

Even as advances in information theory over the last quarter century have cast increasing doubt on the proposition that firms successfully maximize profits, the objective of profit maximization continues to be an axiomatic feature of the neoclassical theory of the firm. This paper attempts to improve our understanding firms by treating the objective function as an open question. Specifically, an ontogenetic thought experiment is undertaken to address the question of what differentiates production teams from firms by asking why team members would sell their control rights to a principal, thereby transforming the team into a firm. What results is an account of the emergence of the objective of profit seeking. Profit seeking emerges endogenously as a more fit alternative than the objective of value maximization, which is less capable of coping with uncertainty through purposive adaptation.     

Agency Structure and Firm Culture: OSHA, EPA, and the Steel Industry

We compare models of Occupational Safety and Health Administration(OSHA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforcementand compliance for steel plants during the 1980s. We find thatOSHA and EPA respond similarly to plant-level compliance andmeasures of hazardousness, but differently to firm-level complianceand risks of plant closing, and we relate the differences tothe agencies' differing organizational structures. Plant-levelcompliance is affected by enforcement pressure, compliance costs,and the firm's overall compliance behavior in similar ways forthe two regulatory areas, but environmental compliance was alsosensitive to plant size and risk of closing. Finally, we findthat the likelihood that a plant was in compliance with oneagency seemed at most weakly related to whether it was in compliancewith the other, but that plants likely to receive enforcementattention from one agency were also more likely to receive enforcementattention from the other agency.