Crafting customer insight: What we can learn from the revival of the vinyl record

The recent resurgence of the vinyl record and the proliferation of so-called craft and artisanal products offer unique opportunities to observe ongoing shifts in the contemporary consumer’s values and attitudes. In this article, we explore such thought-provoking market developments and their implications by contrasting them with the conventional understanding of markets and consumers. This understanding can lead to marketing myopia as it works from the utility-oriented assumption that what ultimately matters for both the company and the customer is cost efficiency and convenience. Against this backdrop, in this article, we discuss how market developments representing the contemporary consumer’s mindset prove valuable in creating customer insight that highlights aspects often obscured by an exaggerated focus on cost efficiency and convenience. We provide an alternative approach to evaluating markets and consumers that encourages companies to build their customer-centric market strategies around questions of context, authenticity, story, and resonance. This will help them narrow the gap between their market offerings and the actual wants and needs of their customer, and consequently allow them to revitalize their market.     

Estimating matching functions when recruiting intensity matters

The article estimates matching functions – the relationships between new hires, job vacancies and unemployment – using monthly time series data for Sweden. The data contain rich information on types of job vacancies which provides information on firms’ recruiting efforts. The analysis shows that the aggregate flow of new hires is well explained by an augmented version of a standard matching function that incorporates data on firms’ recruiting intensity.     

Wage and employment determination in volatile times: Sweden 1913–1939

The paper studies wage and employment determination in the Swedish business sector from the mid-1910s to the late 1930s. This period includes the boom and bust cycle of the early 1920s as well as the Great Depression of the early 1930s. The events of the early 1920s are particularly intriguing, involving inflation running at an annual rate of 30 percent followed by a period of sharp deflation where nominal wages and prices fell by 30 percent and unemployment increased from 5 to 30 percent. We examine whether relatively standard wage and employment equations can account for the volatile economic development during the interwar years. By and large, the answer is a qualified yes. Industry wages were responsive to industry-specific firm performance, suggesting a significant role for “insider forces” in wage determination. Unemployment had a strong downward impact on wages. There is evidence that reductions in working time added to wage pressure; yet, estimates of labor demand equations suggest that cuts in working time may have slightly increased employment as firms substituted workers for hours per worker.     

“One of these days,things are going to change!” How do you make sense of market disruption?

The significance of mindsets is apparent in everyday business life. As today’s managers and companies face uncertainty and disruptive change in the business environment and markets, there is a growing need to understand and strategically address such change. This becomes challenging when disruptive market forces confront the institutional logic or rules of the game based on collectively acquired experience of doing business in the given field. In overcoming such challenges, managers’ hidden reasoning remains an untapped potential while their existing mindset influences what they attend to and what they decide to do. This article elaborates a diagnostic framework, accompanied by a tool to help managers make sense of disruptive markets and reflect individually and collectively on possible courses of action. The framework has two principal dimensions—strategic scope and focus—that are further divided into three business elements of strategic market-oriented management: offering, customer, and market. The tool offers a practical means of profiling individuals’ mindsets. In increasingly dynamic business environments, reflection capabilities represent a new source of competitive advantage.     

Die Beziehung zwischen internationalem Handel und internationalen Bewegungen von Kapital und Arbeit

Ohne ZusammenfassungDieser Aufsatz gibt den hauptsächlichen Inhalt von drei Vorlesungen wieder, die im Dezember 1929 an der London School of Economics gehalten wurden. Er ist fast identisch mit einigen Abschnitten aus dem Buche des Autors Interregional and International Trade, welches sich nun seiner lang aufgeschobenen Veröffentlichung nähert.Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Gerhard Tintner, Wine.     

Is the gender gap in school performance affected by the sex of the teacher?

Girls outperform boys in school. We investigate whether the gender performance gap can be attributed to the fact that the teacher profession is female dominated, that is, is there a causal effect on student outcomes from having a same-sex teacher? Using data on upper-secondary school students and their teachers from the municipality of Stockholm, Sweden, we find that the gender performance differential is larger in subjects where the share of female teachers is higher. We argue, however, that this effect can not be interpreted as causal, mainly due to teacher selection into different subjects and non-random student-teacher matching. Exploring the fact that teacher turnover and student mobility give rise to variation in teacher's gender within student and subject, we estimate the effect on student outcomes of changing to a teacher of the same sex. We find no strong support for our initial hypothesis that a same-sex teacher improves student outcomes.     

Initiation of business relationships in service-dominant settings

Industrial companies today are becoming increasingly service-oriented and therefore need to shift from selling hardware to valuing services and managing customer relationships. A new and particularly significant challenge for these companies is how to initiate relationships which is an issue that has received surprisingly limited scientific attention. The aim of this study is to develop a conceptualization that explores the dynamics in the relationship initiation process in service-dominant settings. Narratives from three sellers of professional services, augmented with narratives from a buyer's view, form the empirical basis of the study. The dynamics in the relationship initiation process are clarified with three new concepts: status, converter, and inhibitor. The paper concludes with implications of the new conceptualization and suggestions for future research.     

Simple aggregation and disaggregation subject to minimal information loss and other criteria

The main purpose of this paper is to develop a method and an algorithm for the aggregation as well as disaggregation of n-way tables, thereby minimizing a set of suitable criteria. One should observe that there is no real difference between aggregation and disaggregation when using this method. Here are presented some basic facts about a mainly one-dimensional method and an outline showing how the method may be extended to more complex cases.