National response strategies and marketing innovations during the COVID-19 pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, different nations have adopted a variety of response strategies to fight and contain the new coronavirus. Such national response strategies can be classified into three categories based on their underlying philosophy: strict control with unlimited resources, relentless contribution with limited resources, and rough rationality with limited resources. We discuss the philosophies, characteristics, and performances of the three response strategies and when they should be adopted. We also examine what marketing innovation strategies enterprises should adopt to survive and grow their businesses in both the short and long term. This study provides important strategic implications for national policymakers and enterprises on the use of response strategies as well as marketing innovation tactics and strategies to be used both during and after the pandemic.     

Partnerships and production: Agriculture and polygyny in Tanzanian households

Women make important contributions to household food production in sub‐Saharan Africa. Women's agricultural productivity is often reduced, however, by inefficient intrahousehold allocation of agricultural resources. Complex marital structures found in polygynous households may complicate resource allocation. Using three waves of the Tanzania Living Standards Measurement Survey–Integrated Survey on Agriculture, we measure the effect of the marital structure, wife position, and plot management on agricultural productivity and input allocations. We find evidence of cooperation within polygynous households. Plots managed by husbands and wives in polygynous households produce more valuable crops, have higher yields, and are more likely to use fertilizer than their monogamous counterparts. Within polygynous households, we observe that plots jointly managed by husbands, first wives, and second wives (together) have significantly more family labor than plots managed by husbands and first wives. This result may provide evidence of different production technologies across plot managers within the same households.     

Legislative protection from discrimination in access to employer‐provided training

This article provides an analysis of laws across all 193 United Nations countries that protect workers from discrimination in access to employer‐provided training. We assessed the overall level of protection and the characteristics most commonly protected, as well as the extent of variation across geographic regions and country income. Overall, 60% of countries were found to offer specific protections from discrimination in access to training for at least one of the seven protected characteristics, which was significantly less than the percentage of countries offering protections from discriminatory hiring or terminations. Gender was the most commonly protected characteristic, whereas sexual orientation was least commonly protected. These findings suggest that employer‐provided training is less well‐protected from discrimination when compared with other aspects of employment and that there is variation in protection across socio‐demographic characteristics and geographic regions. Additional legislation may be needed to ensure equitable access to training for all workers.     

Optimal regulation under imperfect enforcement: Permits,tickets, or both?

Economic activity is often regulated through both permits and tickets (subsequent inspections). We study the effectiveness of such policies where corruption and an underground economy make enforcement imperfect. In the theoretical model, asymmetric information justifies regulatory action which is enforced by corruptible bureaucrats. We find that regulation through permits alone is useless when corruption exists, while tickets still offer some benefit. Surprisingly, we also find that a system with both permits and tickets achieves welfare that is higher than that which can be achieved with only tickets—that combining the two mechanisms has an effect that is greater than the “sum of the parts.”     

Above and beyond? How businesses can drive sustainable development by promoting lasting pro-environmental behaviour change: An examination of the IKEA Live Lagom project

Current global changes require new business approaches driving sustainable development on all fronts. To date, most business approaches have focused on sustainable marketing and corporate social responsibility initiatives. In this field study, we examine IKEA's Live Lagom project, a 3-year behaviour change initiative that aimed to explore how to go above and beyond conventional approaches demonstrating how businesses could support sustainable development by supporting their customers' attempts to live more sustainable lifestyles. We examined the effectiveness of the project involving multifaceted behaviour change interventions, testing for behavioural changes both during and after the project period. In addition, we explored changes in participants' attitudes towards the company. Findings show that the extensive set of interventions led to changes in pro-environmental behaviours across all three participant groups with potentially positive impacts on the customer–company relationship. The article thus provides a call for further businesses to engage in similar behaviour change projects that would allow citizens to engage in more sustainable lifestyles and behaviours across contexts.     

Feminism and the Physical Cultural Studies Assemblage: Revisiting Debates and Imagining New Directions

Abstract

The relationship between feminism and PCS is complex and an exemplar of the politics of knowledge production. We begin this paper by detailing the evolving relationship between feminism and PCS, and identify two key ways that feminist sport scholars have responded to PCS. Whereas one group has rejected PCS outright, another is reappropriating PCS for their own purposes. Aligning with the latter, in the remainder of the paper we offer one of many possible imaginings of a feminist interpretation of the PCS assemblage. More specifically, we briefly outline how a feminist engagement with some of the key tenets of PCS facilitated new understandings of New Zealand women’s embodied experiences of netball, includingMāori women.In so doing, we reveal what a FPCS approach might look like in practice and highlight ways that feminist scholars have, and can continue to, contribute to the PCS agenda through embodied, theoretical, reflexive, political, contextual and culturally-specific research.     

Knowledge exchange in networked organizations: does place matter?

While many studies of knowledge exchange have been undertaken in private and service organizations, government and R&D enterprises, few have studied scientific inter‐organizational collaborations. Furthermore, in the literature on international networks there has been a tendency to assume that knowledge exchange will be inevitably enhanced by global dispersion. Two linked dynamics deserving further study are the role of geographic proximity and the role of information and communication technologies in facilitating knowledge flow across international networks. Studies of intra‐ and inter‐firm knowledge transfer, managerial work values and cultural norms all point to China as being a fascinating counterpoint for the way knowledge exchange might occur in Europe. So in this study of the ATLAS collaboration, a ‘big science’ global network of 3,500 physicists, we explore the perceptions of two subgroups: UK physicists working in Europe and Chinese scientists based in Beijing and HeFei. Findings from 24 interviews and non‐participant observation reveal that face‐to‐face working at European Organization for Nuclear Research (Geneva) is not without its difficulties, but for a variety of sociocultural reasons, it is primarily the Chinese scientists who perceive themselves to be inhibited from full participation in effective knowledge exchange.     

The sixteenth‐century price rise: new evidence from Scotland, 1500–85

This article contributes to the emerging belief among early modern economic historians that sixteenth‐century inflation was primarily caused by monetary factors. The Scottish case study reveals a strong relationship between coinage debasement and rising prices, a contention strengthened by the fact that the Scottish experience of inflation was high in European terms, and, in particular, stands at a considerable distance from the English pattern. This study includes the first scholarly examination of prices during the 1540s, and reveals that substantial inflation first emerged during this hitherto neglected decade. Prices plateaued during the 1550s, and rose consistently from 1560 to 1585. Meanwhile real wages declined during the 1540s and from 1560 onwards. This article is methodologically innovative in constructing two baskets of commodities, designed to represent the elite experience, alongside a more traditional basket based on a working household. These reveal the divergent experiences of the price rise within Scotland: rising prices hit the poor harder than the rich due to the high cost of domestic agricultural goods in the subsistence basket and the deflationary impact of wages and luxury goods upon the overall elite basket.     

Reorganizing School Lunch for a More Just and Sustainable Food System in the US

Public school lunch programs in the United States are contested political terrains shaped by government agencies, civil society activists, and agri-food companies. The particular organization of these programs has consequences for public health, social justice, and ecological sustainability. This contribution draws on political economy, critical food studies, and feminist economics to analyze the US National School Lunch Program, one of the world's oldest and largest government-sponsored school lunch programs. It makes visible the social and environmental costs of the “heat-and-serve” economy, where widely used metrics consider only the speed and volume of service as productive work. This study demonstrates that such a narrow understanding of the labor of lunch devalues care and undercuts the potential for school food provisioning to promote ecological and feminist goals. Further, it proposes a “high road” alternative and outlines an agenda for reorganizing school food provisioning to maximize care in all its dimensions.