Trade Union Approaches towards the ICE Regulations: Defensive Realism or Missed Opportunity?

Reflecting debates about whether statutory workforce‐wide consultation arrangements are likely to undermine or underpin trade union representation, unions' approaches towards the UK's Information and Consultation of Employees Regulations 2004 have been ambivalent and their engagement with the legislation limited. Evidence from longitudinal case studies in 25 organizations suggests that the introduction of information and consultation bodies did not have the effect of marginalizing trade union representation and collective bargaining, and in some cases reinforced unions' standing within the organization. The article highlights the implications for union strategies and legislative reform, and suggests a research agenda.     

Assessing the Efficacy of Structural Merger Remedies: Choosing Between Theories of Harm?

This paper shows that many structural remedies in a sample of European merger cases result in market structures which would probably not be cleared by the Competition Authority (CA) if they were the result of merger (rather than remedy). This is explained by the fact that the CA’s objective through remedy is to restore pre-merger competition, but markets are often highly concentrated even before merger. If so, the CA must often choose between clearing an ‘uncompetitive’ merger, or applying an unsatisfactory remedy. Here, the CA appears reluctant to intervene against coordinated effects, if doing so enhances a leader’s dominance.     

Do Formal Management Practices Impact the Emergence of Bootlegging Behavior?

Innovation in an organization often relies on initiatives by employees who take action to develop their ideas and obtain buy‐in by organizational decision‐makers. To achieve this, employees sometimes apply unorthodox approaches, ignoring formal structures to further elaborate their ideas' potential and promote their implementation. They work without formal legitimacy and gather their own resources until sufficient clarity allows for informed decisions. Finally, they bypass formal communication channels to convince top management of the merits of their ideas. Despite the significance of such bootlegging behavior, research has barely addressed the antecedents of this deviance. Drawing on strain theory and social cognitive theory, we study whether the emergence of bootlegging behavior is influenced by formal management practices, in particular, strategic autonomy, front‐end formality, rewards, and sanctions. Additionally, we investigate the role of employees' self‐efficacy related to innovation tasks at the entrepreneurial stage to explain the emergence of bootlegging. We tested the proposed relationships with empirical field survey data using structural equation modeling. In summary, this paper concludes that intrapreneurial self‐efficacy, strategic autonomy, and rewards for innovation accomplishments foster bootlegging. Front‐end formality has a positive effect on bootlegging by increasing intrapreneurial self‐efficacy, but it reduces the likelihood that employees will ignore formal structures when promoting their ideas and gathering their own resources to support their bootlegging efforts.     

Assessing Finland's Wireless Valley: can the pioneering continue?

Internationally, the success of Finland's Wireless Valley, i.e., the Finnish telecom/mobile cluster, has often been credited to Finnish industry competitiveness, population dispersion, and pro-technology attitudes. Yet, the number of competitors has been low, while demographic dispersion and technology attitudes have not been that different from those in other Nordic countries. In effect, the cluster performance during the second-generation rivalry has been a function of geopolitics (Finland's special relationship with Tsarist Russia and Soviet Union), public strategies (Nordic cooperation, EU strategies and Finnish liberalization in the 1970s and 1980s), and first-mover advantages (firm-level strategies of Finnish mobile vendors and operators). In the emerging 3G competition, the importance of geopolitics and public strategies has become secondary to that of the marketplace. As a result, the Finnish success drivers are dissipating in the new environment.     

The Impact of the Financial Crisis on the Global Seaborne Hard Coal Market: Are there Implications for the Future?

The global financial crisis in 2008 sent commodity markets spinning which caused demand to erode, price levels to quickly plummet and project financing costs to rise. In this paper, the authors examine the impacts the economic slowdown has had on the global seaborne hard coal market looking at the impacts for both coking (metallurgical) and thermal (steam) coals including pricing, supply availability, demand and aggregated mine level production costs. The hard coal market experienced a significant slow down; the commodity has bounced back strongly in 2010 driven by strong Asian demand at growth rates above historic levels and strong projections for the future.     

Do Social Media Tools Impact the Development Phase? An Exploratory Study

Over the past two decades, firms have increasingly adopted information technology (IT) tools and services to improve the new product development (NPD) process. Recently, social media tools and/or tools that include social networking features are being utilized to allow users both inside and outside the organization to easily communicate and collaboratively design, manage, and launch new products and services. Unfortunately, there is little empirical evidence to suggest what influence these new IT tools have on NPD performance. Through a project‐level, exploratory, empirical study, the impact of these new IT tools on the development phase of the NPD process is investigated. We find that the use of these new tools is significantly lower than the adoption of traditional IT tools such as e‐mail and computer‐aided‐design. Traditional tools have a significant, positive impact on NPD outcomes, including team collaboration, the concepts/prototypes generated, and management evaluation. Interestingly, new media tools such as project wikis and shared collaboration spaces also have a significant, positive impact on concepts/prototypes generated, and management evaluation. Surprisingly, social networking tools like weblogs and Twitter negatively impact management evaluation while having no impact on NPD team collaboration and concepts/prototypes generated. These results suggest that social networking tools in their current guise are not helpful to the NPD team and may in fact be distracting to innovation management during the development phase.     

What Are the Effective Strategic Orientations for New Product Success under Different Environments? An Empirical Study of Chinese Businesses

Innovation is an organization's spanning process that must continually change in response to, and in anticipation of, changing business environments. Research in the fields of marketing and management has examined individual strategic orientations (SOs) (such as market orientation) and their relationship to innovation performance. Few studies, however, have compared the effectiveness of different SOs for innovation performance in a single study. It is also not clear from previous research whether the business environment influences the effectiveness of the SOs. The objective of this paper is therefore twofold: it aims to evaluate (1) whether a focus on the customer, the technology, the competitor, or the interfunctional coordination, will have the greatest impact on new product success, and (2) whether the effectiveness of a specific SO varies with the environment. Data were collected from more than 500 senior executives in a wide range of manufacturing and service firms in China. Using cluster analysis and an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model, which are commonly adopted to examine the effects of environments on the relationship between strategy and performance, we identified four subgroups of firms facing distinctively different market and competitive environments. As predicted, the results show that all four SOs have (albeit to a different degree) a significant and positive relationship with innovation performance. More importantly, the results point to the relative advantage in pursuing a specific SO by taking into account its effect under different environments and the effects of other SOs. However, the particularly strong effect of technology orientation compared to that of the other SOs on new product performance across all clusters is somewhat surprising. We offer some tentative explanations for this finding, though further research will be required to fully understand it. Overall, our findings indicate the need for managers to be responsive to environmental contexts and to allocate resources to pursue the effective (hence appropriate) strategic orientations for the specific context.     

The Impact of an increasing share of RES-E on the Conventional Power Market — The Example of Germany

The intermittency of wind power has a decreasing effect on day-ahead spot prices. Data from Germany illustrate this effect and explain the underlying relationships. This short-term price effect leads to an adaptation process in the conventional generation capacity mix. In the long-run, a higher peak load plant share is required to cope with the increasing volatility of the residual demand. The result is an adapted merit-order. This merit-order intersects with an increasingly volatile residual demand curve and leads to a higher price volatility in the power market, which is going to trigger further adaptations. Therefore this article concludes with a list of open research questions, which can be derived from the illustrated relationship. These research questions should be investigated as soon as possible in order to induce the required adaptations in time.     

Does how you pay influence the share of healthy items that you Buy? Assessing differences in nutritional quality of food purchases by payment type

Shoppers that use cash as a form of payment are more likely to evaluate the necessity of an item they purchase than shoppers that pay with other forms of payment, such as credit cards. In this paper, we hypothesize that the use of cash may nudge shoppers to buy more healthful food items. We empirically evaluate whether the payment method affects the nutritional quality of food purchases. We also test whether the effect of payment type differs between food-at-home and food-away-from-home events. Specifically, we test whether shoppers purchase a higher share of nutritious food items when they pay with cash compared to when they use credit and debit cards. We use the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) data that tracks individual’s food purchases over one week. Using the Guiding Stars Program (GSP) algorithm to measure the nutritional quality of food items, we calculate the share of healthy items purchased at each event. We find that shoppers using cash purchase a higher share of healthy items than when they use credit or debit cards, and this nudging effect is primarily driven by food-away-from-home purchases.     

How do CEO emotions matter? Impact of CEO affective traits on strategic and performance conformity in the spanish banking industry

Research on how managers influence firm outcomes has generated promising explanations of differences in organizational strategies and performance within a given industry, but has largely ignored the role of emotions in shaping managers' strategic choices. This article analyzes the influence of the affective traits of CEOs—their long‐term tendency to experience positive or negative moods or emotions—on strategy and performance conformity in a sample of Spanish banks and savings banks. Our results show that managers' negative affective traits are related to more conformist strategies and more typical performance, whereas positive affective traits seem to promote outcomes that deviate from the central tendencies of the industry. Results also show that strategic conformity mediates the relationship between CEO negative affective traits and typical performance. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stage‐to‐Stage Information Dependency in the NPD Process: Effective Learning or a Potential Entrapment of NPD Gates?

The new product development (NPD) process is a sequence of stages and gates. Each stage consists of NPD activities that provide NPD managers with information input about the new product project progression. Information input is used for review decisions at gates. Over the course of an NPD process, managers learn about a new product project as to ensure successful launch. The view is that a new product project is shaped by the path of NPD activities it has traveled. Because learning is assumed to take place over the course of the NPD process, stage‐to‐stage information dependency is an assumption of NPD research. A concern raised is that development activities for each NPD stage are rigorously followed by NPD managers. In other words, stage‐to‐stage information dependency may potentially trap NPD managers rather than create effective learning from end to end of the development process. The purpose of this paper is to explore the assumption of stage‐to‐stage information dependency in NPD. The investigated research questions are whether the selection of NPD activities is linked between stages and whether these information dependencies strengthen NPD gate decisions. For the information dependencies identified in the study, the innovation experience characteristics of NPD managers pursuing them and the influence of information dependencies on NPD gate decisions are analyzed so as to provide insights for a discussion of information dependency versus information independency in the NPD process. The applied research method is an experiential simulation of NPD gate decision‐making—NPDGATES. One hundred thirty‐one NPD managers from international product development strategic business units (SBUs) situated in Denmark participated in the study. Logistic regressions were conducted as the basis for the calculation of stage‐to‐stage information dependency probabilities. Based on the study findings, the assumption about information dependency in the NPD process held by NPD research is found to be flawed. End‐to‐end information paths in the NPD process are rare. Further, market condition changes are found to significantly influence the stage‐to‐stage information dependencies demonstrated by NPD managers. It seems that competition becomes a reassurance of NPD efforts. Also, the results show that NPD experience creates inflexibility in relation to the selection of NPD activities. The need for strict process management is strong among experienced NPD managers. In relation to NPD gates, the results show that information dependencies increase priority given to financial decision criteria at gates and lower priority given to customer and market decision criteria. Overall, stage‐to‐stage information dependency seems to create inflexibility that hinders successful NPD process implementation.     

What determines the elasticity of industry demand?

This paper develops estimates of price elasticity of demand for a sample of U.S. food and tobacco manufacturing industries and tests a model explaining differences in interindustry elasticity. The empirical results are consistent with the hypothesis that demand elasticity is in part determined by the competitive behavior of firms in an industry. In particular, high advertising expenditures result in lower elasticities of demand. Other important variables influencing demand elasticity are industry concentration, the stage of production, the existence of protection from domestic and foreign entry, and the extent of new-product introduction in a particular market.     

Does Homeownership Prolong the Duration of Unemployment?

We examine the effects of homeownership on individuals' unemployment durations. An unemployment spell can terminate with a job or with nonparticipation. The endogeneity of homeownership is addressed by estimating a full maximum likelihood function jointly modeling the competing hazards and the probability of being a homeowner. Unobserved factors contributing to the probability of being a homeowner are allowed to be correlated with unobservable heterogeneity in the hazard rates. Not controlling for ownership selection, there is neither a significant difference in the job‐finding hazard nor in the nonparticipation hazard of unemployed owners and renters. If we jointly model the ownership selection, we find that unemployed homeowners are more likely to find a job than renters.     

What is the function of a figurine? Can the repertory grid technique tell?

Teaching design and product development at upper secondary school level in Sweden is a matter of interdisciplinary considerations. Education in product development, at this level, prepares students for further studies and career in engineering or industrial design. Knowledge of artefacts is an important element in the education. In coherence with the visual and rhetorical strategies characterising the knowledge field, students learn how to develop an idea to a final product. In this study twelve engineers and industrial designers, professionals representing the knowledge field of product development are studied regarding their interpretations of eight pre-selected artefacts. Data is collected and analysed using repertory grid technique. The aim of the study is to examine whether/what we can learn from the informants’ experiences and knowledge that is relevant to education in design and product development at upper secondary school level. Findings show that four of the artefacts appear to be carriers of attributes that reveal the interviewees’ definitions of the artefacts’ functional nature. From these findings it is shown that the interviewees’ definitions of concepts concerning aesthetics/decoration and function can be seen as cultural expressions. How the repertory grid technique is used in this particular study is thoroughly described and the results relevance for education is discussed.     

In the Eye of the Beholder? The Effect of Product Appearance on Shareholder Value

In times of convergence with regard to product functionality and performance, the appearance of a product constitutes an important source of competitive advantage. Astonishingly, only a few studies have empirically examined the relationship between design‐related aspects and firm value. Moreover, existing studies predominantly use accounting‐based and/or subjective performance measures. Against this background, the present work assesses the contribution of the three most important product design dimensions (i.e., aesthetic, ergonomic, and symbolic value) to the creation of firm value in the context of the automotive and consumer electronics industry. To do so, we examine stock market reactions to the unveiling of a new product's appearance to the public using event study methodology. In particular, we combine perceptual data at the consumer level with stock market data to examine how target consumers' perceptions of the aforementioned design dimensions are related to abnormal returns following the unveiling of a new product. Results reveal that ergonomic value is positively related to abnormal returns, while aesthetic value only exerts a significant positive effect on abnormal returns if the product also exhibits a certain degree of functional product advantage. Finally, symbolic value exerts a negative influence on stock market reactions. These findings have important implications for the allocation of design‐related investments to aesthetic, ergonomic, and symbolic design features.     

“Because you are a part of me”: Assessing the effects of salesperson social media use on job outcomes and the moderating roles of moral identity and gender

Although the effects of salesperson social media use have recently received significant scholarly attention, there remains critical research gaps that, if addressed, can further broaden our understanding of the impact of salesperson social media use in business-to-business settings. Grounded in construal level theory and the related psychological distance framework, we suggest that salesperson social media use increases salesperson inclusion-of-the-customer-in-the-self by reducing the psychological distance between the salesperson and their respective customers. More so, we posit that this relationship is positively moderated by salesperson moral identity, such that the relationship is strengthened at higher levels of moral identity. Furthermore, we identify a potential three-way interaction by considering the role of salesperson gender in driving this interactive relationship. Our results, based on survey responses from 158 business-to-business salespeople, lend support to our theoretical model and shows that the moderating effect of salesperson moral identity on the relationship between salesperson social media use and salesperson inclusion-of-customer-in-the-self is stronger for females than it is for males. Additionally, we find that salesperson inclusion-of-customer-in-the-self is related to higher salesperson customer knowledge, which, ultimately, improves salesperson performance. In the light of our findings, we discuss subsequent managerial and theoretical implications.     

Does the growth of mobile markets cause the demise of fixed networks? – Evidence from the European Union

The increasing usage of mobile communication and the declining demand for fixed line telephony in Europe make the analysis of substitutional effects between fixed and mobile networks a key aspect for future telecommunication regulation. Using a unique dataset which contains information on all 27 European Union members from 2003 to 2009, we analyze substitutability between fixed and mobile telecommunication services in Europe by applying dynamic panel data techniques. We find strong empirical evidence for substitution from fixed to cellular networks throughout Europe. In addition, the paper reveals resulting policy implications.