Development of the ‘Travelcard’ Concept in Urban Public Transport

Traditionally, urban bus operators have collected fares in cash for each trip. Some limited mechanisation has occurred in ticket issue at stations. Partly for reasons of operating convenience, there has recently been a shift to simpler fares and prepayment, notably through the introduction of ‘Travelcards', that is, tickets or passes permitting unlimited use of the network (or zones thereof) for a defined period. These cover both all-bus systems, and bus/rail networks (such as the West Midlands PTE system). They are now used in all main British conurbations, following introduction of the London Transport bus/rail Travelcard in May 1983. The Travelcard in effect redefines the ‘product’ being sold. Instead of the public transport service being perceived as a series of separate journeys, payment is made periodically for use of the network as a whole. Cost perception is thus put on a similar basis to that for the private car. The marginal money cost for each trip becomes zero. Interchange penalties associated with re-booking are eliminated. Payment may be made by cheque or credit card, rather than cash, further changing the perception of costs. Product quality is also enhanced through speeding up of services (one-person- operated buses), and enabling the user to select the quickest and/or most convenient route in a network by removing the interchange penalty.     

‘Checkout’: The Analysis of Oligopolistic Behaviour in the UK Grocery Retail Market

Industrial economics is particularly concerned with the relationships between market concentration, market behaviour, pricing and market performance. When, in June 1977, Tesco launched its ‘Operation Checkout’ so began one of the most intensely competitive periods of retailing history. Checkout, which was a wide price-cutting campaign backed up by extensive advertising, provides an ideal opportunity to examine the rivalry of leading grocery companies. This paper examines the events leading up to Checkout, during the initial campaign and after; it examines the possible causes of Checkout and whether it was successful. The paper asks whether the behaviour of firms surrounding Tesco can be considered to be oligopolistic and, if so, what this may mean for the future.     

‘Productivity on the Cheap’? The ‘More Looms’ Experiment and the Lancashire Weaving Industry during the Inter-War Years

Two major debates in the literature, productivity performance and the decline of the cotton industry, are joined in the analysis presented in this article on the attempts to raise productivity through the introduction of the more looms per weaver system in cotton weaving in the inter-war years. We find that the limited resultant changes were the outcome of understandable predisposition to maintain co-operative behaviour which meant that productivity enhancing schemes with long term potential were sacrificed for more modest schemes which preserved consensus in the short term.     

The Fascist ‘Disciplining’ of the Italian Retail Sector, 1922–40

Under the Fascist dictatorship, fundamental laws for the regulation or ‘disciplining’ of retail commerce were introduced. This article analyses three main features of these – the creation of a compulsory retailers' confederation, the system of price controls, and the introduction of a licensing system. The regime's priority for retailing was that it should distribute essential commodities at the lowest possible prices, thereby satisfying basic demand within an economy that privileged production at the expense of consumption. The original expectation was that this would be achieved through a combination of the ‘modernisation’ of retailers' practices and a reduction in the numbers of small scale enterprises. Ultimately, however, it was traditional retailers who proved most able to adjust to the declining profitability and lack of opportunity that characterised distribution in the Fascist era.     

The World Capital Markets’ Perception of Sustainability and the Impact of the Financial Crisis

Using a unique dataset provided by the international rating agency GES^®, we investigate the effects of corporate sustainability and industry-related exposure to environmental and social risks on the market value of MSCI World firms. The results show a negative relationship in the earlier years of our sample period. However, the analysis reveals that the capital market perception of sustainability has changed owing to the financial crisis. Looking at the height of the crisis in September 2008, the month in which Lehman Brothers shocked the world’s capital markets by filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, we find that the previously negative perception of corporate sustainability across its various dimensions was positively affected and offset. In addition, as a moderated regression analysis shows, the crisis led to a positive perception of corporate sustainability in industries that are exposed to higher environmental and social risks. Our study has the practical implication that executives, in particular in industries with high environmental and social risks, should increase their commitment to corporate sustainability due to the changes in the institutional setting triggered by the financial crisis.     

The Impact of the Multi-channel Retail Mix on Online Store Choice: Does Online Experience Matter?

More and more grocery retailers are becoming multi-channel retailers, as they are opening an online alternative next to their traditional offline supermarkets. While the number of multi-channel grocery shoppers is also expanding at a fast growth rate, there are still large differences in online shopping frequency, and as a result, in the levels of experience with buying in the online grocery channel. This study wants to (i) identify the underlying drivers of online store choice and (ii) explore if and how these drivers change when multi-channel shoppers gain online grocery shopping experience. We investigate this question with an online store choice model using purchase data of an extensive UK household panel over a two-year period, covering all multi-channel retailers in the grocery market. Our results show that multi-channel shoppers, at the start of online grocery shopping, tend to select the online store belonging to the same chain as their preferred offline store, especially when the online store is strongly integrated with the offline store in terms of assortment. When online grocery shopping experience increases, multi-channel shoppers’ focus shifts from a comparison within a chain across channels to a comparison across chains within the online channel, resulting in an increasing importance of online assortment attractiveness and online loyalty when choosing an online store.     

Forgiving the Unforgivable: The Possibility of the ‘Unconditional’ Forgiveness in the Workplace

Forgiveness has been a central issue for humankind since ancient times; it emerged in theology, but in recent decades it has received significant attention from different disciplines, such as philosophy and psychology. More recently, forgiveness has received attention also from organizational and managerial studies, particularly, in studying how individuals respond to interpersonal offenses, or perceived harm and wrongdoing in the workplace. Forgiveness is a complex concept, as it can be understood as a family of related constructs and can be analyzed at different levels. Even if social sciences have widely recognized that the nature of forgiveness can be both conditional and unconditional, the notions of conditionality and unconditionality have not yet received sufficient study, especially in organizational and managerial fields. In these fields, forgiveness has been predominantly studied under a psychological approach, looking for the conditions under which it may occur in the workplace. Unconditional forgiveness has received less attention: with a few exceptions, managerial and organizational literature has limited the conceptualization of forgiveness, weakening its scope and probably not catching a relevant part of forgiving experiences in the workplace. This article proposes to follow a more comprehensive approach to forgiveness in the workplace, according to the social sciences field, which can take into account both conditionality and unconditionality. It focuses on unconditional forgiveness according to Continental philosophy, in particular, to the thought of Jacque Derrida and Paul Ricoeur. Through their contributions, the unconditionality of forgiveness is deepened, and the implications of considering both conditional and unconditional forgiveness are discussed.

     

The ‘layering’ of management in post-war Britain: The case of the Office Management Association

The mid-twentieth century saw the creation of layers of managerial jobs in Britain. The increasing numbers of managers and a persistent degree of social closure at the top of organisational hierarchies led groups of managers to try to define specialist management functions as justification for holding organisational power. The Office Management Association was one such group. It promoted office managers’ expertise in the efficient running of the administrative side ofenterprises as a specialist managerial function worthy of a high place in managerial hierarchies. But specialisation was also fragmentation that would weaken the entire occupational group of all managers.     

The Regulation of Retail Investment Services in the EU: Towards the Improvement of Investor Rights?

Despite the fact that a substantial body of European Community (EC) law already exists to protect retail investors, the markets in retail investment services and products in the EU remain fragmented. Moreover, the recent financial crisis has undermined investor confidence in financial markets more generally, and “packaged” retail investment products (PRIP), such as investment funds or life insurance policies, in particular. To rebuild retail investor confidence in PRIP by empowering retail investors to make active use of their rights, in 2009 the European Commission proposed to extend the provisions of the 2004 Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) to PRIP. Is the MiFID, however, fit for the purpose which the Commission has in mind? This contribution explores to what extent the MiFID actually confers rights on retail investors and empowers them to make use of these rights. The author concludes that investor rights and remedies should be taken more seriously when making European financial services law. The current overhaul of the EC legal framework for the provision of investment services provides a good opportunity to do so.     

Morals,Markets and Sustainable Investments: A Qualitative Study of ‘Champions’

Sustainable investment (SI), which integrates social, environmental and ethical issues, has grown from a niche market of individual ethical investors to embrace institutional investors (e.g. pension funds) resulting in ￡764 billion in assets under management in the UK alone [Eurosif, 2008: ‘European SRI Study 2008’ (Eurosif, Paris)]. Explaining this growth is complex, involving shifts in personal and collective values, reactions to corporate scandals, scientific and media pronouncements about climate change, Government initiatives, responses from financial markets and the influence of SI innovators in The City of London. The article examines the influence of human agency through interviews with 14 SI champions who have variously been responsible for launching SI funds and changing investment processes and organisational structures in order to enhance SI. Interviewees were asked about their motivations and persuasive strategies, the obstacles they faced and how they overcame them as well as broader implications of SI for financial markets. The following key categories inform the results and the discussion: Values; Conservatism, Antipathy and Incredulity; Optimism and Sympathy from Insiders; The Social and Political Context; The Business Case; Organisational Constraints; Inappropriate forms of Remuneration; Short-termism; The Nature of Capitalism. Three discourses were also identified. The first is the necessity to make a business case for SI; the second is the benefits that SI can bring to the quest of overcoming short-termism; the third is a belief that for SI to have a significant influence, greater government intervention is required.     

Start ‘Em Early: Pastoral Power and the Confessional Culture of Leadership Development in the US University

We apply a critical perspective on leadership development discourses and practices to the case of student leadership development programs in the US universities and colleges. We leverage the first author’s personal experiences as a facilitator in such programs to focus on the manner in which they adapt and deploy a variety of commodified pop and positive psychology techniques—including prominently among them icebreakers and psychological assessment tests—that encourage participants to share personal and emotional insights about themselves as the necessary prerequisite for becoming leaders. We draw on Foucault’s notion of pastoral power to argue that these quasi-therapeutic practices help to produce and to normalize what we describe as a confessional culture of leadership development that prepares would-be student leaders to submit themselves to similarly or even more psychologically demanding regimes of governmentality in the workplace after they graduate. We conclude with a call for future research on the central role of such leadership development practices—and the institutions, industries, and actors that promote them—in folding together the ways that individuals seek to claim agency and to develop themselves as leaders with the ways that organizations function to constrain that agency and to govern them as willing but compliant subjects.

     

The ‘big data’ myth and the pitfalls of ‘thick data’ opportunism: on the need for a different ontology of markets and consumption

ABSTRACT

The twin pillars of big data and data analytics are rapidly transforming the institutional conditions that situate marketing research. In response, many proponents of culturalist paradigms have adopted the vernacular of ‘thick data’ to defend their vulnerable position in the marketing research field. However, thick data proselytising fails to challenge several outmoded ontological assumptions that are manifest in the big data myth and it situates socio-cultural modes of marketing thought in a counterproductive technocratic discourse. In building this argument, I first discuss the relevant historical continuities and discontinuities that have shaped the big data myth and the thick data opportunism. Next, I argue that culturally oriented marketing researchers should promote a different ontological frame— the analytics of marketplace assemblages—to address how big data, or more accurately its socio-technical infrastructure, produces new kinds of emergent and hybrid market structures, modes of social aggregation, consumption practices, and prosumptive capacities.     

‘Gone to Gowings’ - An Analysis of Success Factors in Retail Longevity: Gowings of Sydney

Low productivity within service industries has been a major concern, but this situation is unlikely to improve without a general change in the way productivity is measured and managed. This paper aims to illustrate the value of stepwise data envelopment analysis (DEA) for measuring and benchmarking productivity. The issues and problems regarding productivity measurement as well as the advantages of using DEA in productivity measurement are analysed. The article extends current DEA applications by developing a stepwise approach to DEA. The latter technique combines correlation and DEA analysis for developing robust models and sound productivity measurement. The advantages of the proposed methodology are illustrated by applying it to a dataset of three-star hotels in the UK. Six inputs and three outputs are identified as the factors affecting rooms division efficiency in three star hotels.     

Bearing ‘the burden and heat of the day’: The experience of business failure in Douglas & Grant Ltd.

This article looks at the role of business culture in a business failure. Using the extensive records of the Scottish engineering firm of Douglas & Grant Ltd., it explores how the choices made by the firm's leaders were shaped by their values and assumptions. The article argues that the failure of the firm to manage expansion in the first decades of the twentieth century was rooted in these values, which both encouraged its leaders to take risks and constrained their ability to manage change.     

The Role of Commodified Celebrities in Children’s Moral Development: The Case of David Beckham

This paper presents an existentialist interpretation of the identity constituting meanings that middle‐class men and women ascribe to their bodies and their related motivations to engage in consumption activities that seek to transform their embodied selves. We begin by describing the relevance of the existential conceptualization of the embodied self to the postmodern condition of consumer culture. We apply this existential perspective to discern three dialectically structured themes drawn from phenomenological interviews with men and women across a broad age range. One emergent and unexpected finding is the extent to which these men and women expressed a constellation of common body image anxieties, thematic meanings, and self‐critical, objectifying interpretations of their bodies. Based on these findings and historical considerations, we propose that men's embodied selves are, like women's, fully inscribed in the patriarchal discourses that circulate throughout postmodern consumer culture. However, men occupy a distinct social space and, accordingly, we argue that their embodied selves are uniquely situated in a cultural model of hegemonic masculinity. We conclude that the postmodern ideal of the plastic, transformable body has become a resonant cultural metaphor through which middle‐class consumers enact their identity projects of creating a desired embodied self.     

The Employee as ‘Dish of the Day’: The Ethics of the Consuming/Consumed Self in Human Resource Management

This article examines the ethical implications of the growing integration of consumption into the heart of the employment relationship. Human resource management (HRM) practices increasingly draw upon the values and practices of consumption, constructing employees as the ??consumers?? of ??cafeteria-style?? benefits and development opportunities. However, at the same time employees are expected to market themselves as items to be consumed on a corporate menu. In relation to this simultaneous position of consumer/consumed, the employee is expected to actively engage in the commodification of themselves, performing an appropriate organizational identity as a necessary part of being a successful employee. This article argues that the relationship between HRM and the simultaneously consuming/consumed employee affects the conditions of possibility for ethical relations within organizational life. It is argued that the underlying ??ethos?? for the integration of consumption values into HRM practices encourages a self-reflecting, self-absorbed subject, drawing upon a narrow view of individualised autonomy and choice. Referring to Levinas?? perspective that the primary ethical relation is that of responsibility and openness to the Other, it is concluded that these HRM practices affect the possibility for ethical being.     

‘Wealthy and Titled Persons’ – The Accumulation of Riches in Victorian Britain: The Case of Peter Denny

This paper utilises previously examined costing material for the Consett Iron Company Ltd in an attempt to throw some light on how business in the mid-Victorian period made key decisions. The nature of the costing information available to management, its limitations for decision-making purposes, and how the costing system was developed in response to the problems facing the company in the late 1860s, are examined. It is concluded that the company adapted its costing system perceptively to cope with real problems, though the changes introduced may not always have been ideal as seen from the perspective of modern management accounting.     

The impact of country-of-origin on the acceptance of foreign subsidiaries in host countries: An examination of the ‘liability-of-foreignness’

This paper examines the relationship between an organization's country-of-origin and the acceptance into a host country environment by constituents such as vendors, suppliers, and distributors. This study contributes to the literature by proposing the examination and ultimate measurement of various tangible and intangible sources of the ‘liabilities of foreignness’. Additionally we show that are these sources are internal and external moderators of perceived acceptance in the host country. Manager must recognize the country-of-origin strategic options to address the negative overshadowing of the liability-of foreignness. We conclude that not doing so can create a stigma that may be attached to the overall organization, its image, products, brands, and to its employees. Further, negative attribution may be caste upon all the identifying characteristics of the foreign entity. The management of the firm must note the potential resistance to accept the organization and its products/services and must develop a proactive set of strategies to address the negativism of the host country constituents.