Telling tales: online comic and gripe story‐sharing by service workers about difficult customers

The article extends previous research on the storying practices of service workers, workplace humour as resistance, and workers’ autonomous use of social media. Discussion strings from two hairstylist forum storylines, exemplifying comic and tragic story‐sharing about difficult customers, were analysed using Gabriel's notion of story‐work. Processes of coping, entertainment, identity‐construction and learning are clearly evident in the discussion strings and social media is confirmed as a ‘new’ terrain for the enactment of employee agency. Findings emphasize that service workers are engaged in contradictory and ambiguous relations of resistance and accommodation as they learn how to deal with difficult customers. The article's contribution is to show how service workers share their fears and anxieties about difficult customers through storying and humour in generative dialogical poietic processes in social media. Further research is suggested.     

讲述品牌故事 传递奢侈品理念

在物质极大丰富的今天,品牌故事化更能吸引消费者,奢侈品品牌故事通过一些故事要素传达了品牌所代表的一种精神、一种理念。透过奢侈品的品牌故事,企业将知道如何讲述自己的品牌故事。     

Operation flood: impacts and issues

This article investigates whether Operation Flood - the Indian dairy programme supported by the WFP, the EEC and other international donor agencies - has achieved its objectives of enhancing dairy production in India while also offering poor and landless farmers a chance to participate in dairying. Detailed empirical work on the project did not confirm the grand claims made for Operation Flood as a success story of global significance. In particular, conclusions are highlighted with regard to Operation Flood's impact on India's dependency on foreign (EEC) deliveries of skim milk powder; India's domestic dairy production; the incomes of participating farmers; existing informal dairy production and marketing; the nutritional levels in rural areas; and the position of rural women. Various options for the future are outlined.     

Uneven Development,Uneven Response: The Relentless Search for Meaningful Regulation of GVCs

The regulation of employment in global value chains (GVCs) is a story of the interaction of corporation and state in transnational space, where uneven international development has allowed the commodification and exploitation of international labour. Global standards are well articulated by bodies such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UN. We know what ‘decent work’ should look like as well as what all workers should enjoy as basic employment and human rights. Yet, internationally, the different mechanisms of private and public regulation fail at the point of implementation and across the world we see no fundamental shift in the condition of labour in terms of its capacity for social or economic upgrading. This article examines the regulatory mechanisms, and outcomes of regulation, of industrial relations in GVCs. It commends a future research agenda to illuminate the interaction between different sources of standards and rules and the complexities of intersecting private and public regulation, in the pursuit of enforceable, meaningful regulation of work and employment in international supply chains.     

德尔福归来

四年前，这家全球最大的汽车零部件公司申请破产保护，成为当时最具爆炸性的新闻。他不为外界所知的教训，以及奇迹般复苏的真实原因。     

Technology,change, and uncertainty: maintaining career confidence in the early 21st century

Over the coming decades, technology and automation are expected to dramatically transform how work will be undertaken. While many of these developments will improve productivity and provide new opportunities, some jobs will likely disappear. In this article, we report data from in‐depth interviews undertaken with 51 young Australians about their strategies for managing the possibility of technological disruption in the workplace. In the face of future uncertainties, we found that the majority of our participants remained confident in their ability to maintain for themselves a ‘good’ career story. We posit, however, that those who could neither avoid nor reduce the possibility that technological advancements might jeopardise their career plans demonstrated an outlook of career malleability whereby they accepted the risk yet remained subjectively confident in their own capacity to rewrite their career narrative if, or when, circumstances demanded.     

八度区不等层高异形柱框架抗震性能研究

目前关于八度区不等层高异形柱框架抗震性能的相关研究较少,而笔者按现行异形柱规程设计制作了一榀1/3缩尺不等层高异形柱框架并对其进行低周往复加载试验,研究分析了该类型结构的破坏特征、破坏机制、承载能力和变形能力、滞回曲线、刚度退化等抗震性能指标。研究表明,该类型框架破坏机制属于混合机制,在较高地震作用下,框架梁柱节点核心区具有足够的抗剪强度,整体抗震性能良好,但在加载后期,底层柱脚混凝土破坏较严重,降低了结构的承载能力,成为结构的薄弱部位,在设计中应予以重视。     

A Longitudinal Examination of How Champions Influence Others to Support Their Projects

The image of the project champion fighting corporate inertia, rallying support, and leading a project to success makes for a great story, but that story may not reveal the true nature of the champion's role. All those oft-told tales about champions fail to provide hard evidence of the techniques that champions use, the activities they perform, and the effects that champions have on project success.
Stephen K. Markham addresses this knowledge gap in a study that examines how champions influence other people and what effects champions have on projects and the people those projects involve. The study uses responses from 53 champions of innovation projects in four large firms as well as team members from those projects. Rather than look at the champions' work on project tasks, the study focuses on the influence champions have on other people to support their projects.
The results of the study only partially support the idea that champions affect projects by influencing people. In the four firms studied, champions use cooperative rather than confrontative tactics to influence other people. However, the champions' choice of influence tactics does not affect the level of compliance or the willingness to participate in the project that those people demonstrate. On the other hand, the champions appear to have a strong influence on their target's behavior if the champions enjoy positive personal relationships with those people.
In general, the tactics used by the champions do not seem to play an important role in the projects studied. From the perspective of the team members, the results of this study do not support the notion that champions make a positive contribution to project performance. However, the champions in this study consistently hold a more positive view of the project than those of the team members.     

Europe's lessons for the U.S

President-elect Clinton can learn a lot from this continent about health care and how to revitalize cities. But industrial policy is another story.     

Illegal activity in the UK halal (sheep) supply chain: Towards greater understanding

Food supply chain theory and practice assumes that the processes involved are legal and value adding. In this paper, using examples from the UK halal (sheep) meat supply chain, we outline a value extracting value chain through a mixed methods qualitative approach consisting of face-to-face-interviews and a documentary research strategy underpinned by Narrative Inquiry. Building on previous theoretical work on Illegal Rural Enterprise, we present a narrative of an individual rogue-farmer, and explore his involvement in the illegal halal (‘smokies’) trade over a fifteen-year period. The paper provides a compelling story that will enable investigators to better understand illegal enterprise from a supply chain perspective and more adequately address the concerns stated in the UK Fraud Act 2006. The paper will be useful to food standards agencies in that furthers our understanding of entrepreneurial practice and morality in the food industry. The results demonstrate that illegal rural enterprise is a multi-faceted concept that requires an understanding of business practices and processes alongside a multi-agency approach to enterprise orientated crime. Our approach suggests that supply chains can be ‘flipped’ in order to understand illegal processes in addition to conventional legal processes.     

Explaining the reduction in child undernutrition in the Indian state of Maharashtra between 2006 and 2012: An analysis of the policy processes

The Indian state of Maharashtra has been lauded as a ‘success story’ for its rapid and significant decline in undernutrition amongst children. Between 2006 and 2012, childhood stunting fell from 39 to 24%. Whilst the global policy and academic literature strongly emphasises the need to act on nutrition, there are still too few studies outlining the policy processes which been part of successful state-led strategies – particularly at a sub-national level. This study is intended to contribute to future policy via unpacking the unfolding story of policy and programme attention to nutrition. Stakeholder perceptions and opinions on the wider policy, political and contextual reasons for Maharashtra’s decline in child undernutrition were sought and used alongside documentary evidence to construct a chronology of key events. Key factors identified via this process include the way in which issue framing and evidence helped catalyse a political response; the particular governance structures employed in response (the State’s ‘Nutrition Mission’) and the way in which leadership and a focus on system-wide capacity combined in an innovative fashion to focus resources on pockets of deprivation in high-burden areas.     

Wizards and Champions: The Kingdom of New Venture Management

We have learned recently that the stories of King Arthur and his Round Table may be more fact than fable. There is certainly more fact than fable in the story told here by Irving Calish and Donald Gamache. They deal with the realities of managing new ventures.     

From Experience: Demystify Creativity, Enhance Innovation

Creativity need not be a chance occurrence. The authors of this article believe there is a technology that facilitates creativity. It is a technology that can be learned and applied and managed. They describe the specific steps that they followed in helping a group of R&D professionals learn, apply, and manage the creative processes in the lab. It is a story of practical steps that dealt with the everyday realities of managing in a large corporation.     

How Do Firms Finance Nonprimary Market Investments? Evidence from REITs

This study explores the impact of investment characteristics, mainly investment location relative to the firm's primary market, on financing choices by real estate investment trusts (REITs). Using a large sample of commercial property acquisitions, we show that REITs are 4–8% less likely to use secured (mortgage) debt when acquiring properties in their primary markets than elsewhere. The documented evidence supports a demand‐side story for the relation between investment characteristics and financing. Moreover, the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that REITs avoid mortgage financing in their primary markets to preserve operational flexibility in those markets.     

Reputation for cooperation: contingent benefits in alliance activity

We model the two‐firm alliance as an iterated prisoners' dilemma game with an exit option and test several theoretical predictions in experimental studies regarding the effect of reputation information. Following the literature, we hypothesize that reputation benefits cooperation; however, our experimental results instead show that reputation decreases cooperation. A contingency explains this result while remaining consistent with the general proposition of reputation as beneficial in games of incomplete information. Implications include a recommendation for when to invest in reputation and whether the lemon's market story is applicable to alliance‐related inefficiencies. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Book Reviews

The first review is of a business novel that contains important lessons about teams and teamwork. The enjoyable story is based on the product development activities of a fictitious Fungible Company, and is an absorbing book to read. The second review covers a book on Total Quality Management (TQM). As our reviewer points out, this book deals with both the philosophy and tools, covering all aspects of TQM.
Finally, we inaugurate a new feature, Brief Notes. From time to time, we will provide short comments about books that may have a specialized or some limited value to practitioners.     

Role of industry relatedness in performance of Indian acquirers—Long and short run effects

We explore the effect of industry relatedness on the performance of Indian acquirers using both short run and long run performance measures. We argue that mergers and acquisitions are distinct strategies, because of the unique regulatory structure and equity ownership pattern that exists in India. Their choice depends on control considerations on the one hand and regulatory imperatives on the other. Correspondingly, their sources of value creation or destruction do not always correspond to extant theories of synergy or agency. We present a modified synergy story and illustrate that, while related acquisitions create value and non-related acquisitions destroy value, both related and unrelated mergers create value.     

Declining Union Density in the 1980s: What Do Panel Data Tell Us?

In this paper we analyse data from the 1980—4 WIRS panel for the light they can shed on the causes of the decline in aggregate trade union density in the UK. We argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom, intra-establishment union density did, on average, decline between 1980 and 1984. This suggests that a traditional compositional change story is untenable. We proceed to investigate the correlation of intra-establishment change with variables suggested by the various hypotheses advanced to explain declining density over the period. We find some evidence for an influence of intra-establishment compositional changes, but the most statistically significant variables are wages and unemployment. These take the wrong sign, however, to support the business cycle interpretation of falling aggregate union density.     

Why Customers Value Self‐Designed Products: The Importance of Process Effort and Enjoyment*

This study analyzes which factors prompt customers to attribute value to products they design themselves using mass‐customization (MC) toolkits. The assumption that self‐design delivers superior customer value is fundamental to the concept of MC toolkits and can be found in almost any conceptual work in this field. However, spectacular failures reinforce the practical relevance of developing a deeper understanding of why and when MC toolkits generate value for customers—and when they do not. Research to date has assumed that the closer fit between the self‐designed product's characteristics and the preferences of the customer is the dominant source of value. In this research, it is asked whether the enjoyment and perceived effort of the self‐design process have an additional impact on the perceived value of self‐designed products. This question is interesting because one could argue that a rational actor would hardly be willing to pay ex post for an economic good already consumed. The hypotheses are tested on 186 participants designing their own scarves with an MC toolkit. After completing the process, they submitted binding bids for “their” products in Vickrey auctions. Therefore, real buying behavior, not merely stated intentions, is observed. The present study finds that the subjective value of a self‐designed product (i.e., one's bid in the course of the auction) is indeed impacted not only by the preference fit the customer expects it to deliver but also by (1) the process enjoyment the customer reports, (2) the interaction of preference fit and process enjoyment, and (3) the interaction of preference fit and perceived process effort. In addition to its main effect, preference fit can be interpreted as a moderator of the value‐generating effect of process evaluation: in cases where the outcome of the process is perceived as positive (high preference fit), the customer also interprets process effort as a positive accomplishment, and this positive effect adds (further) value to the product. It appears that the perception of the self‐design process as a good or bad experience is partly constructed on the basis of the outcome of the process. In the opposite case (low preference fit), effort creates a negative effect that further reduces the subjective value of the product. Likewise, process enjoyment is amplified by preference fit, although enjoyment also has a significant main effect, which means that regardless of the outcome, customers attribute higher value to a self‐designed product if they enjoy the process. In a way, this effect resembles of the classic story of Tom Sawyer and the fence, in which Tom manages to “frame” the tedious chore of whitewashing a fence as a rare opportunity—thus persuading his friends to pay him for letting them work. Manufacturers designing an MC system therefore are advised to designing MC toolkits in a way that they elicit positive affective reactions that make their customers value their work.