Performance impacts of management in Korean schools: Testing the Meier and O’Toole model

This article investigates the impact of management on performance in Korean schools. Drawing upon the model of Meier and O’Toole, we test the linear relationships of internal management, managerial networking, and managerial quality with multiple dimensions of performance. We also examine the nonlinear relationships between networking and performance. The results show a general consistency in the positive link between management and performance, providing evidence to support the key arguments from the model. Still, there are noticeable differences in specific findings. As one of the first applications of the Meier and O'Toole model in Asia, this study illustrates the importance of the national context in management–performance linkage.     

Aspects of complexity in citizen–bureaucrat corruption: an agent-based simulation model

In this paper, the complexity-based approach is used to analyse corruption and its internal economics and dynamics. To better understand the drivers of corruption, we employ an agent-based model with heterogeneous agents (bureaucrats and citizens), the interactions of which determine the level of corruption in a society. The emergence of a prevailing social norm of corruption is shown to be significantly influenced by the initial conditions (i.e., history and habits). A cost analysis demonstrates that a relatively limited financial investment is required for the phase transition from the corrupt to the non-corrupt state. The concept of opportunity costs is used to express the value of information shared within an agent’s social group that improves agent decision-making. Incomplete information and uncertainty in the legal system help to reduce corruption by promoting a fear of engaging in corruption in a society. The results of this research may offer useful insights for informing an effective anti-corruption policy.

     

Responsible supply chain management – an analysis of Taiwanese gutter oil scandal using the theory of constraint

Food safety is one of the main concerns in many countries throughout the world. Failure to ensure food safety would result in significant health concerns to the general public. Despite much effort to improve food safety, many cases of food safety issues or even crises have happened around the world from time to time; it results in undesirable health problems. One of the recent food safety scandals that happened in Taiwan in 2014 was related to the usage of gutter/tainted oil by several oil suppliers. The series of food safety incidents affected 1256 businesses. In order to ensure a responsible supply chain, we analysed the problem using the theory of constraint. Some issues towards the root cause of the problem are suggested. The objective of our study emphasises on building a responsible supply chain and food safety regulation in order to improve food safety in Taiwan.     

Shrinking the state or the Big Society? Public service employment relations in an era of austerity

The Big Society is an integral part of the coalition's plans for public service retrenchment, but it is premature to dismiss it as exclusively concerned with expenditure cuts and privatisation. The Big Society signals the government's ambition to transform public services and it is the rubric that is being used to shrink the state and undermine long‐standing systems of public service employment relations. This article considers the origins and meaning of the Big Society and then assesses its consequences for public service provision and the workforce. The Big Society is integrally connected to deficit reduction with the voluntary sector and an increased emphasis on volunteering promoted as a more user‐centred and cost‐effective way of delivering public services in tough times. For the workforce, more competition between diverse providers in conjunction with budget cuts is placing downward pressure on terms and conditions and encouraging employers to question the continuation of national pay determination in many parts of the public sector.     

Testing for unit roots in the possible presence of multiple trend breaks using minimum Dickey–Fuller statistics

Trend breaks appear to be prevalent in macroeconomic time series, and unit root tests therefore need to make allowance for these if they are to avoid the serious effects that unmodelled trend breaks have on power. Carrion-i-Silvestre et al. (2009) propose a pre-test-based approach which delivers near asymptotically efficient unit root inference both when breaks do not occur and where multiple breaks occur, provided the break magnitudes are fixed. Unfortunately, however, the fixed magnitude trend break asymptotic theory does not predict well the finite sample power functions of these tests, and power can be very low for the magnitudes of trend breaks typically observed in practice. In response to this problem we propose a unit root test that allows for multiple breaks in trend, obtained by taking the infimum of the sequence (across all candidate break points in a trimmed range) of local GLS detrended augmented Dickey–Fuller-type statistics. We show that this procedure has power that is robust to the magnitude of any trend breaks, thereby retaining good finite sample power in the presence of plausibly-sized breaks. We also demonstrate that, unlike the OLS detrended infimum tests of Zivot and Andrews (1992), these tests display no tendency to spuriously reject in the limit when fixed magnitude trend breaks occur under the unit root null.     

The impact of Greek labour market regulation on temporary employment – evidence from a survey in Thessaly,Greece

This paper uses an original data-set for 186 workplaces in Thessaly (central Greece), to study consequences of Greece's strict employment protection law (EPL) and national minimum wage for temporary employment. We find higher temporary work contract rates among workplaces that pay low wages close to the minimum. We also find that EPL ‘matters’, in particular, managers who prefer temporary contracts because temporary workers are less protected definitely employ more. Our findings thus support the view that a firm's HRM decisions regarding internal versus external allocation of tasks are influenced by labour regulation.     

Patterns of university–industry interactions in Brazil: an exploratory analysis using the instrumental of graph theory

The article seeks to explore the evidence related to the sectoral patterns of structuring of the university–industry relations in Brazil, departing from the information extracted from the database of the Brazil Survey Research, with the analytical contribution of graph theory and its centrality measures. The empirical results allow us to identify some important constraints of the university–industry interactions in Brazil. In particular, we highlight the importance of locational aspects in conditioning the actions of universities as producers of science and technology for the productive sector and a tendency to relatively more intense interaction with less knowledge-intensive sectors, compared to so-called science based sectors.     

Cyber supply chain security practices DNA – Filling in the puzzle using a diverse set of disciplines

This paper describes the journey of the evolving cyber supply chain community towards creating practical and useful standards and best practices. It is based on the author?s experience working on the topic since 2006 and contains observations and lessons learned, refined over the years. Cyber supply chain security requires members of several different professional communities to come together including information security, system and software engineering, supply chain and logistics, and process improvement, to name a few. These professional communities have not worked or interacted before and had divergent experiences, vocabularies, frameworks, standards, ways of demonstrating that the practices were performed, and many other things. Over the years these people have learned that many practices that they thought were missing already existed in another discipline and that reinventing them was not necessary. The paper will summarize this journey with the goal of helping those new to this subject matter learn from those who have been working on it for some time.     

The Virtual IELab – an exercise in replicating part of the EXIOBASE V.2 production pipeline in a virtual laboratory

ABSTRACT

We explore options to replicate the EXIOBASE2 multi-region input–output (MRIO) database in the Virtual IELab cloud-computing laboratory environment. Whereas EXIOBASE2 is constructed using a multi-process reconciliation procedure, we present an alternative compilation technique that uses EXIOBASE2's pre-processed data and final tables in reconciling the IELab MRIO with conflicting raw data information. This approach skips the labour-intensive step of detailing and harmonising country tables. Adherence metrics reveal the EXIOBASE2-based IELab table to be considerably less balanced than the original but with stronger adherence to other constraints data. However, these metrics are not comparable to the original EXIOBASE2 statistics due to the distinctive implementation of constraint sets in the two platforms. IELab's main value-added is its flexibility in tailoring EXIOBASE2-based MRIOs beyond the original recipe. Finally, IELab's global carbon, water and material footprints are shown to be comparable with previously reported resource footprints. In contrast, deviations in land footprints warrant further investigation.     

Toward a continuum of measurement scales in Just-in-Time (JIT) research – an examination of the predictive validity of single-item and multiple-item measures

We compare the predictive validity of single-item and multiple-item measures utilized in Just-in-Time (JIT) research. The study examines if single-item measures could be used for some of the JIT practices, especially if the object of inquiry is concrete singular and if the attribute to be researched is concrete. Arguments are developed for the concrete nature of the JIT practice of “set-up time reduction” and we examine the ability of a single-item measure of this variable to predict the criterion variable (delivery performance). In addition, the study also examines the efficacy of using multiple-item measures for variables that are abstract in nature, and thereby attempts to develop a continuum of JIT constructs ranging from concrete to abstract. The results obtained by analyzing two sets of survey data show that multiple-item measures are not necessarily more valid than single-item measures for all constructs. The findings provide evidence that multiple-item measures and single-item measures for scale development should be contingent upon the nature of constructs. For concrete constructs, single-item measures are as valid as multi-item measures. Meanwhile, for abstract constructs it is important to ensure that multiple items are considered to capture the multi-dimensional nature of these constructs. Results also reveal that JIT practices display significant differences in terms of abstract/concrete perceptions. The paper presents theoretical and practical implications of the findings, and offers directions for future research.     

Empirical study on the financial repression of rural households＇ debit and credit and the effects on their welfare in less developed regions --Take Suqian city of Jiangsu province as an example

This paper carries out empirical analysis of the ration behavior of rural credit cooperatives in less developed regions in providing loan services to rural households. It also inspects the interaction between rural households＇ demand for credit and the loan supply from rural credit cooperatives with simultaneous discrete model. The performance of supporting agriculture through a new round reform of rural credit cooperatives is doubtable in this sample region.     

The Pharmacia story of entrepreneurship and as a creative technical university1 – an experiment in innovation,organizational break up and industrial renaissance

While innovative technology supply has been the focus of much neo-Schumpeterian modelling, few have addressed the critical and more resource-demanding commercializing of the same technologies. The result may have been a growth policy focused on the wrong problem. Using Competence Bloc Theory and a firm-based macro to macro approach we abandon the assumed linear relation between technology change and economic growth of such models, and demonstrate that lack of local commercialization competences is likely to block growth even though innovative technology supplies are abundant.

The break up, reorganization and part withdrawal of Pharmacia from the local Uppsala (in Sweden) economy after a series of international mergers illustrate this. Pharmacia has ‘released’ a wealth of technologies in local markets. Local commercialization competence, notably industrially competent financing has, however, not been sufficient to fill in through indigenous entrepreneurship the vacuum left by Pharmacia. Only thanks to foreign investors, attracted by Pharmacia technologies that have opted to stay for the long term, the local Uppsala economy seems to be heading for a successful future.

The Pharmacia case also demonstrates the role of advanced firms as ‘technical universities’ and the nature of an experimentally organized economy (EOE) in which business mistakes are a natural learning cost for economic development.