Confronting Intangibility

No abstract available for this article.     

Confronting chaos

While it is common to observe that our society and world are becoming increasingly complex and fast paced, most of our theories provide no bases upon which to develop appropriate strategies. The need for developing holistic strategies is becoming urgent in two related areas: major interactive technologies and morality. Jonathan King is Associate Professor of Management at the College of Business at Oregon State University. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Antioch College (1965) and his M.B.A. in Finance (1975) and Ph.D. in Business, Government and Society (1980) from the University of Washington. His primary research interests are in the areas of moral philosophy and General Systems Theory. His most important publications are The Three Faces of Thinking, Journal of Higher Education (1986) and Prisoner's Paradoxes, Journal of Business Ethics (1988).     

Competition in Markets and Competition for Markets

This paper builds on a distinction that is sometimes made between competition in a market and competition for a market. Competition for a market refers to the struggle to create a new market, or to erect a new standard, and it is usually associated with the process of innovation that brings new displacing technologies to market. Competition in a market is the conventional view of competition, and concentrates on the actions of incumbents and imitative entrants in well-established markets. The paper reviews some of the issues that competition for markets raises for anti-trust policy makers, and then asks whether competition for a market is a perfect substitute for competition in a market.     

Confronting the software crisis

Backlogs in information-systems departments are growing like Topsy, and something must be done to relieve the load. The authors say that, like it or not, the fourth generation is the answer.     

The Narrow Application of Rawls in Business Ethics: A Political Conception of Both Stakeholder Theory and the Morality of Markets

This paper argues that Rawls’ principles of justice provide a normative foundation for stakeholder theory. The principles articulate (at an abstract level) citizens’ rights; these rights create interests across all aspects of society, including in the space of economic activity; and therefore, stakeholders – as citizens – have legitimate interests in the space of economic activity. This approach to stakeholder theory suggests a political interpretation of Boatright’s Moral Market approach, one that emphasizes the rights/place of citizens. And this approach to stakeholder theory – in terms of citizens – raises a further question, what rights and obligations do economic agents have, beyond those attached to their roles as citizens? Rawls would reject additional rights and obligations of this sort for two reasons, one tied to freedom and one tied to pluralism. Rawls’ work therefore presses us to re-conceptualize the place of ethical claims in the economic context.     

Confronting the Gray Market Problem

Gray markets involve the sales of legitimate products by way of channels of distribution that are not authorized by the brand owners. Gray markets may benefit consumers and even brand owners under certain circumstances. On balance, however, gray markets are detrimental to brand owners because gray market traders access genuine product in both physical and virtual markets and reap profits stemming from the resale of goods owing to price differentiation between markets, thus depriving brand owners of those profits. In this study, we discuss the principal factors that encourage a gray market and the legal underpinnings that permit gray markets in the United States. We then summarize managerial tactics—both reactive and proactive—to combat gray markets.     

如何面对不断演进的预付费市场?

依照信息产业部官方统计数字,截至2004年6月底,国内移动电话用户数已经接近3．1亿,1998年～2003年期间年复合增长率达到62．2%,中国已经当之无愧地成为全球移动通信增长最快的市场。     

Tractable Morality

This article discusses five propositions about managerial moral tractability -- that is, a morality that is amenable to the complexity of managers’ continual pressure to decide and act -- in their customer relations. The propositions come from the comparison of three case studies of different types of managers. To analyze the morality of managers, discursive practices of managers are studied. At the end of the article also some consideration is given to “information strategies” of managers, in relation to their tractable morality.Gjalt de Graaf received his Ph.D. at the Rotterdam School of Management of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He worked for two years as an assistant professor ‘‘strategic management” at the Faculty of Economics and Business Studies of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Currently he works as a post-doc “Integrity of Governance” at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.     

WTO背景下中国广告业的生存与发展

1999年11月15日,对于实行计划经济向市场经济转轨的中国市场来说是一个里程碑式的日子,这一天,中美两国就中国加入世贸组织达成了协议.随着WTO一揽子协议中中方承诺的逐步兑现,WTO对中国广告业的中击正逐渐显现出来.依据协议,我国公关和广告业于2003年可由外资控股,而百分百外资准入的时间是2005年12月10日,在此之前,通过十几年的精耕细作,国内排名前10名的广告公司几乎已是合资广告公司（即国际4A）的天下.     

在国外市场赚大钱

向国外市场扩展业务并不容易,有些公司常把战线拉得过长,结果浪费了大量的财力和资源,其动机仅仅为了能挤进目标市场,占据小得可怜的市场份额.     

The Ethical Issues Confronting Managers in the Sport Industry

The sport industry is an extremely diverse industry, including segments such as professional sport, intercollegiate athletics, health and fitness, recreational sport and facility management. The industry is currently experiencing rapid growth and development, and as it grows, sport managers in the different segments encounter ethical issues which are often unique to each segment. This article examines the professional sport, intercollegiate athletics, health and fitness, recreational sport and facility management segments of the sport industry and discusses the various ethical issues facing managers in each of these segments.     

Emerging Markets

LITERATURHINWEISE

Emerging Markets     

Foreign-Market Expansion in Newly-Emerging Markets

Abstract

The aim of this research project was to further understand foreign-market entry and expansion in two medium-sized Finnish manufacturing companies (A and B) during the time period 1990-2000, in the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary and Poland. Six entries and further expansions comprise the six cases analysed here.

My objective was to find out how the managers made and implemented their decisions to achieve the desired end-to sustain the growth of the company. I needed to discover more about the mechanisms in order to understand better the ongoing process of foreign-market expansion.

My preliminary understanding was that the business relationships with local intermediaries significantly influenced operations in the CEE markets. Hence, both foreign-market expansions of the Finnish companies and business-relationship-development processes were in focus in the study. Given this double focus, I chose as my unit of analysis so-called bridgehead relationships.

I searched for answers to questions concerning how the differences between the six cases arose. Why did they take different courses of action in similar external environments? How and why did the two Finnish companies make different choices? Why were the successes in one country not replicated in another?

Inadequacies in the explanations of the foreign-market-expansion process offered within the international-business-research tradition suggested the relevance of a theory-building rather than a theory-testing research project. Accordingly, after the introduction, the first section of the article describes the theoretical departure of the research project and the second section introduces the applied methodology in detail. The third section discusses the results, including the theoretical framework developed through the grounded-theory analysis of the cases. The final section puts forward some managerial implications and future research avenues in the light of the results of the project.     

Income Distribution in Network Markets

We enquiry about the effects of first and second order stochastic dominance shifts of the distribution of the consumers’ willingness to pay, within the standard model of a market with network externalities and hump-shaped demand curve. This issue is analyzed in the polar cases of perfect competition and monopoly. We find that, while under perfect competition both types of distributional changes result in higher output, provided marginal costs are low enough, in the monopoly case the final outcome depends on the way income distribution and the network externality interact in determining market demand elasticity.