Reliability,mindfulness, and managing healthcare: Introduction to a JBR special section

This special section grew from a need to apply mindful practices to healthcare in order to reach highly reliable outcomes. The six articles in this special section, led by Ellen Langer's masterful article on the mindful use of medical information by both physicians and patients, cover a wide variety of healthcare organizations and a diverse geographic setting.     

An introduction to the special issue

The author provides a short introduction to the special issue, honoring the work of Louis P. Bucklin, including discussion and comments on Bucklin's major contributions to distribution channel theory.     

打差异战,用特殊产品、特殊服务拓展市场--记沧州解放经销商杜明

河北省沧州市中鑫汽车贸易有限公司长期专营一汽解放产品，由于精于管理，买卖越做越大，成了远近闻名的4S经销店。据统计，2004年该公司销售解放牌卡车3000辆左右，比上年同期翻了二番，营业收入达到4个多亿。     

Co-creating stakeholder and brand identities: Introduction to the special section

This article introduces the special section on reciprocal co-creation of stakeholder and brand identities. Branding research and practice traditionally focus on the managerial creation and implementation of brand identity. Based on recent paradigmatic shifts from managerial to co-creative branding and from consumer to multi-stakeholder approaches in marketing, this special section develops a dynamic, process-oriented perspective on brand identity. Brand identity continuously emerges as a dynamic outcome of social processes of stakeholder interaction. Reciprocally, brand identity plays a potentially important role in ongoing interactive identity development processes of stakeholders. The special section contributes to deepening the understanding of this reciprocal co-creation of stakeholder and brand identities, through a series of conceptual and empirical articles. The Introduction reviews four articles as well as related commentaries and discusses their contributions towards establishing a new dynamic paradigm of co-created and reciprocal brand and stakeholder identities.     

Entrepreneurial activity and regional competitiveness: an introduction to the special issue

An important goal of this special issue is to gain a better understanding of the linkage between the entrepreneurial activity of a region and its level of competitiveness. Comparative studies across countries abound in the literature, but much still remains to be investigated on the role played by entrepreneurship in transforming local economies. The set of papers included in this special issue aims to fill this conceptual and empirical gap. In general, besides acknowledging the existence of a bi-directional relationship between entrepreneurship and regional competitiveness, the papers shed some light on the endogenous process of wealth creation in local economies.     

Consumers and deregulation of the electricity market in Germany

Against the backcloth of EU regulation, this note looks at the “politics of necessity” regarding electricity provision in Germany. Electricity as a case is chosen because its provision has been undergoing a profound process of liberalisation and deregulation, and there is a considerable amount of experience with the chances and pitfalls of liberalisation in this sector. Secondly, electricity is a network industry and a natural monopoly subject to systematic market failure, which calls for regulation. The paper starts out with a closer look at the consumer as an actor in the regulation process, proposing a three-role model of the consumer as a market player, as a citizen, and as a micro-producer in households and networks. In these roles, consumers take on different social and political identities; they are affected differently by (de)regulation of essential services and have different options for reacting to quality and price issues. It then describes the legal state and the development of deregulation in the electricity sector in Germany. Selected empirical data are presented, and consumer policy implications are drawn.     

Consumers in transition from the centrally planned economy to the market economy

The article describes the development of consumption and the key consumer policy issues which stem from the transition of Central and East European economies from regimes of central planning to those of market economy. The author analyzes the role of the consumers in the evolution of the communist economies. His conclusion is that maintaining consumption at or below subsistence level (massive starvation was common) was one of the major sources of financing the USSR socialist industrialization under Stalin. This was not possible in the East European people's democracies and, after Stalin's death, in the USSR. Repressed inflation (permanent shortages of consumption goods) and foreign debt became new sources of financing growth in the later stages of the development of the communist economies, a development which caused a permanent disequilibrium leading to negative economic growth and massive popular revolt. The transition to the market economy makes it necessary to address these disequilibrium problems. Two transition strategies are discussed: gradual transition and shock treatment therapy. These strategies give rise to different consumer problems and to different sets of issues facing the consumer movement.

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Konsumenten im Übergang von der Planwirtschaft zur Marktwirtschaft

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag beschreibt, wie sich der private Verbrauch beim Übergang von einer zentral geplanten Wirtschaft zu einer Marktwirtschaft in den osteuropäischen Staaten entwickelt und welche verbraucherpolitischen Aufgaben sich dabei ergeben.Der Autor beschäftigt sich mit der Rolle der Konsumenten in der Entwicklung der kommunistischen Gesellschaften in der UdSSR und in den östlichen Staaten Mitteleuropas. Er kommt zu dem Ergebnis, daß die Begrenzung des Verbrauches auf das Existenzminimum oder auf ein Niveau darunter (massive Hungersnöte waren verbreitet) ursprünglich eine der wichtigsten Quellen war, aus denen das Programm der sozialistischen Industrialisierung in der UdSSR unter Stalin finanziert wurde. Dieses Modell einer industriellen Entwicklung ließ sich in den anderen europäischen kommunistischen Staaten nicht durchführen und war nach Stalins Tod auch in der UdSSR nicht mehr möglich. In der Folgezeit wurden eine unterdrückte Inflation in der Form von dauerhafter Knapphiet von Konsumgütern und wachsende Auslandsschulden neue Quellen für die Finanzierung des industriellen Wachstums — eine Entwicklung, die ihre eigenen Ziele auf Dauer nicht erreichen konnte. Sie führte gegen Ende der 80iger Jahre zu negativen Wachstumsraten, zu massiver Unzufriedenheit in der Bevölkerung, zu sehr ernsthaften Umweltproblemen und zu riesigen Auslandsschulden. Versuche, die kommunistischen Volkswirtschaften zu reformieren ohne Veränderung der politischen und ideologischen Grundlagen, schlugen völlig fehl.Der Beitrag diskutiert zwei Strategien für den Übergang in das neue Wirtschaftssystem. Die eine ist der ungarische Weg eines allmählichen Überganges mit der Fortsetzung der Reformen, die noch unter kommunistischer Herrschaft begonnen wurden, und der allmählichen Öffnung für die Kräfte des Marktes. Die andere ist die polnische Form einer Schocktherapie mit abrupter völliger Öffnung gegenüber den Kräften des Marktes. Beide Strategien führen zu jeweils verschiedenen Verbraucherproblemen mit unterschiedlichen Anforderungen an die Verbraucherpolitik.

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Andrzej K. Kozminski is Professor and Chair of the Department of Management and Organization in the School of Management of Warsaw University, Director of the Warsaw University Postgraduate International Management Center, and President of the International Business School, Nowy Swiat 4, 00-497 Warsaw, Poland.     

Introduction to the special section on subsistence marketplaces

We provide an introduction to the special issue on subsistence marketplaces. We briefly describe the stream of subsistence marketplaces, and the conference series associated with the call for papers. We provide a brief overview of the diverse set of papers in the special section.     

Marketing and society: Preface to special section on volunteerism, price assurances, and direct-to-consumer advertising

We discuss the reasons why this call for papers was issued and describe the process of selecting the three articles presented in this special section. We argue that maximizing stakeholder welfare and not just consumption maybe a new goal for marketing that will be consistent with emerging societal trends. Three articles on volunteerism, price assurances, and direct-to-consumer advertising result from our call and are presented in this section. This introduction is an overview of the three articles.     

Retailing evolution research: Introduction to the special section on retailing research

Five articles were selected from studies presented at the Ninth Society for Marketing Advances Retailing Research Symposium. The following article introduces their themes and main findings, along with the process of selection.     

Retailing evolution research: Introduction to the special section on retailing research

This JBR Special Issue on Retailing includes several high quality research studies presented at the 10th and 11th Society for Marketing Advances Retail Strategy and Patronage Behavior Symposiums. The articles cover a wide range of interesting and important retailing topics including topics such as atmospherics, self-esteem and advertising. This introduction offers a few comments on the 2007 and 2008 Symposiums' content including a brief overview of each article.     

Managing cross-border knowledge transfer for innovation: An introduction to the special issue

This introduction to the special issue maps the extant research on managing crossborder knowledge for innovation and classifies it into four clusters: knowledge spillovers and location, international alliances and R&D networks, knowledge transfer and absorptive capacity, and learning organization and capabilities. The eleven articles that compose the special issue are introduced, and a future agenda for international business research is proposed.