Sustainability through food and conversation: the role of an entrepreneurial restaurateur in fostering engagement with sustainable development issues

Food justice, food cultures and people's engagement with healthy food production and consumption are key contemporary concerns, with a growing sustainable hospitality and tourism literature. Efforts range from narrowly focused initiatives, such as promoting organic produce and fair trade, to more holistic challenges to current systems through initiatives like the slow food and locavore movements, which may represent systemic alternatives. However, little analysis is available on how cafés and restaurants might become sites for experimentation in profitable and just sustainable hospitality, and places for sustainability engagement and education. Focusing on the evolution of a sustainable café in Adelaide, South Australia, this article explores how one entrepreneurial restaurateur uses his café to engage customers and community in a collaborative conversation about sustainable development, food, hospitality and tourism, helping transform our food culture and even lifeways. Our findings indicate the value of deep local embedding as a pathway to meaningful sustainability. The study offers insights into how hospitality and tourism can contribute to dialogues on alternative consumption which may offer visionary pathways to alternative futures. It also explores the role of pioneers in sustainable business and hospitality, their drivers and their views. A forthcoming global research initiative is discussed.     

Evolution of Smartn Players

To model the evolution of strategic intelligence, player types are drawn from a hierarchy of "smartness" analogous to the levels of iterated rationalizability. Nonrationalizable strategies die out, but when higher levels of smartness incur maintenance costs, being right is always as good as being smart. Moreover, if a manifest way to play emerges, then dumb players never die out, while smarter players with positive maintenance costs vanish. These results call to question the standard game-theoretic assumption of super-intelligent players. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: B40, C70, C72, C73.     

Financial capital movements and central bank behavior in a two-country,short-run portfolio balance model

This paper analyzes financial capital movements in a two-country, short-run, portfolio balance model which includes two securities that are imperfect substitutes. Following a disturbance, equilibrium is, in general, reattained, but the effects on interest rates, money supplies, and international reserve holdings depend on the monetary and reserve asset management policies of the two central banks. Special attention is focused on the case in which one central bank holds its international reserves in the form of ‘key currency’ securities, thereby sterilizing for the ‘key currency’ country. There are several applications of the central result that, for any disturbance, the less changes in international reserves are allowed to affect money supplies, the larger the change in reserves required to reestablish equilibrium.     

Working on the Railroad: Public Accounting Talent in the United States—The Case of Haskins & Sells (Now Deloitte)

Nineteenth century US railroads were the first ‘big businesses’ and had profound influence on society. This paper addresses one source of talent for the early US public accounting profession—railroads. Following the end of the US Civil War (1861–65), industrial expansion was a revolutionary experience, with large trusts appearing in the wake of the railroad's maturing influence on the development of a vast continental economy. Accounting practice also was impacted by railroads. For example, the development of annual reports, income measurement, the standardization of reporting by regulators, developing fixed and variable cost, and throughput concepts for capital intensive business—all were related to the railroads. This paper focuses on a significant link between the emerging public accounting profession and the railroads by examining how an early major US public accounting firm relied upon accounting skill developed within railroads as an important source of talent. Arguably, talent is the most important resource of a professional firm. While it is a commonly held view that the immigration of UK accountants in the late nineteenth century was the source of public accounting talent, this paper provides evidence of a competing explanation—the sourcing of talent from a firm (Haskins & Sells) that continues to the present day as Deloitte. Key leadership and personnel of that time gained their experience while working on the domestic railroads.     

Data-driven tree structure for PIN models

Probability of informed trading (PIN) models characterize trading with certain types of information through a tree structure. Different tree structures with different numbers of groups for market participants have been proposed, with no clear, consistent tree used in the literature. One of the main causes of this inconsistency is that these trees are artificially proposed through a bottom-up approach rather than implied by actual market data. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method that infers a tree structure directly from empirical data. More precisely, we use hierarchical clustering to construct a tree for each individual firm and then infer an aggregate tree through a voting mechanism. We test this method on US data from January 2002 for 7608 companies, which results in a tree with two layers and four groups. The characteristics of the resulting aggregate tree are between those of several proposed tree structures in the literature, demonstrating that these proposed trees all reflect only part of the market, and one should consider the proposed empirically driven method when seeking a tree representing the whole market.

     

Success factors for collaborative product development: a study of suppliers of information and communication technology

It is apparent that more and more organizations are embarking on collaborative ventures to develop products. This is particularly evident in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sectors, so much so that part of the 'received wisdom' of ICT companies is that collaboration is the preferred route for product development. The benefits of collaboration have been well documented and are linked to the complexity and costliness of product development and the need for inputs from wide and varied areas of expertise as well as shorter lead times for product development. But the risks and costs of collsborative product development have been less well defined. In this paper, it is argued that the alleged rewards of collaboration may not be experienced in practice and that collaboration can lengthen the product development process, add to the cost of product development and prove difficult to control. However, management practice can facilitate the effective outcome of collaborative product development and the critical factors affecting the likelihood of successful management practice are presented here.     

Strategy clusters in japanese markets: Firm performance implications

This study identifies generic Japanese strategy clusters and explores their performance implications. It is based on Japanese executives’ perceptions of the veracity of various PIMS strategy principles in Japan. Three distinct strategy clusters are identified around market position and product strategy dimensions. These Japanese strategy clusters, when moderated by such contingency factors as strategic orientation and product life cycle stage, offer unique performance implications for the Japanese market. His research interests center on global sourcing, competitive strategy, and cross-cultural comparative issues. His recent publications includeGlobal Sourcing Strategy: R&D, Manufacturing, and Marketing Interfaces (Quorum Books, 1992) andThe Japanese Distribution System: Opportunities and Obstacles, Structure and Practices (Probus Publishing, 1993). His research interests include strategy, international marketing, marketing management, and research methodology. His research has appeared in theJournal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, andIndustrial Marketing Management, among others.     

The evolution and strategic management of new technology-based sectors: the case of computerized business systems

Accepted paradigms of strategic management can be expected to be adapted for new technology where inter alia, the pace of technological change is rapid, uncertainty intense, and product life cycles short. It is argued that there are generic drivers of the euolutzon of such new technology sectors, and that the early identification of anticipation of and adaptatzon to these general forces can in theory provide businesses with a strategic advantage. Businesses, however, are often possessed of considerable inertia whilst the managerial perception of such sector trends can be affected by inter alia earlier commit-ments and experiences. This paper analyses such issues of strategic management with reference to the computerized business systems sector i n which the authors have conducted extensive empirical research over a two-year period.     

Residential location and the earnings of African American women

In comparing the earnings of African American women to three reference groups—white women, African American men, and white men—three principal findings emerge. First, African American women residing in the suburbs are worse off than any other suburban group. Second, central city African American women are worse off than any other group of central city residents. Third, while central city residence imposes a statistically significant earnings penalty on men of both races, no such penalty is found for African American or white women. Therefore, African American women will enjoy no earnings advantage if they move to the suburbs. This finding underscores the importance of including women in studies of residential location and the socioeconomic status of African Americans. A narrow focus on male data to inform policy is clearly insufficient.