Toward a new macrohistory: An extension to Sardar's ‘postnormal times’

How should futurists evaluate Sardar's announcement of ‘postnormal’ times? In contrast to existing images, what light does the postnormal metaphor shed on our global age? This paper views Sardar's postnormal times as embryonic, and extends it using ecosystems theory. To develop Sardar's concept as a macrohistory, Holling's adaptive cycle and panarchical systems are proposed as mechanisms of change that create postnormal times.     

Sustainability of nonprofit organizations: An empirical investigation

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) contribute to society through their social value creation. They operate in an increasingly turbulent context where building sustainable organizations has emerged as a critical need. Past authors have discussed this important issue in a fragmented manner. Using multiple case studies of socially entrepreneurial NPOs, this paper examines how the need for building a sustainable organization has impacted on the strategy focus of the nonprofit organization. The findings suggest that in response to an increased competitive environment, NPOs have been forced to adopt an organizational sustainability focus in both strategic and operational levels of management. The study makes a strong contribution to current debate in social entrepreneurship and to a broader agenda concerned with developing sustainable organizations. Whilst the findings have important implications for theory and current practice, the paper concludes with suggestions for future research at the interstices of these areas.     

Advertising Expenditure,Enplanement, and Market Concentration

This paper investigates the long‐run relationship between advertising expenditure and enplanement (representing the number of passengers boarding an aircraft), advertising expenditure across carriers, and advertising expenditure and market concentration for the six largest US airlines. Advertising expenditure is evidenced to be strategic, although not clearly effective at increasing enplanement, suggesting collusive behavior. Advertising is also evidenced to be, for the most part, balancing in nature across rival carriers. Further tests suggest a positive and linear relationship with positive bi‐directional causality between advertising and market concentration. This paper’s findings raise three important questions. First, if advertising is not clearly effective at increasing enplanement, then why advertise? Second, if advertising increases market concentration, then shouldn’t airline activities be under some degree of scrutiny, or even be partially regulated? Third, could airline advertising be important in explaining higher post‐deregulation fares?     

Net neutrality and investment incentives

This article analyzes the effects of net neutrality regulation on investment incentives for Internet service providers (ISPs) and content providers (CPs), and their implications for social welfare. Concerning the ISPs' investment incentives, we find that capacity expansion decreases the sale price of the priority right under the discriminatory regime. Thus, contrary to ISPs' claims that net neutrality regulations would have a chilling effect on their incentive to invest, we cannot dismiss the possibility of the opposite. A discriminatory regime can also weaken CPs' investment incentives because of CPs' concern that the ISP would expropriate some of the investment benefits.     

The differential roles of brand credibility and brand prestige in consumer brand choice

This study explores how brand credibility and brand prestige affect brand purchase intention and empirically investigates how the combinatory mechanism of brand credibility and brand prestige materialize across multiple product categories. The proposed model of six latent constructs is tested with structural equation modeling analysis: brand credibility, brand prestige, perceived quality, information costs saved, perceived risk, and brand purchase intention. The results suggest that both brand credibility and brand prestige positively influence brand purchase intention through perceived quality, information costs saved, and perceived risk under different product categories representing the high and low self‐expressive nature. Several implications for advertising messages and brand positioning strategies are discussed. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The influence of multiple types of service convenience on behavioral intentions: The mediating role of consumer satisfaction in a Taiwanese leisure setting

Service organizations are looking for ways to better deliver consumer value and to increase consumers’ purchase intentions. Organizations can differentiate themselves by making their services easier to consume, that is, more convenient. Service convenience is complex and is comprised of five convenience types, namely, decision, access, transaction, benefit, and post-benefit. Research into service convenience has examined how these types of convenience affect consumers’ experiences and intentions, but limited research has studied it within a leisure setting. With data collected from a sample of 443 Taiwanese, this research uses mediated regression to examine the influence of the five types of convenience on consumers’ behavioral intentions, and the mediating role satisfaction plays in the relationship. The findings indicate that only benefit and post-benefit convenience are associated with improved behavioral intentions and that satisfaction partially mediates the relationship for those two types of convenience. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

China-United States joint ventures: a typological model of goal congruence and cultural understanding and their importance for effective human resource management

Little has been written about enhancing human resource management effectiveness in joint ventures with China. This study presented a typology of potential relationships between Chinese and American partners in a joint venture based on goal congruence and cultural understanding. Each relationship is described, and implications for the management of human resources are discussed.     

Value relevance of discretionary accruals in the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998

This study investigates whether and how the information values of reported earnings and their components changed around the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. Regression analyses on a sample of 10,406 firm-years from nine Asian countries from 1995 to 2000 reveal the following. First, the crisis led to a significant decline in the value relevance of discretionary accruals but had no significant impact on the value relevance of non-discretionary earnings components such as operating cash flows and non-discretionary accruals. Second, the decrease in the value relevance of discretionary accruals during the crisis was more severe for firms in countries with weak institutions than for those in countries with strong institutions. Third, the value relevance of discretionary accruals declined to a greater extent for firms with high information asymmetries than for firms with low information asymmetries. Our results are robust to a variety of sensitivity checks.     

A New Measure of Trade Openness

Trade openness, popularly measured as (X + M)/GDP in the hundreds of studies published to date, consistently considers the world's biggest trading countries such as the USA, the UK, Japan and Germany to be closed economies, irrespective of the data set used. This study suggests a composite trade share measure that more completely reflects reality by combining two important dimensions of trade openness: trade share and the relative importance of a country's trade level to total world trade. Robustness tests support the new proposed measure in lieu of the conventional measure of openness and suggest that the latter may not only be incomplete but may also overstate the impact of trade on such things as income and the environment.