Internationalisation in Service Companies

This article presents a conceptual framework for analysing the internationalisation of knowledge-intensive service companies. The framework has been developed as a result of an empirical study of ten Scandinavian companies, representing different types of service -for instance, insurance, consulting and security. The internationalisation process is divided into four stages: prospecting, introduction, consolidation and reorientation. One major implication of the study is that internationalisation should not be viewed as mainly a question of globalisation or adaptation to local business conditions, as is usually assumed in the litera- ture. Instead it is the interplay between these two major strategic orientations that determines the outcome of the inter- nationalisation process, and companies need to learn how to balance the two successfully. The empirical results and practical implications of the study are summarised in a number of theses dealing with the overall guidance of the internationalisation process.     

Employment hardship and rural minorities: Theory,research, and policy

Rural racial and ethnic minorities are among the poorest of all Americans. This article situates their plight both theoretically and empirically in the context of employment hardship. Defined by access to employment and job quality, employment hardship is more prevalent among nonmetropolitan African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans than it is among either their central city counterparts or non-Hispanic whites. The strengths and limitations of both individuallevel frameworks (e.g., human capital) and macro-level theories (e.g., uneven development) in explaining the economic double jeopardy faced by rural minorities are discussed. Policy recommendations designed to ameliorate employment hardship are presented. This paper was prepared as the author’s contribution to the Rural Minorities Working Group of the Rural Sociological Society Task Force on Persistent Rural Poverty. The Working Group’s report appears as chapter 6 inPersistent Poverty in Rural America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993).     

On employment,wage and risk sharing in labor contracts

This note studies risk sharing in labor contracts when the price of the firm's product is uncertain. It demonstrates that if the firm adjusts employment at its own discretion, then the wage should not in general be constant, but should be constant only if the production function is of the Cobb-Douglas type.     

This is your brain on neuromarketing: reflections on a decade of research

ABSTRACT

In this commentary, we reflect on the last decade of research in the field of neuromarketing and present a schematic illustration of the basic process of a typical neuromarketing study. We then identify three critical points of interest in this illustration that have not received enough discussion in neuromarketing-relevant literature, and which we consider to be somewhat problematic. These are the dominance of event-based designs in neuromarketing, the potential of alternative modalities in neuromarketing and the current focus on reverse inference in neuromarketing. We argue that, taken together, these points have substantive implications for the development of a more reflective neuromarketing, which in turn has greater potential to make a positive impact on marketing knowledge, marketing practice and public perceptions of marketing activity in general.