Company technology strategy

Abstract
The authors report the results of a small-scale study of the attitudes of 174 British companies to managing their technology. Their data sources were replies to a questionnaire and interviews with 18 senior managers of the respondent companies. They relate their findings to current academic thinking about technolgy strategy, of which a bibliography and critical review is presented in the paper.
The results showed that the firms in the survey did not give much specific attention to technology when formulating their strategies. Some do not have a clear notion of what is meant by 'their technology', and others have difficulty in deciding its character. In any case a 'firm's technology' is usually seen as a cluster of technologies, which is enmeshed in a network of external technologies such as those practised by suppliers and customers, rather than as a single entity. After in-house R&D the most often used forms of technology acquisition are licensing-in and contract R&D. The import of technology presents difficulties, such as codifying it in usable form and making sure that there are in-house staff capable of using it.
The authors conclude overall that few firms in the sample can assess their technological strengths and weaknesses or clearly conceptualize their situation. They remark that academic approaches to technology strategy are oversimplified and do not sufficiently address the main problems in this area, which are to help managers to understand the nature of their technology position and the technological network of which their firm forms a part.     

Agricultural policy reform in the United States: an unfinished agenda

The 1996 Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act (FAIR) contained important breaks with a tradition of crop–by–crop subsidies dating back to the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. Farmers with recorded base acres were given the opportunity (which nearly all accepted) to sign a seven–year 'contract' with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), under which payments will be continued on the merged base acres on a declining schedule until the year 2002. FAIR is an unfinished agenda. First, the coverage of 'freedom to farm' is only partial, with numerous commodities left out of the decoupling programme. Second, the largest producers will augment their already significant receipts with generous lump sum transfers from USDA. This will further reinforce the concentration of roughly 90 per cent of receipts and payments in the hands of the 100 000 to 200 000 largest producers of field crops. An alternative would be to make payments in times of low marketing receipts which recede when prices are high.     

How does sharing a sales force between multiple divisions affect salespeople?

An increasing number of firms are sharing a sales force between multiple divisions of their companies. Although this practice may increase organizational efficiency by reducing unit selling costs, it is not clear how it affects outcomes at the level of the individual salesperson. This study examines the effects of sharing a sales force between multiple divisions on salespeople’s role perceptions, satisfaction, and performance. The results indicate that sharing is associated with higher levels of role stress and lower levels of work satisfaction and nonfinancial performance. The association between sharing and financial performance is not significant. Formalization and centralization of the sales organization moderate the relationships between sharing and the outcome variables. Higher levels of formalization lessen the effects of sharing on salespeople’s role conflict, role ambiguity, and work satisfaction. Conversely, higher levels of centralization exacerbate the effects of sharing on role ambiguity and work satisfaction. His research interests include issues in personal selling, sales management, and channels of distribution. He has published in theJournal of Retailing, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, and various conference proceedings. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include management of brand equity and competitive analysis. He has published in theJournal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Advertising Research, Industrial Marketing Management, andPlanning Review. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests are in the areas of personal selling and sales management. His articles have appeared in numerous journals, and one of them received the William O’Dell Award for the most outstanding article published in theJournal of Marketing Research. He has coauthored several books includingSales Force Management: Planning Implementation and Control (Irwin, 1992). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois-Urbana.     

CPI revision provides more accuracy in the medical care services component.

This revision, as in the past, enabled the Bureau to update medical care service expenditure weights in the CPI, including a more complete allocation of health insurance premiums. Instead of keeping the portion of premiums that go to benefits under health insurance, the expenditure weight for each benefit category has been added to the appropriate out-of-pocket expense. The unpublished health insurance item represents only the retained earnings portion of premiums paid by households. The specific item categories included in medical care services have also been updated and expanded. A study conducted during the developmental phase of the revision indicated that the Bureau should expand the eligible priced rates for physicians in the CPI to include not only the "self-pay" rate, but also other categories of payment as well. Another study indicated that the direct pricing of health insurance is not feasible because of the difficulty of factoring out from premium changes the effect of utilization levels and modified coverage. In pricing medical care service items, as with other item categories in the CPI, BLS attempts to exclude from price movement the effect of quality changes. However, some quality changes are difficult to assess or are not readily identified, for example, a change in the ratio of nurses to patients, and such changes may be reflected as part of the price change movement in the CPI.     

South Africa in the Australian mirror: per capita real GDP in the Cape Colony,Natal, Victoria,and New South Wales, 1861–1909

This article compares the real GDP per capita of the Cape Colony and Natal between 1861 and 1909 with that of Australia's two most developed colonies, Victoria and New South Wales. Estimates of European and non‐European GDP per capita for both South African colonies are also provided. Together, this information allows for the first time an evaluation of the growth performance of these important parts of the South African economy in the colonial era. The article concludes that South African performance in this period was stronger than often assumed and that by the beginning of the twentieth century European South Africans, now more fully integrated into a British World economy, operated at a level of GDP per capita that matched and in some places may have exceeded that of Australians. Non‐European South Africans, however, did not share in these same advances.     

Charitable organizations' storytelling influence on donors' emotions and intentions

The stories told by charitable organizations are typically designed to take the consumer through different emotional stages. This research probes the view that following exposure to the inciting incident or problem statement in the appeal for a particular charity, the consumer feels negative emotions. These feelings convert into anticipated positive emotions when the consumer is given the opportunity to help the person in need through a donation. Feedback that donors receive from the charitable organization will help to strengthen the emotional pay-off and enhances future donation intentions. The research utilizes an experimental design and data from 319 undergraduate students in a large U.S. university to confirm these hypotheses. Theoretical and managerial implications are then presented.     

Networking under uncertainty: Concepts and research agenda

This paper has two aims: Firstly, to develop the interpretation of business management as a process of ‘networking’ between companies by relating networking to the concepts of managerial uncertainties and abilities. Secondly, to suggest some areas of potential research that arise from the view of management as networking under uncertainty.The paper builds on the Activities, Actors, Resources (ARA) structure (Håkansson & Snehota 1995) and the Model of Managing in Business Networks (Håkansson et al., 2009) and interprets business interaction as a problem-coping process that involves a set of choices for interacting actors within particular business relationships that are unique in time and space. The paper then relates these choices to the uncertainties and abilities of interacting counterparts.     

Host-country location decisions of early movers and latecomers: The role of local density and experiential learning

Service firms such as banks and hotels typically locate multiple foreign affiliates in the same host country. Often, these location patterns occur in waves with early movers followed by latecomers; for example, the early entries of Japanese banks into the U.S. market in the 1970s and 1980s were followed by emerging-market Asian banks in the 1990s. Using insights from the agglomeration and organizational learning literatures, we argue that local density and experiential learning affect location choices within a host country, and that these relationships differ between early movers and latecomers. We test and find support for our arguments using a sample of Asian banks in the United States over 1997–2003.     

The effects of families and ability on men's education and earnings in Britain

The paper estimates the returns to education for a cohort of men born in Britain in March 1958 who have been followed since birth until the age of 33. The data used has a wealth of information on family background including parental education, social class and interest shown in the child's education as well as measures of ability. These variables are typically missing in studies looking at the returns to schooling. In the paper, we find that the average return to an additional year of full-time education for the UK men is somewhere around 5 1/2% to 6% even after correcting for the effects of measurement error. The paper also presents evidence that the returns to an additional year of schooling in the UK are heterogeneous. In particular, the paper finds some evidence that men with lower tastes for education, have significantly higher marginal returns to education. The results of the paper suggest that recent IV estimates of the returns to schooling in the UK, which exceed typical OLS estimates, may overestimate the average marginal return for the population of men as a whole.