Cities mediating technological transitions: understanding visions,intermediation and consequences

Approaches to technological transitions and their management have generated considerable interest in academic and policy circles in recent years. The development of this body of work may be seen as a response to the complexities, uncertainties and problems which confront many western societies, in organising ‘sustainably’ various aspects of energy, agricultural, water, transport and health systems of production and consumption; problems which are seen as systemic and entwined or embedded in a series of social, economic, political, cultural and technological relationships. For all the light that transitions approaches shine on such processes they say little explicitly about the role of places. In this paper we address this through looking at the way in which London is currently beginning to shape a systemic transition in its energy infrastructure. We outline and discuss key aspects of the roles of strategic intermediary organisations, which have been strategically set up to intervene between technological possibilities and the territorial context of London. We draw on the case of London to highlight an emblematic example of a city's attempt to systemically re-shape its energy infrastructure and the lessons to be drawn from this. We also outline the particularity of London in this respect, the limitations of the transferability of experiences in London and highlight directions for future research in this area.     

Collecting Event Histories with TrueTales:Techniques to Improve Autobiographical Recall Problems in Standardized Interviews

This article deals with the challenges autobiographical recall processes present to validity of events and their dates in the collection of life histories in standardized interviews. Effective interviewing techniques should support the idiosyncratic cognitive structure and the reconstructive memory processes of autobiographical memory by allowing to flexibly explore the interconnections between memories. We describe the techniques and strategies of interviewing and data recording used in the German Life History Study, namely modularization, forward recall and single case data edition. We introduce TrueTales, a CATI- Program designed to support memory and communication in the interview, and results of its experimental evaluation. TrueTales personalizes instructions, questions and probes and permits controlled flexibility in dealing with individual biographies and recall strategies. Working with a calendar-based time-line, it yields more complete, consistent and valid event histories. Finally, we discuss implications for standardized interviewing practices and the concept of standardization.     

Acquisition vs. internal development as modes of market entry

An established firm can enter a new product market through acquisition or internal development. Predictions that the choice of market entry mode depends on ‘relatedness’ between the new product and the firm's existing products have repeatedly failed to gain empirical support. We resolve ambiguity in prior work by developing dynamic measures of relatedness, and by making a distinction between entries inside vs. outside a firm's primary business domain. Using a fine‐grained dataset on the telecommunications sector, we find that inside a firm's primary business domain, acquisitions are used to fill persistent gaps near the firm's existing products, whereas outside that domain, acquisitions are used to extend the enterprise in new directions. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Organization of foreign trade under capitalism and socialism

We study the effectiveness of various ways of organizing foreign-trade activities utilized under capitalism and socialism. A normative theory of organization is developed based on the costs and benefits of processing and acting on information by the organization. We survey the forms of organization employed by large American firms, Japanese trading companies, and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe and evaluate their development on the basis of our normative theory. In all systems, there is a steady approach toward organizational forms that produce direct links between producers and international markets. Such ties, however, appear to create greater difficulties for socialist countries than for capitalist firms.