Technology development and adoption rates: Systems approach for agricultural research and extension

Adoption of new technology in peasant agriculture remains lower than expected. Failure to achieve expected returns is associated more with insufficiencies in the conduct of research than with external and economic factors such as price structure or lack of agricultural support services. This article sets out the case for national agricultural research and extension structures that emphasize on-farm research with a systems approach.     

The Good Manager – A Moral Manager?

In this article two problems with the recently developed "practice or virtue approach" to business ethics are discussed. The first problem concerns an alleged harmony between common demands of morality (generally understood) and the internal goods of actual business practice. The claimed harmony is strong in essence since it holds that the role expectations a good manager has to live up to, do in fact coincide with what morality demands. The second problem is related to the first and concerns the alleged relevance of a virtue perspective for business ethics. According to the virtue perspective discussed in this article, moral reasoning should take actual practice, and only actual practice, as a point of departure. In so doing ethics is claimed to become insulated from e.g. putting irrelevant demands on practitioners. Such demands are understood as based on abstract principles alien to the practice in question. The thesis of this article is that neither of the above mentioned two claims are plausible. This is so basically because one needs to turn elsewhere than to actual business practice in order to detect a morally laden notion of managerial goodness.     

Anreizregulierung für Schienenwegbetreiber — ein kleiner Schritt in die richtige Richtung

Resulting from the entry into force of the “Act to strengthen competition in the railway sector” in 2016, railway infrastructure charges will be subject to a new regulation regime. As of 2019, the Federal Network Agency must set annual price caps for the infrastructure managers in order to incentivise increases in efficiency. As compared to the situation prior to 2016, new components for reducing costs have been introduced to the regulation regime. However, it is doubtful that the intended incentive regulation will bring about the expected reductions in costs.     

Uncovering evidence on community-based injury prevention: A review of programme effectiveness and factors influencing effectiveness

This study examines systematic reviews of community-based injury prevention programmes to obtain an overview of the evidence base on the effectiveness of these programmes and to analyse how effectiveness is measured and the extent to which factors contributing to achieving programme effectiveness are examined in these reviews. Thirteen systematic reviews were found, encompassing a total of 121 programmes. The results reinforced the well-documented point that the evidence regarding the effectiveness of community-based injury prevention programmes is inconsistent. Some of the programmes targeting specific injury categories, e.g. specific injury types and/or age groups, were successful, whilst more broadly targeted programmes demonstrated less convincing results. Effectiveness was predominantly measured as injury rate reductions. Only one of the reviews identified contextual factors that could have impacted on programme effectiveness. To advance the field, researchers and systematic reviews need to include evidence on factors that may explain how the effects were achieved.     

Venture Idea Assessment (VIA): Development of a needed concept,measure, and research agenda

To address challenges constraining prior research on evaluation of entrepreneurial projects, we develop the concept of Venture Idea Assessment (VIA) and validate an instrument to capture it. VIA concerns the assessment of Venture Ideas (VI) unbundled from assessment of any agents with whom they may be associated. The assessment can be performed by anybody at any stage of the venture development process, not just by potential founders at its outset. We develop and validate a parsimonious VIA measure across six empirical studies using a broad set of assessors and VIs using interviews, experiments and surveys following real-world start-up processes and decisions. In a research agenda we outline how the VIA platform—the concept and its operationalization—can be employed in novel research across various streams of entrepreneurship research.