Animating the Pioneer versus Late Entrant Debate: An Historic Case Study

This paper examines the debate about whether early entrants/pioneers to an industry enjoy long–term advantage over their successors. While most of the research suggests that pioneers are advantaged, there are methodological problems with these studies that tend to enhance the likelihood that pioneers will be found to be more successful. Through a case study of the US animation industry, it is shown that being a late entrant was almost certainly advantageous to some of the companies concerned. The paper explores the reasons why some late entrants prevailed over others and some of the mechanisms that allowed late entrants to overcome pioneers. The factors involved in survival relative to pioneers include the limited protection of patents, complacency, the mobility of staff with expertise in a new technology (in this case cel animation), and the neglected importance of managerial and organizational factors. It is shown that the findings also have implications for the population ecology approach.     

Identity, appropriateness and the construction of regulatory space: the formation of the Public Accountant's Council of Ontario

Practice rights legislation in Canada continues to be contested 50 years after its first enactment. In Ontario, one of the earliest provinces to enact restrictive legislation, the challenges have focused on how the legislation has been implemented rather than on whether or not public accounting should be regulated. To better understand the contested issues in this field, we examine the process undertaken by the Public Accountants Council of Ontario to implement the Public Accountancy Act of 1950. Our analysis is based on the first 15 years of the minutes of the meetings of the Public Accountants Council for Ontario, augmented by other archival sources such as court cases, newspaper clippings, correspondence and reports. Our intent is to document the process and “logic of appropriateness” used by the Council to construct its identity and stake out its “regulatory space” in the face of the ambiguity of the law and pressure from interest groups. We also identify the contradictions that were institutionalized in this field resulting in repeated challenges to the Council. We conclude by relating the historical insights from this analysis to the continuing challenges to practice rights legislation in Ontario.     

Business Strategy and Poverty Alleviation

Currently, entrepreneurs and corporations overwhelmingly do not view the alleviation of global poverty as a strategic priority. Yet business activity can have a negative as well as a positive effect on each distinctive form of poverty. In order to reduce poverty, entrepreneurs have to find ways of limiting the negative aspects. This might be achieved by deliberately augmenting strategies so that they can achieve a synthesis, in partnership with governments and NGO’s. Alan E. Singer is a reader in strategy at the university of Canterbury. He was the 2004/5 Aram chair of Business Ethics at Gonzaga. He is author of Strategy as Rationality (Avebury), Co editor (with Pat Werhane) of Business Ethics in Theory and Practice (Kluwer) and editor of Business Ethics and Strategy (Ashgate, forthcoming). He has written journal articles on many aspects of strategy and decision making and has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Business Ethics (to 2003), Human Systems Management, Journal of International Entrepreneurship, African Journal of Business Ethics and the Journal of Economic Development and Business Policy.     

The Competitive Characteristics of U.S Manufacturers in the Machine Tool Industry

This paper examines the competitive characteristics of U.S. manufacturers in the machine tool (MT) industry. After several decades of decline, this industry has recently shown signs of a modest but sustained recovery. Empirical evidence from a national survey of 104 MT producers suggests that the revival of this sector has been driven by a combination of factors, including renewed export involvement, improved customer support, and better product design. Although most MT companies are small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the survey data show that very small SMEs are poorly represented in the recovery thrust of the industry as a whole. Our principal conclusion is that the MT industry has been following an export-led path toward stabilization, but that certain types of small producers are unlikely to thrive for very long. The most serious problems facing small producers include shrinking local markets, import competition, shortages of skilled labor, and cyclical demand.     

HOW IDEOLOGIES SUPPLANT FORMAL STRUCTURES AND SHAPE RESPONSES TO ENVIRONMENTS

Observations of nineteen hospitals show how organizational ideologies are manifested and sustained by beliefs, stories, languages, and ceremonial acts. The data indicate that harmonious ideologies accompany simple structures, but that discordant ones accompany elaborate structures. Through their effects on people and structures, ideologies guide organizations’responses to external threats.     

Expressive Constitutionalism

We argue that the standard Constitutional Political Economy defence of constitutionalism, that derives from an argument relating to the shift from narrowly self-interested motivations in the in-period context to relatively general-interest decision making in the constitutional context, is flawed precisely because it is intended to relate to essentially political settings where decision making must be construed as collective in nature. We suggest an alternate account of expressive constitutionalism that points to a specific defence of constitutional conventions that are insulated from popular voting.     

Behavioural Microsimulation with Labour Supply Responses

This paper provides a technical survey of recent developments in behavioural microsimulation. We discuss the criteria by which models of labour supply may be chosen for application to behavioural microsimulation, and consider how such models may be augmented to control for fixed costs, child–related work costs, preference heterogeneity and endogeneity in wages. We describe methods by which non–linear budget constraints may be accommodated in estimation, policy simulations and welfare analysis, and discuss how stochastic terms may be factored into the simulation of behavioural responses to a policy shock.     

The Effect of Risk Characteristics on the Willingness to Pay for Mortality Risk Reductions from Electric Power Generation

The objective of this study is to estimate willingness to pay (WTP) for the reduction of mortality risks caused by fossil fuel (natural gas, coal and oil) versus nuclear electric power generation systems and to examine the influence of risk characteristics involved with electric power generation on WTP. A choice experiment was conducted to achieve these objectives. The attributes for nuclear risks in the experiment included the probability of disasters and the expected losses if a disaster occurs. We find evidence of (i) a baseline effect (where WTP is sensitive to hypothetical versus actual baseline expected mortality); (ii) a ‘labeling effect,’ where, surprisingly, the term ‘nuclear’ has no effect on WTP, but the term ‘fossil-fueled power generation’ results in lower WTP; and (iii) disaster aversion, meaning that people focus on the conditional loss from a nuclear disaster, not the probability. We also find that the WTP for reducing deaths from a nuclear disaster is about 60 times the WTP for routine reducing fossil-fuel generation-related deaths.