Explaining Location Patterns of Suburban Offices

Suburban office markets exhibit a pattern of variegated clustering that is little explained by the conventional theories of urban form based on agglomeration effects and the cost of distance. To explain the pattern, this paper introduces industry economies of scale for "Class A" offices. Empirical tests for industry economies of scale are reported, based on data from the office market of Houston, Texas. The models presented, under conditions typical of North American cities in recent decades, imply the patterns of variegated clustering that are observed. They suggest a sequence of clusters, increasing in size and distance from the central business district. Further, they imply the potential for mass movement by tenants from older clusters to new.     

Hybrid social media: employees’ use of a boundary‐spanning technology

Improved employee collaboration and communication can be facilitated by social technologies that extend within and beyond organisations. These social technologies have increasingly come to be represented by social media sites, which are used to extend workplace relationships across personal and professional boundaries in a hybrid role. This presents opportunities and risks as those boundaries are collapsed. Using boundary management as a theoretical lens, we evaluate the associations of relationship initiation between colleagues at different levels of organisations with employees’ strategies and their well‐being. We also investigate relationships with social media usage, age and propensity to self‐monitor and group employees using cluster analysis. We consider implications of our findings for developing more sophisticated policies, training and guidance for employees on the use of social media as a workplace tool.     

Business-to-business collaboration through electronic marketplaces: An exploratory study

Many business-to-business electronic marketplaces (EMs) are now offering collaboration functionalities, but the collaboration concept in an EM context has not been studied systematically. This paper is a preliminary effort to explore and categorise the different types of collaboration functionalities that may be offered by EMs. By surveying websites, we identified five types of horizontal collaboration (buying groups) and four kinds of vertical supply chain collaboration in EMs. Our findings suggest that supply chain collaboration tends to be supported more than buying groups by existing EMs, and a high percentage of EMs now offers supply chain coordination and integration. Among online buying groups, the exchange-catalogue model is the most popular, possibly since it puts fewer burdens on members and coordinators.     

Fragmentation or creative diversity? Options in the provision of land management advisory services

Rural land managers need access to sound advice and information to respond to pressures from environmental regulations, declining farm incomes, changing patterns in international trade and new institutional arrangements within the domestic food chain. Governments have cut back their provision of advisory services but need more than ever to influence land managers’ decisions to achieve a growing array of policy objectives. The paper develops a conceptual framework for analysing advisory services and concludes, through a review of sixteen case studies, that the needs of both governments and land managers can be met by a diverse mixture of private and public sector provision.     

Lessons from the PB Selayang Land consolidation project in Medan, Indonesia

The National Land Agency (BPN) carried out the PB Selayang Land Consolidation (LC) Project on 79 ha of urban fringe land in Medan from 1986 to 1990 as a pilot project for North Sumatra Province. Although it did not include the construction of the network infrastructure, the project provided valuable benefits and lessons. It demonstrated the feasibility of the LC technique in the Medan context, including the preparation of the needed land parcel map of the site and the 90% landowner support for the project. It created a planned layout of roads and public facility sites and reshaped land parcels with the public lands in government ownership and the private land parcels with registered titles. It also provided lessons to guide the future use of LC in Medan and for all urban LC projects by BPN, including the need to incorporate the construction of the network infrastructure in each project, the desirability of undertaking the projects as joint BPN/ municipal government projects, and the need to make each project self-financing by the sale of some of the new parcels/plots to recover the project costs.     

An Insurance Approach to Risk Analysis of Debt Home Equity Conversion Programs

The use of home equity conversion debt creates a compounding obligation against the home that makes collateral deficiency a potentially dominant risk. Using an insurance methodology, an examination of this risk and its impact upon the potential for home equity conversion is conducted. The paper includes a consideration of how deficiency risk and maximum potential benefits are affected by the interaction of household characteristics with demographic and economic factors.