Patent breadth as effective barrier to market entry

Firms protecting their invention by a patent have the legal right to exclude competitors from using the patented matter. However, despite patent protection, competitors could enter the market by ‘inventing around’. Provided that inventing around becomes more difficult the broader a patent is, the strength of protection against market entry increases in patent breadth. Building on a theoretical benchmark formalizing the relationship between varying patent breadth and the threat of market entry, our empirical analysis supports the prediction that inventors perceive broad patents as effective market entry barriers.     

High‐Growth Women’s Entrepreneurship: Fueling Social and Economic Development

High‐growth firms, often referred to as “gazelles,” are equated with entrepreneurial success and celebrated as the key to growing economies, and women’s entrepreneurship is a vehicle of economic and social development. This special issue publishes papers that address the general lack of research on high‐growth women’s entrepreneurship. In this introduction paper, we offer an adapted framework for the factors driving high growth across multiple levels: individual (entrepreneur and entrepreneurial team characteristics), venture (strategy, organizational structures, and systems), resources, location, and environment. We also introduce the papers in this special issue and present an overview of the contributions to this issue.     

The link between product diversification and performance among Spanish manufacturing firms: Analyzing the role of firm size

This study sheds additional light on the product diversification‐performance relationship for firms in a country having recently attained an advanced economy status in our period of analysis. We assume there will be an inverted U‐shaped relationship and use a sample of small, medium, and large Spanish manufacturing firms between 1994 and 2008. Our findings provide solid support for this assumption, and are identical when the sample consists of small, medium, and large firms and of large firms alone. Our results also suggest that the larger the firm, the higher the optimal level of diversification. Panel data models are used to control for unobservable heterogeneity and potential endogeneity problems. Copyright © 2015 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Return of the State: Neocollectivism,Agrarian Politics and Images of Technological Progress in the MAS Era in Bolivia

The Movement towards Socialism (MAS) party promised to break with neoliberal politics when it rose to power in Bolivia in 2006. Using the concept of neocollectivism to characterize MAS agrarian politics, this paper examines one of its key instruments for achieving rural development: the state enterprise EMAPA. This state company, which supports small producers, envisions a new agrarian structure of production and commercialization, one that will break the power of the Santa Cruz–based agro‐industrial elite. Drawing on a discussion of the mechanisms of governance employed by this state entity, we argue that new complexities in state–civil society relations and a low state capacity have constrained its ability to shift power relationships between the state and the agro‐industrial elites. Instead of reducing the dependency of small producers on agro‐industrial capital, the Bolivian state has increased it, thereby undermining its goal of redistribution. The paper also analyses different moments of politicization and depoliticization in the intervention process arising from the demand for political change, as well as for technically efficient and profitable agricultural production.     

The Agenda for Ethics in Human Resource Management

In April this year a Conference on Ethical Issues in Contemporary Human Resource Management was held at the Management School, Imperial College, London, and jointly sponsored by the British Universities Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA) and the UK Chapter of the European Business Ethics Network (EBEN-UK). We are indebted to the organisers of the Conference, Dr Diana Winstanley, Lecturer in Human Resource Management at Imperial College Management School, Dr Jean Woodall, Reader in Human Resource Management at Kingston Business School, and Professor Edmund Heery, Professor of Human Resource Management at Cardiff Business School, for the following overview of the ethics agenda emerging for modern HRM as this figured in contributions to the Imperial College Conference. All the papers delivered at the Conference are obtainable from Dr Diana Winstanley, Imperial College Management School, 53 Prince's Gate, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2PG, tel: (44)(0) 171-594-9114.     

The Future of Japanese Manufacturing in the UK

The expansion of Japanese FDI into the UK manufacturing sector during the 1980s and early 1990s gave rise to the debate on the Japanization of British industry. The paper argues that this debate was constructed from a Western perspective. It did not locate the strategies and structures of Japanese subsidiaries within the broader context of how Japanese multinational corporations were evolving in this period. The necessity to look at these issues from a more global perspective is reinforced by the changes which have occurred since the mid 1990s in the environment for Japanese multinationals. The global economy offers more choices to firms about their location as well as facing them with a more competitive environment. In the Japanese case, this is leading to a growing differentiation between standardized mass production (which can be located in Asia and Eastern Europe) and science–led sectors of industrial production (which necessitate location near to centres of research and development expertise in the USA and Europe). This means that Japanese firms are reconsidering the strategy and structure of their subsidiaries in the UK. Standardized mass production will only survive in the UK as long as costs can be pushed further down and productivity increased, both of which are difficult conditions to meet given possibilities elsewhere in the world for cheap mass production. The growing area of investment will be in science–based manufacturing, though here the UK will be competing against the USA and Germany for Japanese investment. Here, however, the organizational and management characteristics of Japanese subsidiaries will make the necessary connections with local managers and local networks of expertise difficult to achieve. Thus Japanese subsidiaries in the UK are in a period of prolonged uncertainty about their role in the future. These changes open up the necessity for a new agenda of research which goes beyond the Japanization approach and is concerned with the organization and management of Japanese multinationals in an era of global competition.     

Corporate Ethics Initiatives As Social Control

Efforts to institutionalize ethics in corporations have been discussed without first addressing the desirability of norm conformity or the possibility that the means used to elicit conformity will be coercive. This article presents a theoretical context, grounded in models of social control, within which ethics initiatives may be evaluated. Ethics initiatives are discussed in relation to variables that already exert control in the workplace, such as environmental controls, organizational controls, and personal controls.     

Effluent fees and market structure

This paper explores the efficiency properties of a system of effluent fees in a mixed economy in which polluting agents take a variety of organizational forms: private monopoly, the managerial firm, regulated firms, and public bureaus. The analysis, including some crude empirical estimates, suggests that the welfare gains from pollution control are likely to dwarf in magnitude the potential losses from the various imperfections in the economy. The tentative conclusion is that the case for a system of fees that is invariant with respect to organizational form is not seriously compromised by likely deviations from competitive behavior.     

Alcoholic beverage legislation: Harmonizing EEC laws

This article outlines the range of non-tariff obstacles to intra-EEC trade in alcoholic beverages. It describes the response of EEC institutions vizàviz harmonization of laws and European Court jurisprudence. The implications of the now famous ‘Cassis de Dijon’ court ruling are discussed and the paper concludes with tentative suggestions on the direction of future EEC efforts to create a common market for alcoholic beverages.