Instrumental client relationship development among top-ranking service professionals

Informal client contact forms a crucial part of the daily routine of service professionals, in particular among top-ranking professionals working for consultancy and accountancy firms. In this paper, we investigate how 34 service professionals develop informal client contact, by studying their networking styles. Our study shows many similarities in informal client contact between two groups of service professionals grouped by gender, but we also found subtle differences in what we coin instrumental and expressive relations. Contrary to gender stereotypes, we found that female service professionals tended toward instrumental networking styles, using professionalism and distance and allowing the high quality of their work compensate for network deficits, contingent upon their clients’ gender. Male service professionals drew on expressive relations to develop emotional bonding with their male clients in particular, but nonetheless toward instrumental purposes. Our study contributes to service industries literature by theoretically and empirically establishing the different informal networking styles between top-ranking service professionals, and the role of emotional bonding in particular. In doing so, the paper helps to better understand the intricacies of informal client contact as a critical dimension of the professional services industry.     

Vertical and financial ownership: Competition policy and the evolution of the UK pub market

Abstract

Traditionally the UK brewing industry was vertically integrated with brewers owning and controlling pubs. This came to an abrupt end in the forced divestment of a large proportion of the major brewers' pub estates in the 1989 ‘Beer Orders’. The divested pubs spawned the independent pub companies. This study of regulatory policy and financial services interest in the UK brewing industry poses the question of whether the original industrial structure was preferable to what has emerged subsequently. The contribution of the article is in highlighting the risks and rewards of regulatory intervention in deeply-embedded organisation and the sustainability of alternative business models that emerge.     

Environmental Performance Focus in Private Family Firms: The Role of Social Embeddedness

The macro-level business ethics in Scholasticism contrasts with modern Anglo-Saxon Capitalism, which is very influential worldwide. Scholasticism, developed between the thirteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries, deals with key elements of free market morality, including private property, contracts, profits, prices, and free competition. For over 500 years Scholasticism tried to understand economic phenomena and business activities and reflected on them from an ethical perspective. Scholasticism offered the crucial lesson of the centrality of justice and the role of practical wisdom in considering market morality. Justice is seen as both a virtue and a principle, and commutative justice (justice in exchanges) with the common good of society as the reference for the Scholastics, is regarded as being especially important.     

Outsourcing Canadian Armed Forces logistics in a foreign theatre

Successful outsourcing of military logistics depends much on cooperation and efficiency, and this article provides an in‐depth analysis of challenges this may pose using collaborative competence theory. Using an exploratory approach, this paper is based on a review of the existing literature and on the experience of the Canadian Armed Forces in a foreign theatre. Specifically, the information collected comes from on‐site observation during the UN mission in Bosnia, semistructured interviews, and archives. Our analysis shows that outsourcing military logistics activities in a foreign theatre should be seen as building and managing a “temporary network.” In order to overcome challenges in such a situation, the Armed Forces must specifically act on the adaptability of all individuals in the theatre. The approach should be based on “collaborative competence.” Copyright © 2015 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Economic Significance of User-Generated Feedback

This paper examines the impact of user-generated feedback on price at a price comparison site or shopbot. It employs a modified hedonic price function to explore the use made by current potential consumers of the experience of past actual consumers in evaluating quality attributes that were not observable when the product was initially launched on to the market. Using a database of daily observations on 211 digital cameras traded on NexTag.com, we find that the product’s star rating, reflecting all the available individual assessments of the product, has a significant negative impact on the discount on the manufacturer’s recommended selling price at which the product is offered.     

Innovation Economy,Productive Public Expenditure and Economic Growth

Multidisciplinary innovation is the main engine of growth for an increasing number of economies. Innovation requires the participation of and interaction between all economic agents. It also requires public spending on education, research and infrastructures. Our main goal is to emphasize the government's role in a growing innovation economy. Developing a non‐scale, idea‐based, one‐sector growth model with complementarities and productive public expenditure, we analyse theoretically the growth effects of an increase in productive public expenditure, which we find positive in the short, medium and long run.     

Is bank staff interaction associated with customer saving behavior in banks?

Major changes are underway in the U.S. retail banking sector toward heavy investments in technology and fewer in personnel. Using the 2017 survey of household economics and decision‐making (SHED) (n = 11,359), we examine the relationship between saving behavior related to emergency, long‐term and periodic expenses and personal, technological, and hybrid bank account access methods. Binary logistic regression models were used to estimate the odds of reporting various saving behaviors in relation to various banking access methods. Findings suggest that the personal access method is positively associated with savings behavior for periodic expenses for the general population, and negatively associated with emergency savings in people with lower education attainment. Technology is associated with all types of saving behavior, while the hybrid access method is associated only with saving for periodic expenses. As investments in self‐service technology increase, the importance of access methods to savings behavior must be considered.     

Einnahmen- und ausgabenseitige Multiplikatoren der deutschen Volkswirtschaft

Theoretically based on the Haavelmo theorem, this study analyses the economic effects that increasing public expenditure or reducing public income have on the gross domestic product of Germany, with the help of two medium-sized macro-econometric models, the RWI business cycle model and the Econometric Model of the German Economy. The major finding is that most of the public revenue multipliers are considerably lower than most of the public spending multipliers. However, both the dimension and the time course of the effects are a function of the specific kind of politico-economic measures taken by the government.     

Organizing for Society: A Typology of Social Entrepreneuring Models

In this article, we use content and cluster analysis on a global sample of 200 social entrepreneurial organizations to develop a typology of social entrepreneuring models. This typology is based on four possible forms of capital that can be leveraged: social, economic, human, and political. Furthermore, our findings reveal that these four social entrepreneuring models are associated with distinct logics of justification that may explain different ways of organizing across organizations. This study contributes to understanding social entrepreneurship as a field of practice and it describes avenues for theorizing about the different organizational approaches adopted by social entrepreneurs.