Organizational performance and managerial turnover

Involuntary and voluntary managerial job‐termination hazard functions are estimated for English professional soccer for the period 1972–1997. A novel feature is the use of match‐level data, which reveals aspects of the hazard otherwise concealed by estimation using annual data. Short‐term fluctuations in performance strongly influence the involuntary termination hazard. The latter is also heavily dependent on the team's current league position relative to its position when the manager took charge, and on the win ratio over the entire spell. Managerial human capital attributes are found to have a greater influence on the voluntary rather than on the involuntary termination hazard. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

MNE practice transfer as a process of institutional change

We build upon current theory on strategic organizational practice transfer in multinational firms by incorporating the agency of actors and applying an institutional lens to the transfer process. Our theoretical analysis suggests that practice transfer is a process of institutional change that leads not only to practice adoption, adaptation, or nonadoption, but also to reconstruction. We argue that when contradictions exist within and across institutional environments, misaligned interests motivate actors to engage in praxis. As a parent‐subsidiary coalition, these actors reconstruct the practice by transcending the multitude of institutional environments that comprise the institutional system. Our process theory provides insight into how less powerful subsidiary actors engage in praxis to extend knowledge and build new capabilities within the firm. Copyright © 2014 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Retention of latent segments in regression-based marketing models

Product design and marketing mix decisions for segmented markets depend crucially on the correct specification of marketing models used as input to these decisions. With real-world data, the true number of segments in a market is unknown. Current evidence from simulation studies suggests that the accuracy of commonly used criteria for determining the number of segments in a market depends on the usage context, including the type of distribution being used to describe the data, the model specification, and the characteristics of the market. This study investigates via simulation the performance of seven segment retention criteria used with finite mixture regression models for normal data. This is one of the most important analysis contexts in marketing research since regression models are used, for example, in conjoint analysis and market response analysis, yet no previous study in either the marketing or statistics literatures explores the segment retention problem for mixture regression models. The study shows that one criterion, Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC) with a per-parameter penalty factor of 3 (AIC3), is clearly the best criterion to use across a wide variety of model specifications and data configurations, having the highest success rate and producing very low parameter bias. Currently, this criterion is rarely, if ever, used in the marketing literature.     

“搜索”淘金潮

“众里寻他千百度，蓦然回首，那人却在灯火阑珊处。“中国排名第一的搜索引擎公司——百度公司的名字取自辛弃疾的千古名篇《青玉案·元夕》。从千年前的寻爱之旅到21世纪的搜索成功之路，百度仅仅走了不到5年的时间。     

Pushing back the frontiers: management control and work intensification under JIT/TQM factory regimes

Drawing on primary and secondary sources the authors argue that the JIT/TQM manufacturing system intensifies work as a result of increased surveillance and monitoring of workers' activities, heightened responsibility and accountability, the harnessing of peer pressure within 'teams' and via 'customers', and the fostering of 'involvement' in waste elimination and the continuous improvement of the production process.     

The first WFSF Asia—Pacific course: the futures of development

Is development theory dead? It seems to be, if the thinking of some young people at a futures course in Bangkok is any indication. The course, ‘The futures of development: historical roots, present trends and alternative futures’, was held in Bangkok 23–30 August 1992 by the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF), with sponsorship from UNESCO and the Communication Centre of the Queensland University of Technology, Australia.     

Project selection and execution in teams

We use a mechanism‐design approach to study a team whose members select a joint project and exert individual efforts to execute it. Members have private information about the qualities of alternative projects. Information sharing is obstructed by a trade‐off between adaptation and motivation. We determine the conditions under which first‐best project and effort choices are implementable and show that these conditions can become relaxed as the team grows in size. We also characterize the second‐best mechanism and find that it may include a “motivational bias,” that is, a bias in favor of the team's initially preferred project, and higher‐than‐optimal effort by uninformed team members.