Conformity and the Demand for Environmental Goods

The existing literature on eco-labeling and green consumerism has been framed within a classical market context where price and quality are the drivers of consumer choice. However, it seems possible that consumers are also concerned about the choices made by other consumers. In fact, it is unclear that people’s consumption decisions are made independently of social context. For instance, under the desire to conform to certain social norms—or in the presence of status concerns—some individuals may be willing to pay a higher price premium for green products the more widespread green consumerism is in society. We test this hypothesis using a choice experiment where the respondents were asked to choose among coffee products varying with respect to their share of ecological beans, share of fair trade beans, and price. Three treatments were used, differing only in the information given about the choices made by other consumers. We find different responses to the treatments across individuals and we can only confirm our hypothesis of conformity for women, although men appear to have stronger preferences for ecological coffee than women have.     

Strategic Management Thinking and Practice in the Public Sector: A Strategic Planning for All Seasons?

This paper explores how strategic management thinking manifests itself in strategic management practice in the public sector. Mintzberg's framework of ten strategic management schools of thought is chosen for mapping strategic management thinking. The paper analyses a convenience sample of 35 strategic management processes, observation of an agency's strategy reformulation process and interviews of managers in the public sector in Norway for informing the discussion. Strategic planning is heavily criticised in some of the business strategy literature. The analysis indicates that strategic management in the public sector extensively uses strategic planning, bundled with certain other schools of thought, despite tendencies to downplay formal, mechanistic planning in contemporary strategic management theory.     

Does Gibrat's law hold for retailing? Evidence from Sweden

Gibrat's Law predicts that firm growth is a purely random effect and therefore should be independent of firm size. The purpose of this paper is to test Gibrat's law within the retail industry, using a novel data-set comprising all surviving Swedish limited liability companies active at some point between 1998 and 2004. Very few studies have previously investigated whether Gibrat's Law seems to hold for retailing, and they are based on highly aggregated data. Our results indicate that Gibrat's Law can be rejected for a large majority of five-digit retail industries in Sweden, since small retail firms tend to grow faster than large ones.     

“Squeezing R&D”: A Study of Organizational Slack and Knowledge Creation in NPD,Using the SECI Model

During new product development (NPD), functional areas such as marketing, R&D, and manufacturing work together to understand customer needs, create product concepts, and solve technical issues. NPD is dependent on the creation of new knowledge and the interplay between tacit knowledge (knowledge that is difficult to articulate and codify) and explicit knowledge (knowledge that can be codified and documented). Knowledge creation requires time and resources, and the dichotomy facing senior management is how much spare capacity in NPD teams—so‐called organizational slack—is appropriate. Too much organizational slack and precious development resources will be wasted; but when slack is eliminated, there is a danger that knowledge creation will be severely hindered. There have been very few studies of organizational slack at the project level, and so the aim of our research was to examine the impact of changes in organizational slack on knowledge creation in NPD projects. Six projects were studied at two companies, over a two‐year period. Multiple sources of data were used to determine how changes in organizational slack impacted knowledge creation, which was operationalized using Nonaka's socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization (SECI) model. It was found that the creation of knowledge in NPD projects is susceptible to changes in organizational slack. A significant finding was that every time there were changes in organizational slack, there was always some impact on knowledge creation. Increased slack enabled knowledge creation; but, importantly, the impacts of decreasing organizational slack were often very negative and disrupted the work of NPD teams, particularly at the end of projects. Managers who feel that “squeezing R&D” is important should think again—their action might disrupt knowledge creation and compromise innovation.     

Dynamische Wertprobleme

Ohne ZusammenfassungAus dem Schwedischen übersetzt von J. Morgenstern, Wien     

Preise und Produktion

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Die Fließarbeit

Ohne ZusammenfassungÜbersetzt von Dr. Erich Schiff, Wien     

Empirical evidence on the two-gap hypothesis: A revised analysis

This paper reconsiders the problem, analyzed by Weisskopf (1972a), of empirically classifying a set of low-income countries as having had their growth performance primarily constrained by the availability of foreign exchange or of domestic savings. Ambiguities in Weisskopf's procedure are noted, and an alternative, based on the extension of classical likelihood-ratio methods to the case of regression parameters subject to linear inequality constraints, is suggested. Reclassifying a subset of countries from Weisskopf's sample, we find stronger evidence against the importance of an independent foreign exchange constraint than indicated by Weisskopf's original results.     

Does adaptation pay off?

Adaptation has been taken as self-evident in earlier research. However, adaptation is vital between a buyer and seller in order to make the relationship more productive. The purpose of this paper is to analyse a win-win situation for both the supplier and the buyer. In such a situation the suppliers' adaptation results in an improved quality of produced products, consequently leading to a stronger position on the market. This paper describes a unique form of adaptation, which is both joint and individual among a group of suppliers.