Managerial decision making in customer management: adaptive, fast and frugal?

While customer management has become a top priority for practitioners and academics, little is known about how managers actually make customer management decisions. Our study addresses this gap and uses the adaptive decision maker as well as the fast and frugal heuristics frameworks to gain a better understanding of managerial decision making. Using the process-tracing tool MouselabWEB, we presented sales managers in retail banking with three typical customer management prediction tasks. The results show that a majority of managers in this study are adaptive in their decision making and that some managers use fast and frugal heuristics. Usage of adaptive decision making seems to be mainly driven by low objective task difficulty, the use of fast and frugal heuristics by experience. While adaptive decision making does not impact predictive accuracy, usage of fast and frugal heuristics is associated with proportionally greater use of high predictive quality cues and a significant increase in accuracy. Hence, the existing skepticism concerning heuristics should be questioned.     

interpreting slavery Tourism

This inquiry explores the manner in which tourists endow a former slave plantation with meaning by promoting or demoting its cultural authority. Drawing on the encoding/decoding model, this study utilizes interviews to examine the ways in which tourists decode the plantation by acquiescing or negating the preferred cultural text through the adoption of dominant, negotiated or oppositional readings. The findings indicate that as active recipients of the preferred reading tourists interpreted/decoded the plantation in dichotomous polarized ways based on the meaning structures and knowledge frameworks of the interpretive communities within which they are situated. In essence, the decoding process, much like the encoding process is viewed as constituting an array of dominant ideologies.     

Farmer perceptions of legumes and their functions in smallholder farming systems in east Africa

Legumes play an important role in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) farming systems through the provision of food, feed, fuel, income and a range of biophysical benefits, such as soil fertility enhancement and erosion control. However, their full potential is not being realized. The purpose of this study was to assess farmers’ perceptions and knowledge towards legumes and the rationale of farmers for current legume production practices using a survey of 268 farmers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya. Most of the farmers had some knowledge of legumes and their characteristics. However, they had little knowledge of some key functions, including soil erosion control and soil fertility improvement. Most farmers relied on radio and other farmers for legume-related information. Farmers with relatively large livestock holdings ranked provision of livestock feed as an important legume function. We conclude that farmers put more value on short-term benefits of legumes including food and income than long-term benefits such as natural resource management and thus grain legumes are more readily identified by farmers than forage species. Also, we conclude that farmers require more than just information about legumes to increase uptake, they also require improved market access to procure inputs and sell products to realize other benefits that are associated with growing legumes.     

Book reviews

Ohne Zusammenfassung

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Book reviews

     

Do Changes in Regulation Affect Temporary Agency Workers’ Job Satisfaction?

This paper evaluates how a reform relaxing regulations of the temporary help service sector in Germany affected job satisfaction of male temporary agency workers. We isolate the causal effect of this reform by combining a difference‐in‐difference and matching approach using rich survey data. We find that the regulatory change substantially decreased agency workers’ job satisfaction while leaving regular workers’ job satisfaction unchanged. Further analysis reveals that the negative effect on agency workers’ job satisfaction can be attributed to a decrease in wages and an increase in perceived job insecurity. These results are robust to the use of different specifications and placebo tests.     

Skew and heavy‐tail effects on firm performance

Research summary : Most strategic management studies adopt an average‐centered view that uses the central tendency to explain between‐group variation in performance (i.e., performance differences between business units, firms, industries, and countries). In this study, we explain within‐group variation using a variance‐centered view that focuses on the peripheral characteristics of performance distributions as defined by skew and heavy tails (i.e., variance and kurtosis). Drawing on performance feedback theory, we hypothesize that successful firms tend to develop a positive skew in their performance distributions, which we call a “positive skew effect” in this study, and that heavy tails moderate this effect. Our analysis of the performance of a group of foreign affiliates provides general support for our hypotheses at both the firm and segment (industry and country) levels. Managerial summary : Managers of multi‐business firms use various approaches to improve the aggregate performance of their business units. Some expand the range of upper performance outliers (exploration) or reduce the range of lower outliers (downsizing); others improve the performance of current business units (exploitation). We find that firms with superior performance tend to have a balanced mix of the three approaches. We also find that segments (countries and industries) with higher mean performances provide environments that facilitate the entry of productive firms and the exit of unproductive firms and provide environments in which incumbents can further improve their performance by learning from others. We observe that successful firms and segments have a positive skew in their performance distributions, which we call a “positive skew effect.” Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The European Union's accounting policy analyzed from an ethical perspective: The case of petroleum resources,prospecting and evaluation

This article uses Habermasian philosophy as a reading grid to understand the eminently political aspect of international accounting standard-setting. We specifically analyze the accounting regulations specific to the exploration for and the evaluation of mineral resources in the European context. The rise of the IASC and its successor, the IASB, favors the emergence of a new phase in accounting standard-setting, with a shift from a ruling logic to regulations that put the economic and social actors at the forefront of the negotiations. This change is particularly obvious in the notorious exception allowed by IFRS 6 (Exploration for and evaluation of mineral resources) exempting applicants from paragraphs 10–12 of the IAS 8. This example allows us to question the legitimacy of international accounting standardization and the ethical problems it poses.     

Land versus Territory: Evaluating Indigenous Land Policy for the Mapuche in Chile

What are the challenges associated with translating indigenous territorial demands into land policy? While most land policy prioritizes the economic utility of land, indigenous territorial demands call for governments to more broadly conceptualize the definition and utility of land. Since the 1990s, most Latin American countries have formally recognized a range of indigenous territorial rights and worked to translate these rights into practice. Drawing on the Chilean experience, this paper argues that these alternative conceptualizations of land and territory complicate the implementation of government efforts to recognize indigenous demands. Specifically, the insufficiently defined scope of the policy exacerbates tension between communities' territorial rights demands and the government's capacity to return land. This tension is gradually and bureaucratically resolved, hindering both the policy's ability to meaningfully respond to indigenous territorial demands and the government's objective of promoting rural development. Future discussions and research must consider how these competing conceptualizations of land affect indigenous and land policy.     

Consumer revolution in north-western Germany: Material culture,global goods,and proto-industry in rural households in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries

Existing scholarship on the early modern consumer revolution postulates a dichotomy between the classic pioneering countries of England and the Netherlands and the remaining parts of Europe, which were more stagnant. We contribute to this literature by analysing probate inventories in a rural area in north-western Germany. We show that a closer look at these spaces, which had an intermediate level of development and integration into global markets, reveals a more gradual development and a discernible market evolution. Sumptuary laws may have somewhat slowed down the change in material culture in German regions, but the presence of towns and the proximity to the Netherlands had noticeably positive effects on consumer behaviour. The proto-industrial orientation of local economies proved to be particularly important, as it led to the granting of access to global markets, in addition to greater availability of cash. We observe a delayed diffusion of the new consumer culture in intermediate European regions and argue for a more gradual view of the European consumer revolution.