Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this issue:

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  Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota's System Is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It

       

Feints

In both economic and military situations, agents may try to mislead rivals about their true types or plans, whatever they may be. We consider a simple model in which one player attacks and the other player defends. We show that such environments have two types of possible equilibrium behavior, depending upon the signaling technology. If the signal is not very revealing about the attacker's plans, then the attacker always invests more resources in attack than in misdirection. If the technology is revealing, then the attacker does not always feint, but when he feints, he invests more than half of his resources into misdirection. Comparative statics also depend on whether the technology is revealing.

" Always mystify, mislead and surprise the enemy, if possible ."

— General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson     

Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises,Technology, and Globalization: Introduction to a special issue on Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in the Global Economy

This paper is an introduction to the special issue on Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in the Global Economy. The paper gives a broad outline of globalization, the role of technology, and examines the role that small and medium-sized enterprises play in the global economy. We focus on foreign direct investment of small technology based firms and how their innovations diffuse into the global economy.     

Differential Association, Multiple Normative Standards, and the Increasing Incidence of Corporate Deviance inan Era of Globalization

This paper examines with the use of aggregate data from the U.S. Department of Justicethe extent of contemporary white-collar crime as a consequence of multiple normative standards existing within corporations. Given the implications of globalization, the desire for increased profits, and the declining role of regulatory agencies across much of the world (save for Europe, Japan, Mexico and India), paper suggests that the incidence of corporate deviance is likely to increase in the foreseeable future.     

A methodological note on diversity measurement

This research addresses the question, do categorical and continuous measures capture the same construct of diversity? Using analysis of variance, cluster analysis, and discriminant analysis, we investigated whether continuous measures (entropy and product count) differentiate between diversification categories, whether continuous measures converted to categories and subjectively assigned categories classified companies similarly, and whether continuous and categorical measures predicted similar diversity–performance relationships. We concluded that the techniques were associated but did not yield the same performance predictions. For researchers investigating diversity–performance relationships, choice of measurement technique will influence research results. Our research results suggest that attempts to combine categorical and continuous techniques as a way to overcome the limitations of both methods is not appropriate.