Sustainable development and entrepreneurship: Past contributions and future directions

This article discusses the emerging research concerned with sustainable development and entrepreneurship, which is the focus of this special issue of the Journal of Business Venturing. Entrepreneurship has been recognized as a major conduit for sustainable products and processes, and new ventures are being held up as a panacea for many social and environmental concerns. However, there remains considerable uncertainty regarding the nature of entrepreneurship's role and how it may unfold. We begin with an overview of sustainable development and the role of entrepreneurship and outline recent contributions exploring this role. We then summarize the papers presented in this special issue and conclude with suggestions for further research.     

Consumer benefits and demand impacts of regular train timetables

This paper reports novel research into the benefits that rail travellers receive from more regular features of timetables over and above any benefits of improved frequency. A stated preference (SP) exercise amongst rail travellers was conducted to estimate these benefits and the generally plausible results have been used to enhance a rail demand model which in turn has been used to forecast the effect on demand of more regular timetables for a range of situations. Not surprisingly, the demand impacts are generally relatively small, although they would be welcome additional benefits in the evaluation of a regular timetable.     

Growth accounting with investment-specific technological progress: A discussion of two approaches

Two approaches taken to the embodiment question are compared and discussed: quantitative theory and traditional growth accounting. The two approaches give very different estimates for the contribution of investment-specific technological advance to economic growth. Therefore, the approach taken matters. It is argued that the measures used in traditional growth accounting to gauge the importance of investment-specific technological progress have little economic content, unlike the measure obtained from quantitative theory.     

Nonparametric identification and estimation of random coefficients in multinomial choice models

We show how to nonparametrically identify the distribution of unobservables, such as random coefficients, that characterizes the heterogeneity among consumers in multinomial choice models. We provide general identification conditions for a class of nonlinear models and then verify these conditions using the primitives of the multinomial choice model. We require that the distribution of unobservables lie in the class of all distributions with finite support, which under our most general assumptions, resembles a product space where some of the product members are function spaces. We show how identification leads to the consistency of a nonparametric estimator.     

Why Do People Join Unions in a Period of Membership Decline?

Drawing on a large survey of new members, this paper examines the reasons why people join unions and the methods of their recruitment. It shows that collective reasons remain central to union membership and that individual services are secondary in the recruitment process. While there is little variation in reasons for joining across industry, occupation and sex, there are marked differences in the methods used to recruit new members. These findings are used to examine existing explanations of membership decline and to assess the efficacy of the different recruitment policy options available to unions.     

Analysing clusters of skills in R&D — core competencies, metaphors, visualization, and the role of IT

Though it is now universally accepted that companies should try to align their R&D activities with their business objectives, achieving this alignment is notoriously difficult in practice. The rise of the core competence framework has been very helpful in creating, and legitimizing, a language in which issues of technical competence and R&D strengths can be followed through to their consequences for competitive advantage. Companies are starting to express their R&D priorities explicitly in terms of core competencies.
Without effective IT support, core competence concepts are often applied arbitrarily. This has led to accusations that core competence theory can become yet another battlefield upon which companies play out their internal political battles. Computer-based techniques can help counteract this danger by enabling large volumes of relatively objective data to be collected, then making it possible to analyse and draw out patterns from this data, and finally enabling the data to be represented effectively.
It is in this last area of data representation that information technology is now of particular benefit. In order to make the core competence approach sufficiently robust as a basis for decision making, it is necessary to collect and process large volumes of data. However, this data is normally difficult to represent in such a way that managers can assimilate it. In our recent experience, we have come to realize the particular importance of effective representations and metaphors, and have started to shift our own emphasis towards these areas in addition to analysis per se .
The paper shows how core competence approaches can support R&D management decision making by exploring the roles of data collection, analysis and representation. Information technology is an integral part of these approaches, and we draw out some generalized lessons for the successful use of IT in decision support.     

Heightening Tension in Relations between Trade Unions and the Labour Government in 2002

During 2002 tension between trade unions and the Labour government reached a level not seen before in their relationship. This review examines the source of the tension and its manifestations. It shows that during the year a range of issues emerged that divided the government and unions. New Labour ‘modernizers’ cited these differences as reasons to further distance the Party from trade unions. The article argues that relations between trade unionism and the government are at low ebb, and that the extent of disagreement between the two is now more pronounced than at any other time since 1997.