Cyborg Urbanization

Books reviewed in this article: Bruno Latour and Emile Hermant, Paris ville invisible William J Mitchell, E‐topia: ‘Urban life, Jim — but not as we know it’ Antoine Picon, La ville territoire des cyborgs     

Knowledge management in enterprises: a research agenda

Knowledge management (KM) is an emerging area, which is gaining interest by both enterprises and academics. The effective implementation of a KM strategy is considering as a ‘must’ and as a precondition of success for contemporary enterprises, as they enter the era of the knowledge economy. However, the field of KM has been slow in formulating a universally accepted methodology, due to the many pending issues that have to be addressed. This paper attempts to propose a novel taxonomy for KM research by co‐instantaneously presenting the current status with some major themes of KM research. The discussion presented on these issues should be of value to researchers and practitioners. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Updated Literature Review of Distance Correlation and Its Applications to Time Series

The concept of distance covariance/correlation was introduced recently to characterise dependence among vectors of random variables. We review some statistical aspects of distance covariance/correlation function, and we demonstrate its applicability to time series analysis. We will see that the auto‐distance covariance/correlation function is able to identify non‐linear relationships and can be employed for testing the i.i.d. hypothesis. Comparisons with other measures of dependence are included.     

Applying the reduce,reuse, and recycle principle in the hospitality sector: Its antecedents and performance implications

Although the literature on eco-friendly strategies followed by firms is abundant, the focus on the reduce, reuse, and recycle (3Rs) policies as the cornerstone of environmental sustainability is scarce. This study examines the 3Rs environmental strategy among 143 large organizations in the hospitality industry. We use the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm theory to test the strategy's determinants and its impact on business performance on a suggested conceptualization level. As hypothesized, green corporate governance and environmental management systems, along with slack financial resources, were found to positively influence the adoption of a 3Rs environmental strategy. In turn, the implementation of the latter leads to superior business performance, measured in terms of operating profits and Tobin's Q. The study has several implications on a theoretical, managerial, and public policy level where intriguing directions for future research are provided.     

The Peripheral Halo Effect: Do Academic Spinoffs Influence Universities' Research Income?

Extant literature has drawn attention to the ‘halo effect’ of the good reputation of a core organizational activity on the outcome of a peripheral activity. We contribute to the literature on organizational reputation by illustrating a halo effect in the opposite direction – from the periphery to the core. We show that developing a reputation for a peripheral activity (in our context, universities' social impact via spinoffs) may have positive spillovers for core organizational activities (in our context, university research), a phenomenon we term the ‘peripheral halo effect'. We also show that this effect is more prominent for high‐status than for low‐status organizations. Our research also contributes to the academic‐entrepreneurship literature by revealing that spinoff portfolios can generate income for universities not only directly via equity positions but also indirectly via reputational benefits.     

Estimating financial distress with a dynamic model: Evidence from family owned enterprises in a small open economy

Employing earnings shortfall as a financial distress indicator, we formulate a dynamic nonlinear model, implementing Wooldridge's conditional maximum likelihood estimator and accounting for potentially endogenous covariates. Likewise, we not only achieve a significant improvement in consistency and classification accuracy over static approaches, but we also manage to understand better the evolution of the financial distress process. In our sample of Greek listed firms the higher the positive performance and the lower the leverage at the initial period the greater the chance that a company enters financial distress further down the road, possibly due to manager–owner overconfidence and debt-imposed discipline by company's creditors.     

The social cost of rent seeking in Europe

Direct measurement of the social cost of rent seeking is impeded by non-observable and non-reported activities. We use a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to compute the social cost of rent seeking in Europe. Our estimate is based on competition among interest groups for privileges provided by governments, including income transfers, subsidies, and preferential tax treatment. The model, which is calibrated to the euro area as a whole and also to individual euro member countries for 1980–2003, performs well vis-à-vis the data. We find that significant proportions of GDP are extracted as rents available to be sought by rent seekers.