Technology development and adoption rates: Systems approach for agricultural research and extension

Adoption of new technology in peasant agriculture remains lower than expected. Failure to achieve expected returns is associated more with insufficiencies in the conduct of research than with external and economic factors such as price structure or lack of agricultural support services. This article sets out the case for national agricultural research and extension structures that emphasize on-farm research with a systems approach.     

The Good Manager – A Moral Manager?

In this article two problems with the recently developed "practice or virtue approach" to business ethics are discussed. The first problem concerns an alleged harmony between common demands of morality (generally understood) and the internal goods of actual business practice. The claimed harmony is strong in essence since it holds that the role expectations a good manager has to live up to, do in fact coincide with what morality demands. The second problem is related to the first and concerns the alleged relevance of a virtue perspective for business ethics. According to the virtue perspective discussed in this article, moral reasoning should take actual practice, and only actual practice, as a point of departure. In so doing ethics is claimed to become insulated from e.g. putting irrelevant demands on practitioners. Such demands are understood as based on abstract principles alien to the practice in question. The thesis of this article is that neither of the above mentioned two claims are plausible. This is so basically because one needs to turn elsewhere than to actual business practice in order to detect a morally laden notion of managerial goodness.     

COVID-19 Regulations,Political Institutions,and the Environment

Environmental and Resource Economics - The COVID-19 pandemic was associated with short-term air quality improvements in many countries around the world. We study whether the degree of democracy and...     

Do Evaluative Pressures and Group Identification Cultivate Competitive Orientations and Cynical Attitudes Among Academics?

Journal of Business Ethics - This article theorizes and analyzes how two aspects of the increasing accountingization of academia in the form of evaluative pressures and group identification,...     

Towards a three-part heuristic framework for technology education

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - There is not one single global version of technology education; curricula and standards have different forms and content. This sometimes...     

Venture Idea Assessment (VIA): Development of a needed concept,measure, and research agenda

To address challenges constraining prior research on evaluation of entrepreneurial projects, we develop the concept of Venture Idea Assessment (VIA) and validate an instrument to capture it. VIA concerns the assessment of Venture Ideas (VI) unbundled from assessment of any agents with whom they may be associated. The assessment can be performed by anybody at any stage of the venture development process, not just by potential founders at its outset. We develop and validate a parsimonious VIA measure across six empirical studies using a broad set of assessors and VIs using interviews, experiments and surveys following real-world start-up processes and decisions. In a research agenda we outline how the VIA platform—the concept and its operationalization—can be employed in novel research across various streams of entrepreneurship research.     

The impact of control strategies on the management of returnable transport items

This research examines the impact of different control strategies on the management of returnable transport items (RTIs) in closed-loop supply chains. A simulation model is developed based on an empirical case and is used to explore different scenarios. The results suggest that the choice of control strategy has a significant impact on investments and operating costs, and that RTI shrinkage can be controlled either through the use of tracking systems, or choice of control strategy. Moreover, a simulation-based method for estimating the fleet size required to operate the system for the different strategies is presented.     

Commodity prices as payment vehicles in valuation experiments

Many contingent valuation experiments use commodity prices as the payment vehicle. In this note it is shown, in general, that this approach does not allow the investigator to extract the respondent's willingness to pay. However, it is also shown how the valuation question can be formulated so as to yield a commodity price payment vehicle which is equivalent to a lump sum payment.The idea for this paper came while teaching the Royal Economic Society Easter School in Birmingham (March/April 1995). I am grateful to my students for stimulating discussions and comments on the subject. Kerry Smith provided me with (as always) insightful comments on an     

Clustering,MNEs, and Innovation: Who Benefits and How?

Abstract

This paper explores three under-researched questions in the literature on multinational enterprises (MNEs), clustering, and innovation. First, to what extent does multinationality lead to higher rates of innovation activity and performance? Second, what, if any, is the link between MNE cluster location and innovation inputs and outputs? Third, are there any significant differences between enterprises belonging to domestic and overseas MNEs in these regards? Evidence is based primarily on 11,775 firms derived from the UK Community Innovation Survey 2007. Diversity in the regional economy exerts the most consistent positive influence, followed by the scale of employment in the enterprise’s own industry. Enterprises belonging to domestic MNEs appear to exert higher levels of innovation effort. However, evidence regarding their superiority in innovation outputs was weaker. Contrary to Michael Porter’s work, it appears that enterprises belonging to overseas firms benefit more than domestic firms.     

Lovely but dangerous: The impact of patent citations on patent renewal

What is the impact of patent citations on patent renewal behaviour? Patent citations are commonly used as an indicator of technology spillovers. For cited patents, therefore, patent citations have a potentially ambiguous impact. On the one hand, patent citations may indicate a scientific breakthrough, a high value of the cited patent and therefore a long survival period. On the other hand, patent citations may indicate competing innovations that render the cited patent obsolete. By discriminating patents by technology field, it is demonstrated that patents that receive citations across technology fields survive longer than other patents. Patents that receive citations within the same technology field lapse earlier.