Organizing and integrating marketing and purchasing in business markets: An introduction to the special issue, issues and implications

The article is the introductory paper to the special issue on “Organizing and Integrating Marketing and Purchasing in Business markets”. It analyses the different organizational issues in the marketing and purchasing interfaces by an extensive analysis of the literature. It introduces the different contributions to the special issue and draw some reflections on further research steps.     

Fare Thee Well? An Analysis of Buyout Funds’ Exit Strategies

This paper analyzes exit strategies of buyout funds in portfolio companies following initial public offerings (IPOs). We use a data set of 222 buyout‐backed IPOs in the United States from 1999 to 2008, including hand‐collected data about each exit process, to draw a detailed roadmap of buyout investors’ divestment processes. Using this data, we document the timing and aggressiveness of the exit strategies, and analyze to which degree a multitude of possible determinants influence the choice of a given exit strategy. Our results indicate that buyout funds remain invested in their portfolio companies for a substantial period of time after the IPO, and that the choice of a given exit strategy depends not only upon the characteristics of each respective portfolio company, but also on the financial success of the deal from the perspective of the buyout investor.     

Bringing the brand to life: Structural conditions of brand-consistent employee behavior

Continuous brand success can be realized only if the brand promise that is communicated through mass media campaigns is lived up to by customer contact employees. In fact, discrepancies in brand experience may lead to customer confusion and dissatisfaction. However, what does that mean to brand managers? A survey among marketing managers shows that a reorganization of brand management routines is needed in order to bring the brand to life: informal management techniques and employee empowerment are required instead of formal management activities. In this article, we elaborate first steps for the implementation and maintenance of behavioral branding considering findings of our survey as well as implications from management focus groups and best practice examples.     

Das Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz und die Industriestrompreise

Die herrschende Meinung geht davon aus, dass durch die Umlage der F?rderung nach dem Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz (EEG) auf die Letztverbraucher die Strombezugskosten der Unternehmen steigen und ihre Wettbewerbsf?higkeit sinkt. Wie setzt sich der Strompreis zusammen und wovon ist die Strompreisbildung abh?ngig? Welche Wirkung hat das EEG auf den Gro?handelsstrompreis?     

The Climate Policy of the European Union

There is now almost universal agreement that climate change, with potentially disastrous consequences, is happening and that it is contributed to by human activities. This Forum is dedicated to the discussion of various aspects of the European Union's climate policy, e.g. the EU's future role in the global effort to combat global warming, the efficiency of its climate strategy, the design of a new rule for sharing the corresponding burdens fairly among member states, and the interrelationships between the Union's climate policies, on the one hand, and its energy and transport policies, on the other. * and member of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU). The author wishes to thank Helen Bicknell (Mainz University of Applied Sciences), Oliver Deke (WBGU) and Jürgen Schmid (ISET, Department of Efficient Energy Conversion at the University of Kassel) for their helpful comments. ** This contribution is based on a Jean Monnet Lecture held at Aarhus University on 19 March 2007. The author would like to thank Harri Kalimo for valuable comments.     

The integration-responsiveness framework and subsidiary management: A commentary

This commentary article discusses the appropriateness of using the integration-responsiveness framework for studying subsidiary management. The framework is frequently used and highly accepted in the international business literature, but the research contributions of applying the framework can be questioned. This commentary article discusses the applicability of the framework from a theoretical point of view, and furthermore, argues that it is difficult to empirically test subsidiary strategies and management based on hypotheses derived from the framework, and that the implications that can be drawn have limited theoretical content.     

False Discoveries und Fehlinterpretationen wissenschaftlicher Ergebnisse

High-quality science communication to the public depends to a large extent on the way research findings are translated into comprehensible language and common speech. In this communicative process, a reasonable evaluation of the trustworthiness of empirical findings, based on an adequate interpretation of statistical analyses, is absolutely crucial. This paper’s authors argue that the credibility of science is jeopardised by two compromising developments within science itself: on the one hand, an inflation of ostensible empirical evidence related to misuses and misinterpretations of the concept of statistical significance, and, on the other, a sensationalist overvaluation of the results of single studies instead of an adequate representation of the available body of evidence in a given scientific field.     

A note on the connection between factorial series distribution and zero-truncated power series distribution

Summary

The main purpose of this note is to call attention to the close relationship between the problem of estimating the parameter of a zero-truncated power series distribution and the problem of estimating the parameter of an associated factorial series distribution. We also extend a known recurrence property for the Poisson case to the binomial and negative binomial cases.     

Wissenstransfer in der Betriebswirtschaftslehre: Eine Untersuchung anhand ausgewählter akademischer Zeitschriften in Deutschland und Frankreich

Reviewing and analyzing new research outcomes are important prerequisites for scientific progress. If one interprets science as a universal pursuit of knowledge development, transparency and communication between national scientific systems are indispensable in order to realize international knowledge transfer and diffusion. This article examines on the basis of scientific journals in business administration in Germany and France how and to what extent such a transfer is currently taking place. The results show a high degree of isolation.