GSS for Multi-Organizational Collaboration: Reflections on Process and Content

Multi-organizational collaboration has become the norm for modern organizations as they seek to survive and prosper in increasingly turbulent times. These collaborations can take many forms, but face problems due to different management styles, different cultures, and different operating modes of the participant organizations. These differences usually cause difficulties for the multi-organizational teams that are set up to make the collaboration operational. Group Support Systems (GSSs) is one possible way of supporting these multi-organization collaboration teams (MCTs). This paper builds and describes a conceptual framework that highlights the critical characteristics of these teams and how GSS might support their activities. The framework is based on a detailed analysis of three case studies using three different GSSs.     

What Can We Learn From Great Business Leaders?

There are many leadership lessons that can be extracted from the lives of great business leaders like John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan, Sam Walton, Jack Welch, A. G. Lafley, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. Although different in personality and style, these leaders showed talent at a very young age, persevered in achieving their goals, surrounded themselves with the best people they could, worked hard and with great discipline, had great confidence in themselves, and were creative and innovative in managing their businesses.     

Technology and labor regulations: theory and evidence

This paper shows that different labor market policies can lead to differences in technology across sectors in a model of labor saving technologies. Labor market regulations reduce the skill premium and as a result, if technologies are labor saving, countries with more stringent labor regulation, which bind more for low skilled workers, become less technologically advanced in their high skill sectors, but more technologically advanced in their low skill sectors. We then present data on capital-output ratios, on estimated productivity levels and on patent creation, which tend to support the predictions of our model.     

Examining Group Facilitation In Situ: The Use of Formulations in Facilitation Practice

In this paper we examine how the talk of the facilitator shapes group workshop interactions by using the conversational object ‘formulation’. The data consist of video recordings of a corpus of four facilitated workshops held with management and development teams. By adopting an exploratory video-based investigation using conversational analysis to examine our data, we highlight the significance of three distinct set of formulations used by facilitators in workshops. Specifically, our findings show how formulations that encourage reflection or facilitate action, together with those collaboratively produced, enable sense making and the achievement of a temporal conversational order among participants. This research contributes to the study of facilitated workshops by offering a more nuanced approach to the understanding of the craftsmanship of doing facilitation, its effects on the workshop process and, ultimately, workshop outcomes.     

The Economic Significance of the Film Business: An Empirical Analysis of the Italian Market

Most studies indicate Hollywood's economic and financial leadership in the movie markets from the 1910s onward. There is a shortfall in the literature concerning the analysis of the efficacy of other minor film industries. This article examines the Italian film industry in the 1990s and beginning of the twenty‐first century. The research suggests that the Italian film industry is very risky and unpredictable, but while the extreme uncertainty surrounding the business is offset by the considerable economic success that Hollywood movies achieve at the box office, as indicated by previous literature contributions, a different business scenario emerges in Italy. The value of this article is first represented by the data used—provided by the Osservatorio of Cinecittà—which is unique and has not been published before. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Negative network effects and asymmetric pure price equilibria

Portuguese Economic Journal - We show that in finite settings with identical firms and consumers, asymmetric pure price equilibria with positive profits exist. We consider a price competition...     

COVID-19 and the power of indigenous,Mexican-origin farmworker families in the US Pacific Northwest

Over the last several years—in the context of US political upheaval, ongoing crises related to climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic and an economic downturn—indigenous, Mexican-origin farmworker families in Washington State have engaged more intensely in class struggle through acts of solidarity and forms of collective action, in part through independent labour unions, worker cooperatives and mutual aid. This article chronicles the labour struggles that led to a notion of class rooted in family units of production and that strengthened transnational solidarity in resistance to racist forms of exploitation in the agricultural sector. Class organization rooted in family and solidarity has allowed indigenous agricultural workers in Washington State to face COVID-19 and incidents driven by climate change, which syndemically compounded existing community health crises, from a place of power. Focusing on the experience of farmworker families in Washington State, I outline agricultural employers' exploitation of workers during this period of increased vulnerability and the strength of farmworkers' resolve to take their health and well-being into their own hands.     

Firm–bank credit network,business cycle and macroprudential policy

We present an agent-based model to study firm–bank credit market interactions in different phases of the business cycle. The business cycle is exogenously set, and it can give rise to various scenarios. Compared to other models in this literature strand, we improve the mechanism according to which the dividends are distributed, including the possibility of stock repurchase by firms. In addition, we locate firms and banks over a space and firms may ask credit to many banks, resulting in a complex spatial network. The model reproduces a long list of stylized facts and their dynamic evolution as described by the cross-correlations among model variables. The model allows us to test the effectiveness of rules designed by the current financial regulation, such as the Basel III countercyclical capital buffer. We find that the effectiveness of this rule changes in different business cycle environments and this should be considered by policy makers.

     

Plural forms and dual distribution: the “external” party’s perspective and the role of path dependency

Marketing Letters - Increasingly, marketing activity takes place within complex organizational structures. One example of this is the so-called 'plural forms’ structure, where a buyer and...