Impact model for socially low tariffs in Zairian river transport

This article models the sequence of the effects of low tariffs in public river transport for goods. Within 10 years of deregulation, the public corporation had lost 83 per cent of its river traffic. The reasons for the inefficiency are made clear. The effects of low tariffs are examined, such as service rationing, overcharges, overcapacity and high budget claims, cost enhancement, and cross-subsidizing. The underlying objective is to formulate and apply an assessment method for transport policy that blends theories of rents and contestability in order to show how and why good intentions to boost demand by low tariffs in Zairian river transport produced very different results. Although illustrations are given for one mode of transport in one country, they are believed to be of much wider significance—to over 80 countries liberalizing their economies, including China, developing and east European countries. The National Transportation Authority (NTA, or Onatra) is a public corporation operating seaports, the Matadi–Kinshasa railway and an extensive network of river transportation 8,060 km long in the western half of Zaire. In the 1980s, it held monopolies on seaports and river ports, and shared the monopoly with the National Railway Authority (SNCZ) over the railways and the transport of mineral exports. The market in river transport appeared to be oligopolistic but it was dominated by the NTA. Since the NTA was one of the largest state-owned enterprises (SOEs), its experience is significant for many other SOEs and for the whole national economy. Ways to overcome inefficiencies are suggested, such as ending multiple public monopolies and cross-subsidies, privatization and deregulation.     

HIGH-INVOLVEMENT MANAGEMENT PRACTICES, TRADE UNION REPRESENTATION AND WORKPLACE PERFORMANCE IN BRITAIN

Debates about Britain's productivity performance have often drawn attention to the roles played by working practices and employment relations. In the 1980s and 1990s, trade unions were a prime focus; more recently, attention has turned to high‐involvement management (HIM) practices (also referred to as ‘high‐performance work systems’). We combine the two to investigate the relationships between work organisation, trade union representation and workplace performance. We find that HIM has a positive impact on labour productivity. However, this effect is restricted to unionised workplaces, and seems more readily explained by concessionary wage bargaining than ‘mutual gains’, given the absence of any association with financial performance. These findings raise questions about the universal applicability of HIM as a route to improved workplace performance.     

Firm age: a survey

This survey paper synthesizes theory and evidence on processes of firm-level aging. We discuss why anthropomorphic analogies are not helpful for understanding firm aging, because of differences in population pyramid shapes (with around 50 % of firms exiting after just 3 years), no upper bound on firm ages, and no deterministic change in performance with firm age. We discuss the liabilities of newness, adolescence, and senescence and obsolescence, and define what we mean by the direct and indirect causal effects of age. Our causal model also helps clarify previous confusion about why controlling for size in regressions of firm age on survival can reverse the results (Simpson’s paradox and the ‘bad control’ problem). While aging processes can occur at many levels (employee-level, firm-level, cohort-level, etc.), we focus on the firm-level. We summarize empirical work on firm age and conclude that the most interesting age effects occur within the first 5–7 years, which underscores the importance of datasets that do not under-represent young firms.     

Innovation by design: SPARK and the Overcoming of Stanford University's Translational “Valley of Death” in Bio-Medicine

Stanford University's world leadership as an entrepreneurial university induced a “paradox of success,” inhibiting further development of its organizational infrastructure for entrepreneurship support. Nevertheless, some prospective academic entrepreneurs realized that there were invisible persisting gaps in the university's innovation system. We discuss the role of the entrepreneurial university and provide a case study of SPARK, an organizational innovation, created to address Stanford's translational research gap, that was then spread to other universities. The creation of a support structure to encourage students and faculty to define entrepreneurial projects as part of their education and research revealed a novel organizational change dynamic.     

Inhabited Actors: Internalizing Institutions through Communication and Actorhood Models

We argue that accounts of relationships among actors, actorhood and institutions are predominantly based on a spatial metaphor of actors operating within institutions. We outline how an inversion of this metaphor – i.e., the perspective that institutions inhabit actors – may prove generative for theory, particularly with respect to recent discussions about the microfoundations of institutions. We outline how communication and actorhood models function as transmission mechanisms of institutions from one actor to another. We conclude with a discussion of how the inverted metaphor of institutions inhabiting actors can be useful for future theoretical developments.     

Taylor rules and the Great Inflation

Can US monetary policy in the 1970s be described by a stabilizing Taylor rule when policy is evaluated with real-time inflation and output gap data? Using economic research on the full employment level of unemployment and the natural rate of unemployment published between 1970 and 1977 to construct real-time output gap measures for periods of peak unemployment, we find that the Federal Reserve did not follow a Taylor rule if appropriate measures are used. We estimate Taylor rules and find no evidence that monetary policy stabilized inflation, even allowing for changes in the inflation target. While monetary policy was stabilizing with respect to inflation forecasts, the forecasts systematically under-predicted inflation following the 1970s recessions and this does not constitute evidence of stabilizing policy. We also find that the Federal Reserve responded too strongly to negative output gaps.     

Enhancing Singapore travel agencies' customer loyalty: an empirical investigation of customers' behavioural intentions and zones of tolerance

The services marketing literature focuses on the measurement of service quality and its impact and consequences on businesses. Set in the context of the travel retail agency in Singapore, this study focuses on the relationship between service quality and favourable behavioural intentions. The findings revealed that improving service quality can increase favourable behavioural intentions. However, service improvements that exceed customers' minimum‐service threshold and those that exceed customers' desired‐service level were found to have mixed effect on behavioural intentions. Hence travel agencies must carefully determine the behavioural intentions they wish to foster amongst their various customers and develop service quality strategies in line with the findings of this study. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.