Embedded entrepreneurship in the creative re-construction of place

This paper focuses on ways in which entrepreneurs engage with place and community. Drawing on the ideas of embeddedness and transferring value across spheres, we develop insight about how the relationship between entrepreneurs and communities influences entrepreneurial practices and outcomes. Employing an ethnographic perspective including participant observation, we explored the situated practices of entrepreneurs in two depleted communities in the Northwest of Ireland. We found that entrepreneurs not only drew on the community in running their business, but were also involved in a wide range of “other” activities that engaged, involved and worked with the community. This entrepreneurship produced a range of projects that addressed social and economic issues (unemployment, employability and emigration) and the depleted sense of place which was adversely affecting these communities. We show how social bonds and an affinity to community enable entrepreneurship to create, renew and reify a positive identity of place by combining understanding with entrepreneurial purpose.     

Uncertainty,Learning and Heterogeneity in International Environmental Agreements

This paper concerns the formation of International Environmental Agreements under uncertainty about environmental damage with different models of learning (complete learning, partial learning or no learning). The results of the existing literature are generally pessimistic: the possibility of either complete or partial learning generally reduces the level of global welfare that can be achieved from forming an IEA relative to no learning. That literature regards uncertainty as a parameter common to all countries, so that countries are identical ex ante as well as ex post. In this paper we extend the literature to the case where there is no correlation between damage costs across countries; each country is uncertain about a particular parameter (in our case the benefit-cost ratio) drawn from a common distribution but, ex post, each country’s realized parameter value is independently drawn. Consequently, while countries remain identical ex ante, they may be heterogeneous ex post. We show that this change reinforces the negative conclusions about the effects of partial learning on international environmental agreements, but, under certain conditions, moderates the negative conclusions about the effects of complete learning.     

Household Versus Individual Valuation: What’s the Difference?

Standard practice in stated preference typically blurs the distinction between household and individual responses, but without a clear theoretical or empirical justification for this approach. To date there have been no empirical tests of whether values for say a two adult household elicited by interviewing one randomly selected adult are the same as the values generated by interviewing both adults simultaneously. Using cohabiting couples, we conduct a choice experiment field study valuing reductions in dietary health risks. In one treatment a random individual is chosen from the couple and interviewed alone; in the other treatment, both partners are questioned jointly. We find significant differences in household values calculated from joint as opposed to individual responses, with further variation between the values elicited from men and women. Our results question the assumption, implicit in common practice, that differences between individually and jointly elicited estimates of household values can effectively be ignored.      

Enabling, enacting and maintaining action at a distance: An historical case study of the role of accounts in the reduction of the Navajo herds

The role of accounting in enabling action at a distance has received considerable attention in the accounting literature. In this paper we examine the role of accounts in the actions taken by government officials in Washington, DC to reduce the size of the Navajo livestock holdings on their reservation in the southwestern United States in the 1930s. We examine the role of accounts in three acts: first in enabling action at a distance, second in enacting action in the local setting and finally, in shoring up, or maintaining action when things go wrong. We argue that in order to understand the role of accounts in these three acts, it is necessary to examine the conditions of possibility within which they emerge, the network of agents who adopt and give them life and the way in which they become entwined with various and shifting strategies. We also examine how action taken in Washington, DC had profound consequences for the Navajo when attempts were made to enact actions taken at a distance on the reservation.     

Strategic Innovation with Complete and Incomplete Labour Market Contracts

In a model of strategic R&D competition between two firms that negotiate with independent unions we show that: (i) incomplete labour market contracts may Pareto-dominate complete labour market contracts (ii) even when complete contracts Pareto-dominate incomplete contracts, economies can get stuck in the incomplete contract equilibrium. These conclusions provide additional strategic reasons why complete labour market contracts may not be used—even if they were feasible. We propose two testable predictions to discriminate between complete and incomplete contracts: (i) the variance of wages is lower with complete contracts; (ii) the variance of employment is higher under complete contracts.     

Six Sigma – at your service

Lean Six Sigma is the bedrock of quality initiatives in manufacturing companies. Can this approach be used in service companies? It already is, and Peter Guarraia, Gib Carey, Alistair Corbett and Klaus Neuhaus show how techniques long used by Motorola and Toyota can be used in your company.     

Evaluating the impact of a communication exercise in an industrial works

In this article Alistair Ostell and his colleagues discuss a study which evaluated the impact of communicating business information to a large industrial workforce. The results indicated that the exercise was successful in terms of informing employees but it apparently failed to motivate them to act or think differently.     

Biodiversity and Optimal Policies Towards R&D and the Growth of Genetically Modified Crops

In this paper we provide a simple model illustrating the possible nature ofgovernment policy with regards to genetic modification, taking into accountits impact on the environment. We show that it is necessary not only tointervene in the growing of crops, but also to intervene in R&D througha tax on the adoption of new GM technology. Without intervention at bothlevels, both the cultivation of GM crops and the rate of innovation in GM willexceed their socially optimal levels.     

Bridging the divides of online reporting

This paper looks at the possibilities of improving online reporting by closing the ‘digital divide’ through a ‘digitalised revolution’ and by narrowing the ‘accounting divide’ through the sharing of power and the expansion of membership in the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). Paradoxically, whilst the IASB may have contributed to the ‘accounting divide’ it may very well possess the potential to close it and thus improve online reporting. The potential to bridge the ‘accounting divide’ rests with the greater participation by developing country members to exert influence and ownership of the accounting standards setting process.