Leveraged Acquisitions and the Market for Corporate Control

What is the function of the market for corporate control? Mike Wright and two colleagues outline the advantages of an active market in corporate control and review the consequences of leveraged buyouts.     

Time Integration: Agribusiness Structure for Competitive Advantage

Traditional views and models of perishable food suppliers fail to capture the fundamental role of time integration in firm-level organization. A two-phase research design of major grower–shipper firms of lettuce, tomatoes, and melons reveals a diverse distribution of firms across the time-integration continuum. Most firms use more than one microclimate to extend product availability. Decision makers are encouraged to understand the implications of these temporally integrated organizations on agricultural and trade policy.     

Developing frameworks for examining community participation in a multi-level environment

The purpose of this paper is to explore public participation from the perspective of two parallel developments in English urban governance since 1997: namely the attempts to modernise local government and area-based approaches employed to tackle social exclusion. The paper will situate these developments within a system of multi-level governance and highlight the significance of the locality-neighbourhood axis. The paper seeks to explicate current changes by drawing on theories of governance. The emphasis on mechanisms that bring together relevant local interests to secure coherence and stability in matters of local governance, combined with the specific focus on the role of citizens and communities as key partners in these arrangements resonates strongly with the key concerns of regime theory. The strengths and limitations of regime theory are discussed with particular reference to matters of contextual specificity. Community Governance is then introduced as a means of better understanding the institutional framework of English localities and, we argue, of providing a sounder basis for the application of regime theory. More powerful still is the potential synthesis of regime approaches with different interpretations of community governance and the paper concludes by drawing on recent developments in English localities to elaborate the potential offered by the this synthesised framework.     

Can Commitment Be Managed? A Longitudinal Analysis of Employee Commitment and Human Resource Policies

Tim Morris, Helen Lydka and Mark Fenton O'Creevy present data on a group of graduates during the first five years of employment. Dividing the sample into those who have remained with their original employer and those who have changed, they examine attitudinal commitment and tenure intentions against a set of human resource policies measured at three points in time. They find that those policies significantly associated with high commitment change over time; that attitudinal and behavioural commitment are conceptually distinct constructs; and that behavioural commitment is a less stable construct than attitudinal commitment. Generally, it appears that employee commitment is more provisional than is implied by much of the literature. Tim Morris is a Lecturer at the London Business School, Helen Lydka a researcher at the Henley Management College, and Mark Fenton O'Creevy a Research Fellow at the LBS Centre for Organisational Research.     

Corporate Performance: Does Ownership Matter? A Comparison of Foreign- and Domestic-Owned Firms in Greece and Portugal

The paper investigates whether multinational corporations (MNCs) operating in Portugal and Greece perform differently than domestic firms. Departures from normality of firms’ profitability motivated the use of quantile regression. The results suggest that ownership ties do not make a significant difference with respect to performance of firms in Portugal. Results are similar for firms in Greece. Only when firms in the upper quantiles of gross profits are compared, MNCs are found to significantly perform better than domestic firms. MNCs have to compensate for their liability of foreigness that in spite of their technological advantages they cannot persistently outperform domestic rivals.JEL Classifications: F23, L10, L60, C21