E–Commerce and the Australian Economy

This paper considers the likely impact of e–commerce and the Internet on the Australian economy. It surveys literature on the extent and development of e–commerce in Australia and its impact on the shape of the Australian economy. Evidence for the 'renewal' of the Australian economy is presented and examined, especially the question of whether Australia has enjoyed increases in productivity as a result of the production and/or use of new information and communications technology. Australia is seen as broadly well placed to benefit from the Internet and e–commerce. Traditionally isolated from the world's main economic centres and reliant on commodities in international trade, the advent of the Internet is ideal for a country in transition to a service–orientated, knowledge–based economy. As the composition of Australia's exports becomes more service–orientated and knowledge–intensive, traditional trading links with Europe and North America may strengthen relative to those with Asia.     

The compliance model of employment standards enforcement: an evidence‐based assessment of its efficacy in instances of wage theft

This article critically assesses the compliance model of employment standards enforcement through a study of monetary employment standards violations in Ontario, Canada. The findings suggest that, in contexts where changes to the organisation of work deepen insecurity for employees, models of enforcement that emphasise compliance over deterrence are unlikely to effectively prevent or remedy employment standards violations.     

Our Collaborative Future: Activities and Roles of Stakeholders in Sustainability‐Oriented Innovation

While stakeholders have long been at the forefront of sustainable development debates, the emphases have tended to be on different stakeholder pressures, or managing stakeholder expectations about controversial issues. In this paper we bring a fresh direction to these debates and ask in what ways different stakeholders can contribute to sustainable innovation in firms. Based on 80 semi‐structured interviews, we conduct a fine‐grained qualitative analysis of stakeholder activities in sustainability‐oriented innovation (SOI) processes in 13 different companies across Europe. Our analysis identifies eight roles that stakeholders play in SOI processes: stimulator, initiator, broker/mediator, concept refiner, legitimator, educator, context enabler and impact extender. More traditional roles such as legitimator and educator are less common in our cases. However, emerging roles such as stimulator, concept refiner, context enabler and impact extender are clearly identifiable and could be particularly valuable for SOI. We enhance a collaborative perspective of stakeholder theory, finding that stakeholders can play highly collaborative and proactive roles, and argue that secondary stakeholders may actually be more relevant for SOI than primary stakeholders. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

The fundraiser's journey: A developmentally informed,grounded theory analysis

Fundraisers play a vital role in the success of nonprofit organizations, yet relatively little is known about the experiences, motivations, and thought processes that inform their career choice and development. This exploratory, cross-comparative case study of 3 fundraisers addresses this gap in the literature by examining some formative influences on fundraisers' careers, their professional growth aspirations and opportunities, and how, if at all, they engage in personal philanthropy. Results suggest that fundraisers' aptitudes, skills, and abilities may influence their career choice more than a sense of connection to the nonprofit sector or organizational mission. Further, fundraisers seek opportunities to exercise leadership at the individual, organizational, and community levels. Additionally, their personal philanthropy and social embeddedness play integral roles in their professional development. Although not large enough for generalization, these results suggest the need to study fundraisers holistically, including their psychological development and social embeddedness over time. We argue for the need to move beyond traditional marketing and public relations perspectives to explain fundraising. Instead, future studies should adopt a service-dominant logic framing that considers fundraisers as part of a larger philanthropic ecosystem. We conclude with several questions to guide future studies toward this line of inquiry.     

Complementarities between organisational strategies and innovation

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether organizational strategies in various manufacturing industries are complementary with innovation. In particular, our interest is to discover which organizational strategies are complementary with major innovations (world-first and Canada-first). Knowledge of complementarity should pave the way for creating sustainable competitive advantage because the use of a complex strategy may be difficult to imitate. In other words, competitive advantage increases as the complexity of the strategy increases (i.e. because the number of strategy combinations follows a power law), which acts as a barrier to potential imitators (Rivkin, J.W. (2000) Imitation of Complex Strategies. Management Science, 46(6), 824–844.).

Because of the static nature of our results (productivity and profit are for 1997), their interpretation can only be tentative. Thus, our research is really a first step along the road to understanding the (potential) importance of complementarities among firm strategies. Caveats aside, managers may want to compare their own firm’s emphasis on particular strategies against what is empirically determined to be complementary with innovation and high-performance within their industry. The frequency of complementary pairs that involve innovation range from 40 to 50% depending on whether we are talking about profit, productivity, or strategies. This result is important—as it means that innovation outcomes are statistically significant for both increased productivity and increased profit. Furthermore, innovation was found to be complementary with many organizational strategies. The complementary strategies across industries were quite different, but this was expected to occur.     

The Roles of Independent Research and Technology Organizations in the United Kingdom's Technology Transfer Mechanism to SMEs

Independent Research and Technology Organizations (RTOs) provide an increasing proportion of the UK's technology services requirements. RTOs, often former state research establishments spun out into the private sector, provide technology consulting and networking services to specific sectors or for generic technologies; some are membership-based organizations while others work for contract clients. In this paper we explore the roles and services provided by RTOs, together with the measures being taken to assist small firms that, for many RTOs, form a new and challenging market. The diversity of services and approaches to SMEs are related, in part, to the different origins of RTOs. The research indicates three forms of technology services market failure that suggest a need for ongoing external support for the market's mechanism.     

J. S. Mill on Wages and Women: A Feminist Critique

"J. S. Mill on Wages and Women" questions the common belief that Mill, despite his feminism, never suggested an end to the sexual division of labor because of his devotion to the concept of efficiency and other tenets of classical economics. A review of Mill's analysis of a competitive labor market indicates that he believed it to be fully consistent with women's equality in the workforce. In fact, in his works on women, it becomes clear that Mill was concerned that the logical extension of classical economic principles might lead to the commodification of domestic duties, including child rearing, a notion he evidently feared. Therefore, it was Mill's fear of, rather than dedication to, extreme allegiance to efficiency and unimpeded capitalism that limited his feminism.     

Family income and child outcomes in Canada

Abstract.  A positive relationship between income and child outcomes has been observed in data from numerous countries. A key question concerns the extent to which this association represents a causal relationship as opposed to unobserved heterogeneity. We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth to implement a series of empirical strategies for estimating the existence and size of the effect of income on three measures of cognition. Our results indicate that the effect of income on these outcomes may well be positive, but that it is likely to be smaller than conventional estimates. JEL Classification: I10     

Green marketing strategies: an examination of stakeholders and the opportunities they present

As green marketing strategies become increasingly more important to firms adhering to a triple-bottom line performance evaluation, the present research seeks to better understand the role of “green” as a marketing strategy. Through an integration of the marketing, management, and operations literatures, an investigative framework is generated that identifies the various stakeholders potentially impacted through the environmentally friendly efforts of a firm. Specifically, the inter-connected nature of the core business disciplines of marketing, management (both strategy and human resources), and operations are examined as controllable functions within an organization from which strategies can be enacted to affect a firm’s stakeholders. The prior research in these areas is examined to identify potential research opportunities in marketing while also offering a series of representative research questions that can help guide future research in marketing.     

The Macroeconomic Consequences of Financing Health Insurance

Employer-financed health insurance systems like those used in the United States distort firms’ labor demand and adversely affect the economy. Since such costs vary with employment rather than hours worked, firms have an incentive to increase output by increasing worker hours rather than employment. Given that the returns to employment exceed the returns to hours worked, this results in lower levels of employment and output. In this paper, we construct a heterogeneous agent general equilibrium model where individuals differ with respect to their productivity and employment opportunities. Calibrating the model to the U.S. economy, we generate steady state results for several alternative models for financing health insurance: one in which health insurance is financed primarily through employer contributions that vary with employment, a second where insurance is funded through a non-distortionary, lump-sum tax, and a third where insurance is funded by a payroll tax. We measure the effects of each of the alternatives on output, employment, hours worked, and wages.