Global New Product Development Processes: Preliminary Findings and Research Propositions

This study examines the processes and routines firms employ for developing new global products. Observations from 13 Japanese, American and European multinational companies reveal that global new product development processes vary in terms of the involvement of overseas subsidiaries in project teams and the generation of new product concepts. In particular, when the knowledge about different product design requirements among overseas markets or plants is tacit, firms employ cross-national product development teams and use overseas subsidiaries as sources of new product concepts. Anchoring these findings on information processing theory, we develop a set of research propositions on global new product development processes and suggest directions for future research.     

Old homes, externalities, and poor neighborhoods. A model of urban decline and renewal

This paper investigates urban decline and renewal in the United States using three panels that follow neighborhoods on a geographically consistent basis over extended periods of time. Findings indicate that change in neighborhood economic status is common, averaging roughly 13 percent per decade; roughly two-thirds of neighborhoods studied in 1950 were of quite different economic status fifty years later. Panel unit root tests for 35 MSAs indicate that neighborhood economic status is a stationary process, consistent with long-running cycles of decline and renewal. In Philadelphia County, a complete cycle appears to last up to 100 years. Aging housing stocks and redevelopment contribute to these patterns, as do local externalities associated with social interactions. Lower-income neighborhoods appear to be especially sensitive to the presence of individuals that provide social capital. Many of the factors that drive change at the local level have large and policy relevant effects.     

Do mortgage rates vary based on household default characteristics? Evidence on rate sorting and credit rationing

Credit screening models suggest that lenders vary loan rates and debt ceilings across applicants on the basis of credit risk. We argue that regulatory constraints such as Fair Lending Laws may preclude rate sorting while increasing lender use of debt ceilings to adjust for applicant credit risk. Using household data from the 1983 SCF, we find that mortgage rates do not vary with applicant credit risk whereas related studies find that debt ceilings vary with borrower risk attributes. Together, these findings support arguments that regulatory constraints reduce rate sorting while increasing the use of non-price terms in the mortgage contract.     

Management Control as an Employee Resource: The Case of Front‐line Service Workers

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the conception of management control as an employee resource can enhance critical understandings of front‐line service work. The argument is developed first through a critique of the contemporary control literature and its prominent worker images of smiling docility and haggard exhaustion. Seeking to encourage accounts more sensitive to the subjectivity and agency of service workers, the paper calls for more research attention to the question of how these employees experience and evaluate management control in relation to their self‐defined interests. Analysis of the nature of contemporary service work suggests that one such perceived interest is likely to be interactive control, or the capacity of workers to control and influence those parties with whom they directly interact. Based on a close reading of the emerging empirical literature on services, the article explores various ways in which the bureaucratic, technical and normative regulation designed by management to control service workers is used in turn by workers to further their own control and influence over managers and customers.     

The antecedents of employee commitment to customer service: evidence from a UK

This paper provides a first attempt at conceptualizing and operationalizing the notion of commitment to customer service (CCS) as part of a broader concern to explore the determinants of key aspects of service quality and of individual-level performance in service organizations. Based on an explicitly behavioral definition of commitment to customer service, we first set out a model of the antecedents of CCS. We then test it using data from a representative sample of 717 employees of a major food-retailing organization in the UK. The results suggest that commitment to customer service is primarily a non-calculative phenomenon driven above all by affective. normative altruistic concerns, rather than by overtly instrumental considerations. Additional significant determinants of CCS were job pressure, job routinization. job competence and employees' understanding of customer service requirements. Research and policy implications of the study are discussed.     

Intergenerational Mobility and the Process of Development

This paper offers an explanation for some evidence that intergenerational earnings mobility is higher in more developed economies and that mobility is positively correlated with wage equality. In the model mobility promotes economic growth via its effect on the accumulation and allocation of human capital. Growth influences mobility via its effect on incentives to acquire education and its effect on liquidity constraints upon such acquisition. In the process of development mobility increases and the distribution of education becomes better correlated with ability. Redistributive policy has a negative effect on growth in developed economies and a positive effect in developing economies.