Choices, situations, and happiness

This article explores some conceptual issues in the study of well-being using the traditional economic approach of inferring preferences solely from choice behavior. We argue that choice behavior alone can never reveal which situations make people better off, even with unlimited data and under the maintained hypothesis of 100% rational choice. Ancillary assumptions or additional forms of data such as happiness measures are always needed. With such ancillary assumptions and additional data, however, the use of revealed preference to study well-being can be significantly improved, so that the choices people make can jointly identify preferences, mistakes, and well-being.     

Environmental regulation and innovation driving ecological design in the UK automotive industry

The theory of ecological modernization asserts that economic and environmental goals can be integrated within a framework of industrial modernity. Its central tenet is that environmental regulation can stimulate the application of ‘clean’ technologies or techniques. Ecological modernization also contends that environmental regulation can offer business benefits from innovation through improved product design and economic performance. The EU End of Life Vehicles Directive (ELVD) reflects many of these principles, as it compels all car manufacturers to ‘take back’ and dismantle vehicles at the end of their useful lives and to remove the hazardous substances from the production process. Each component will then be either reused or recycled. The legislation forces designers to introduce ‘clean design’ and ‘design for disassembly’ practices. In light of this, we examine the impact of the directive on UK automotive component manufacturers. We find limited evidence that the EU ELVD Directive has driven product innovation beyond short‐term, incremental technological trajectories. We therefore conclude that a more radical approach, in line with the ‘dematerialization’ thesis by Dobers and Wolff (1999), is needed to generate more radical, ecological design solutions within the UK automotive industry. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Global account management: a supply-side managerial view

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theory-based explanation for the adaptive variations in a supply manager's role within a global account management (GAM) relationship. The variations in a supply-side manager's role are explained using a combined knowledge-based view and relational contracting theoretical perspective. The demands of the global customer, which constrain the supply managers' role adaptation, present a unique set of challenges to organizations supplying in global accounts. The new managerial competencies, required for effective global account supply management under global customer's constraints, are described. In conclusion, specific managerial actions are recommended for effective global account supply management, which are intended to engender the development of trust and social capital in the global customer-supplier relationship.     

Household Composition, Equivalence Scales and the Reliability of Income Distributions: Some Evidence for Indigenous and Other Australians

Indigenous families experience substantial and multiple forms of economic burden arising from the size and structure of their families and households. Indigenous households are more likely to have more than one family in residence than other Australian households and are more likely to be multigenerational with older Indigenous people living with younger people in extended family households. This paper seeks to characterise the economies of household size in Indigenous and other Australian households using equivalence scales that cover the range of feasible values and 1995 National Health Survey data.     

Design Reuse in Manufacturing and Services*

Most professionals, actively engaged in design, live in a world of trade‐offs. The most typical compromise is that reducing the cost of design causes quality to suffer, but there are many others as well. This paper summarizes current use of one of the most popular approaches to improving the new offering development process: design reuse. In the present study 42 companies were surveyed, of which 23 were in manufacturing and 19 were in services—but all were actively engaged in technology and design reuse in new offerings. It was hypothesized that policies for design reuse and internal sourcing would promote the complexity and breadth of reuse (here the combination of modular and architectural substitution), which, in turn would dampen the percentage of substitution and reduce the negative impact on innovativeness of new offerings. These predictions were generally supported. Adoption of policies for encouragement or to mandate design reuse were significantly correlated with the extent of reuse (application of both architectural and modular design vs. just one or the other) among manufacturers but not services firms in the sample. Internal sourcing of ideas for design reuse was significantly correlated with extent of reuse for the total sample, and especially for services. Design reuse percentage and extent of design reuse were significantly and inversely associated for manufacturing, as predicted, but not for services. Novelty of new offerings was significantly and inversely related to percentage of reuse, as predicted, for manufacturing, but not for services. It was found that sector also makes a difference in likelihood of adopting higher levels of reuse with service company respondents reporting significantly higher levels (average of 42% reuse for services and 28% for manufacturing applications). Perhaps one of the most interesting preliminary findings to emerge was that the tipping point of negative impact from design reuse percentage on innovativeness for all firms in the sample of new offerings was 43%, beyond which novelty suffers. For manufacturing, the tipping point was lower: Novelty begins to suffer after 33% design reuse, which has important management implications. The conclusion was drawn, based on these preliminary results, that much can be done to relieve some of the negative consequences of the typical trade‐offs commonly encountered in development programs for new offerings, especially when cost, timing, and innovation are the target goals. However, services and manufacturing are quite different in their approach to design reuse and substitution. Further development of the concept of design reuse strategy appears to be warranted based on these preliminary findings. The findings raise the distinct possibility that mesolevel strategic aggregation issues might lead research into areas that help explain how complex systems realize their full self‐organizing potential and why corporate strategy considerations, alone, have failed to explain the success and failure of organizations coping in rugged landscapes.     

Mentoring and turnover intentions in public accounting firms: A research note

Turnover in public accounting firms is a critically important issue as firms seek to retain quality accounting personnel in the face of skilled labour shortages. Mentoring is one initiative that has been suggested as a means of reducing the high costs associated with employee turnover. However, prior accounting research examining the association between mentoring and turnover intentions has produced mixed results, which may be due, at least in part, to difficulties in operationalizing the mentoring construct. Drawing on recent management literature regarding organizational turnover intentions, we challenge the conventional view that mentoring generally leads to reduced turnover intentions, by testing a theoretical model that posits that different functions of mentoring have differing effects on turnover intentions. Specifically, we argue that while the psychosocial support function of mentoring can serve to reduce public accountants’ turnover intentions, the career development function of mentoring has the potential to increase turnover intentions. Results support this conclusion.     

Recruitment and retention in front‐line services: the case of childcare

This article highlights how problems of recruitment and retention in front‐line services create a particular challenge to traditional HRM models and solutions. Private day nurseries make an interesting example of the challenges facing managers in the service sector as the combination of a feminised workforce, a price‐sensitive service, public–private competition and state regulation create particular difficulties. We report on a study of 33 day nurseries involving interviews with managers and employees over an eight‐month period. Our findings show that childcare providers have to cope with recruitment and retention problems associated with high‐end interactive service provision compounded by gender segregation and small business characteristics. Our analysis of employer and employee perspectives examines labour market issues affecting recruitment, and categorises the reasons for staff turnover into internal ‘push’ factors, external ‘pull’ factors, outside factors and functional turnover.     

Voices from the Field: How Exceptional Electronic Industrial Innovators Innovate

This exploratory research uses in‐depth qualitative interviews to investigate how 11 exceptional innovators in the electronics industry initiated, created, and commercialized radical innovations in their firms. From the data, two initial frameworks emerged for how radical innovations were created by these individuals. Four themes emerged associated with what these innovators bring to the organization as an underpinning for being able to radically innovate. Additional themes emerged as to the process by which they innovate. Across the literatures of innovation, psychology, and management, creativity is discussed in terms of person, product, or process. This research samples on highly creative innovations (products) and finds that it appears that both person and process need to be considered in attaining radical innovation. One may not be able to consider separately the person who achieves radical innovation from the process he or she uses to achieve it. These exceptional innovators have specific personality characteristics that support radically creative behavior, supplemented by a perspective or worldview that focuses on having a business orientation yet also a somewhat idealistic attitude. They have prepared for innovation by studying deeply, within not just one primary technology topic but also a secondary or peripheral technology topic. In addition, they have prepared broadly, across technology, business, and markets. They are both extrinsically and intrinsically motivated to innovate. People communicating what problems are urgently important to them to be solved produce external motivation for the innovator, who is then intrinsically motivated to solve these people's problems by creating new products. In terms of how they innovate, these exceptional innovators are organizationally savvy and both understand and participate in the politics necessary to gain acceptance of and resources for their project. They use an innovation process that emphasizes the up‐front aspects of finding interesting problems, planning first before executing, and understanding customer needs in great detail. This allows them to generate insights into how to solve those problems profitably for the firm. Once they have obtained and validated their insights for solving the problem, they participate in the actual implementation of the concept to a commercialized product. However, this development aspect of innovating is not much spoken of, as if it is taken for granted. Finally, they actively disseminate knowledge and acceptance of the innovation postinvention.     

Collateral Constraints and the Interest Rate

This paper develops a model in which an increase in financial frictions leads to a fall in the steady-state rate of interest. A perpetual youth overlapping generations (OLG) model is extended to incorporate a collateral constraint, this results in a transmission mechanism in which an interest rate fall occurs endogenously from a disruption to the credit market. It is found that that non-linearities exist in the relationship between changes in financial frictions and the interest rate. By specifying the mechanism by means of which this occurs, the model provides an explanation for why low interest rates have been observed with such persistence since the financial crisis.