Company giving to schools: Business or charity?

Almost weekly, national newspapers report the launch of governmental initiatives and funding programmes to improve educational standards and the environment in which these are to be actioned. Local newspapers also recognise the news-worthiness of the school community. The MP's visit, the Gladiator opening a school fete, the environmental programme are all avidly reported. With the millions of pounds being poured into education and the insatiable appetite of the media to report what is happening at schools, it is hardly surprising that business has recognised the commercial potential of dealing with the school community, be this as a direct supplier or as an organisation that may receive publicity through association. This article will examine the business-school relationship and the motives that underlie this relationship. Much of the below article is developed from material taken from the author's recent book, ‘A Handbook of School Fundraising’¹.     

A revenue management approach to demand management and order booking in assemble-to-order manufacturing

Revenue management is an order acceptance and refusal process that employs differential pricing strategies and stop sales tactics to reallocate capacity, enhance delivery reliability and speed, and realize revenue from change order responsiveness in order to maximize the revenue from pre-existing capacity. While previously considered primarily as a tool of service operations, revenue management has considerable potential for assemble to order (ATO) manufacturing environments. Increasing demand for customer responsiveness has created service-oriented manufacturing environments suitable for the application of revenue management methods. This paper applies revenue management concepts and techniques to ATO manufacturing environments and presents models for optimal pricing and capacity decisions.     

CO-OPERATION AND AGRI-BUSINESS EVOLUTION

Co-operatives in North America, developed to correct or off set real or imagined wrongs in the economic system within which agriculture over time became further involved, have remained largely rural. Where successful, co-operatives bridged the gap between a fundamentalist agricultural production industry that tended to look inwards to itself and a privately capitalised marketing industry that looked outwards towards metropolitan and overseas markets. In pioneer and pioneering environments where free enterprise agri-business became significantly involved in on-farm or on-ranch operations, co-operatives did not become im-portant as the services and attitudes of agri-business complemented rather than exploited the man on the land. In the more commercialised integrated agriculture of today, corporate agri-business has found an interest in greater involvement in farm operations: much of this comes from changes in technology that make off-farm purchases as important a component of the agricultural com-plex as off-farm sales of products. Thus, co-operatives have lost their unique “bridge” role, have problems themselves of identity and of their most desirable patterns of future development. But their competition-existing corporate agri-business and new entrants from the conglom-erate industrial giants-are not without their problems also. These are outlined as well as the issues co-operatives-and co-operative philosophers and promoters-must tackle if they are to remain successful market participants and have identifiable characteristics that reflect co- operative idealism. The unique member-client relationship the co-operative is based on should be exploited to maintain and expand these complementary and essential goals for continued farmers’business participation in the North American and world economies.     

PLANT-LEVEL ANALYSIS USING THE ARD: ANOTHER LOOK AT GIBRAT'S LAW

This study uses the Annual Respondents Database to test whether Gibrat's law of proportionate effect holds for the UK manufacturing industry during the period 1973–1998. For a sample of manufacturing industries, four different panel unit root tests were carried out to test the relationship between growth and size for three measures of size: gross output, employment and gross value added. The tests were applied to unbalanced plant‐level panel data. The results show that there is strong evidence to reject Gibrat's law that firm growth is a random process in favour of the alternative proposition of mean reversion.