EFFECTS OF ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING IN THIRD‐PARTY LOGISTICS

Logistics service providers operate in an intense competitive environment that requires continuous improvement in logistics service quality and firm performance. Key organizational resources may contribute toward the improvement in performance of logistics service providers. This paper investigates the effect of organizational learning within logistics service providers on client relationship orientation, logistics service quality and firm performance. The study proposes and examines an original concept in logistics research that contributes to theory in the area, provides the opportunity for further research and addresses how organizational resources can contribute to performance in logistics.     

The colonization of the future: An alternative view of financialization and its portents

Financialization is generally interpreted by heterodox economists to be a dysfunctional and thus historically transient outgrowth of contemporary capitalism: dysfunctional because it is seen to be driven by attempts to escape production and profit realization constraints in the real economy, transient because these attempts are seen to be ultimately futile. This article proposes the contrary argument that financialization is a functionally useful feature of contemporary capitalism that is entirely in keeping with the latter’s continuing development as a commodity system. Specifically, it will be argued that just as globalization represents the extension of the commodity principle along the axis of geographical space, financialization represents the extension of this same principle along the axis of time: the future is being colonized so as to make it take the overspill of the pressures on organizations operating in the present.     

Globalisation as commodification

While recognising that most pre-capitalist formations exhibitedelements of commodity exchange, Marx argued that capitalismdifferentiates itself as a genuine commodity system by virtueof two interdependent processes having reached a critical stageof development: a ‘stretching’ of commodity relationsto the point where production for the market displaces subsistenceproduction as the primary form; and a ‘deepening’of commodity relations such that these encompass not only goodsand services but the capacities for producing them. This paperargues that globalisation can best be understood as the culminatingstage of these stretching and deepening processes: the formerin the sense that commodity relations now embrace the entireplanet and the latter in the sense that they cover not merelygoods, or the capacities for producing goods, but also everyother type of capacity and every other type of outcome.