Similarities in fan preferences for minor-league baseball across the American Southeast

Three Minor League Baseball leagues across the Southeastern United States are studied in order to determine what drives fan attendance. Individual game attendance and game characteristics are examined for three leagues located in the American southeast, the Florida State League, the Southern League, and the South Atlantic League. Despite the three leagues encompassing different levels of play (from A to AA), the determinants of attendance are similar across leagues. Factors affecting attendance such as winning percentage, weather conditions, local income and population, and individual game promotions, such as fireworks, are explored.     

Extraction Not Creation: The History of Offshore Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico

Offshore development is one of the most important but leastanalyzed chapters in the history of the petroleum industry,and the Gulf of Mexico is the most explored, drilled, and developedoffshore petroleum province in the world. This essay examinesoffshore oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico, highlightingthe importance of access and how the unique geology and geographyof the Gulf shaped both access and technology. Interactionsbetween technology, capital, geology, and the political structureof access in the Gulf of Mexico generated a functionally andregionally complex extractive industry that repeatedly resolvedthe material and economic contradictions of expanding into deeperwater. This was not achieved, however, simply through technologicalmiracles or increased mastery over the environment, as industryexperts and popular accounts often imply. The industry moveddeeper only by more profoundly adapting to the environment,not by transcending its limits. This essay diverges from celebratorynarratives about offshore development and from interpretationsthat emphasize the social construction of the environment. Itchallenges the storyline of market-driven technology and itsmiraculous ability to expand and create petroleum abundancein the Gulf.     

Does Business and Society Scholarship Matter to Society? Pursuing a Normative Agenda with Critical Realism and Neoinstitutional Theory

To date, B&S researchers have pursued their normative aims through strategic and moral arguments that are limited because they adopt a rational actor behavioral model and firm-level focus. I argue that it would be beneficial for B&S scholars to pursue alternate approaches based on critical realism (CR) and neoinstitutional theory (IT). Such a shift would have a number of benefits. For one, CR and IT recognize the complex roots of firm behavior and provide tools for its investigation. Both approaches also note the importance of social context and IT, in particular, points to tangible sites where changes in (and outcomes of) corporate practices can be assessed. CR also has an emancipatory ethos which harkens a role for scholars in social change, while IT provides mechanisms to ground this ethos in tangible activities that go beyond appealing to managers’ strategic or moral sensibilities.     

Story and Narrative Noticing: Workaholism Autoethnographies

We enter this energetic debate over causes and consequences of workaholism using autoethnography. Our main contribution is to explore when our autoethnographies of workaholism experiences is narrative, and when it is expressive, living story. The difference in narrative is a re-presentation (following representationalism of a sensory remembrance), where as living story is a matter of reflexivity upon the fragile nature of our life world. We began through analysis of workaholism narratives in our own academic lives, and in the movies of popular culture, the influence of a particular meta-narrative – that of the American Dream. We proceed to juxtapose our own living stories in their struggle with those American Dream narratives.     

Regulatory institutions and processes in telecommunications : An international study of alternatives

This article reviews national regulatory institutions and processes for telecommunications, and assesses some advantages and disadvantages of the alternatives. It is based on a report commissioned by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in connection with its Regulatory Colloquium programme. The report was prepared by an independent team, and represents their views, not an ITU view. It summarizes experience in numerous countries, and includes detailed case studies.     

A Simple Multi-Factor,Time-Dependent-Parameter Model for the Term Structure of Interest Rates

In this paper, we present a simple version of the Duffie and Kan model (1996). Our model can perfectly fit the yield curve and the volatility curve and further provide true closed form solutions to the pure discount bond price and its European contingent claims. Due to the specific factor structure in our model, the calibration exercise is easy to implement. This advantage will improve the computational efficiency in pricing American style claims.     

Program Trading and Stock Index Futures: Blessing or Bane?

'Program trading'and stock index futures and options are often blamed for stock market volatility, and especially so after the Crash. Professor Tyler Cowen, of the University of California at Irvine, claims that these new trading techniques have not added to volatility and that regulation could well increase it.     

Practical Obstacles to the 'Standard'

Changes of units of account are faced with severe practical difficulties, argues Tyler Cowen, Post-doctoral Fellow in Economics at George Mason University, Virginia. The Preferoble alternative to commodity based units of account is to be found in the private supply of new medio of exchange.