Competitive strategy and the implementation of a new network technology: the case of EFTPOS in the UK

This article analyses competrtion and cooperation between UK banks, as they attempted to develop a national syitem jor electronic funds transfer at the point of sale (EFTPOS) The banks formed a {epanste company, EFTPOS UK Ltd, to develop a technically sophisticated national system, but soon interbank divisions led the larger banks to develop national schemes from pnwourly 'exfierzmental' networks. Over a period of two years, competition came to be defined as that between banks supporing the Switch scheme and banks supporting a Visa afebit turd senme. During this period the banks made repeated public declarations of the commritment to EFTPOS UK and represented nascent, proprietary EFTPOS networks as computible with the national scheme. The process by which the banks attempted to make sente of that ambiguous competitive environment is described and we use the idea of metastable' competive rategies to represent the successive temporary commitments the banks made to particular ways of understanding thew competitiue environments. 'strategic maps are drawn to represent stages in bank thinking on the possible competitive outcomes of EFTPOS development.     

Trade Union Responses to Outsourcing in a Neo-Liberal Environment: A Case Study Analysis of the Australian Public Sector

Australia has witnessed a rapid growth in outsourcing over the past decade with the public sector being the clear leader in these initiatives. Explanations of the rise of outsourcing tend to emphasize economic and human resources management factors and neglect the political dimension. In particular, unions and collective labour relations have been a target of a neo-liberal reform agenda pursued by both Labour and conservative governments, which has included outsourcing as a means of individualizing the employment relationship and reducing union influence. This can be seen clearly from the experience of the state of Victoria both in its reform of local government and its electricity generation industry where a carefully implemented programme of downsizing and outsourcing played upon existing divisions in the workforce. In both cases a pragmatic, survival oriented response from the major unions was elicited.     

Covert operations

Few executives have insight into what really goes on in their organizations. CEO Stephen Martin seized a rare opportunity to anonymously discover the nitty gritty of his company. He shares his insights with Julian Birkinshaw and Stuart Crainer.     

A meta-analytic review of influence strategies in marketing channel relationships

Influence strategies (ISs) are a dominant topic in channel research. However, the literature lacks a consensus on when noncoercive and coercive strategies are more valuable or damaging to partnership quality, and their judicious applications remain unclear. Mainly based on social exchange perspectives, we review and conceptualize several contingency factors in the IS-partnership quality relationships in this metaanalysis. The moderating results generally suggest that the stronger positive impacts of noncoercive ISs result from a higher appreciation for supportive attempts, whereas the higher negative sensitivity to coercive ISs can be attributed to the low acceptability of forceful influences. We determine degrees of appreciation and acceptability by the perceived significance of benefits/damages, expectations, and tolerance levels for both strategies. Also, we synthesize and meta-analyze the key outcomes and antecedents of both strategies in an integrated framework. The direct-effect results indicate that the choice of effectively applying both strategies necessitates a tradeoff between goals and priorities.     

Behind Migrant and Non-Migrant Worktime Inequality in Europe: Institutional and Cultural Factors Explaining Differences

Migrants often work longer hours than their non-migrant counterparts. In this article, we examine reasons behind this inequality, arguing that institutional working time configurations at the country level have impact on worktime inequality. Our cross-country comparative study uses data from the European Labour Force Survey. We focus on France, Sweden, Austria and the UK as archetypal examples of working time configurations and breadwinner models in Europe. Our findings indicate that institutional and cultural factors play a role in working hour differences between migrants and non-migrants. We conclude that more centralized worktime regulation and bargaining foster equality, and we suggest several avenues for future research.     

Financing agricultural R&D in rich countries: what's happening and why

Governments everywhere are trimming their support for agricultural R&D, giving greater scrutiny to the support that they do provide, and reforming the public agencies that fund, oversee, and carry out the research. This represents a break from previous patterns, which had consisted of expansion in the public funds for agricultural R&D. Private-sector spending on agricultural research has slowed along with the growth of public spending in recent years, but the balance continues to shift towards the private sector. This article presents a quantitative review of these funding trends and the considerable institutional changes that have accompanied them. We discuss new data for 22 OECD countries, providing institutional details for five of these countries, and conclude with an assessment of policy developments.     

Do Information Rents in Loan Spreads Persist over the Business Cycles?

In this paper, we seek empirical evidence for information rents in loan spreads by analyzing a sample of UK syndicated loan contracts for the period from 1996 to 2005. We use various measures for borrower opaqueness and control for bank, borrower and loan characteristics and we find that undercapitalized banks charge approximately 34 bps higher loan spreads for loans to opaque borrowers. We further analyze whether this effect persists throughout the business cycle and find that this effect prevails only during recessions. However, we do not find evidence that banks exploit their information monopolies during expansion phases.     

Estimating time-varying variances and covariances via nearest neighbour multivariate predictions: applications to the NYSE and the Madrid Stock Exchange Index

In this article, we present a technique to obtain the time-varying covariance matrix for several time series for nearest neighbour predictors. To illustrate the use of this technique, we analyse the time-varying variances and correlations between the daily returns on two equity stock market indexes, the New York Stock Exchange and the Madrid Stock Exchange Index.