Strategic Goals and Practices of Innovative Family Businesses

A profile of 231 Washington state family businesses is presented. This article focuses on the business strategies of these firms, analyzing the relationship between strategy, performance, and business practices. Firms categorized as Prospector firms reported more gains in their current market position than all other strategic types. These firms were more likely to value an effective management and employee team and to develop new quality products and services and career development plans for non-family employees. Implications for family businesses are discussed.     

Labour mobility and wage inequality in the presence of endogenous foreign investment

This paper examines the impact of labour mobility and increased competition on skilled–unskilled wage inequality and foreign investment. Unlike the existing literature this paper considers a model where foreign investment is endogenously determined. The paper shows that in the shortrun, inflow of either skilled or unskilled labour has no effect on wage inequality but increased competition increases wage inequality. Inflow of either type of labour increases foreign investment but the impact of increased competition on foreign investment cannot be unambiguously determined. Inflow of skilled labour increases wage inequality in the longrun and its effect on foreign investment is positive. Increased competition in the longrun increases wage inequality, foreign investment and welfare.     

Post-privatization performance and organizational changes: Case studies from Ghana

A significant number of less developed countries (LDCs), including Ghana, have embraced the World Bank/IMF led economic reforms. Ghana has been implementing these reforms since the early 1980. One of the conditions of the reforms is the privatization of former state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Such privatization activities have however generated debates among academics, practitioners, and policy makers. Research findings so far have been mixed. This paper analyzes the performance of two large privatized companies in Ghana. Both companies have been paraded by the Ghanaian authorities and the international financial community as success stories of privatization. Our objective is to examine how and why these firms have been claimed to be successful. Drawing on the dimensions of the balanced scorecard, we examine the performance of the firms from five main perspectives—financial, customers, internal business process, learning and growth, and the community. The analysis is based on data gathered from diverse sources, namely, semi-structured interviews and discussions with managers of the selected companies and with personnel from key government departments, and analysis of internal and external documents. We conclude that, overall the performance of both organizations improved after privatization under all the performance dimensions examined. These improvements were also accompanied by certain organizational changes, including changes in the accounting and control systems. However we are not claiming that all privatization programs in Ghana have been successful. In fact there are stories in the Ghanaian media of several other privatization failures in the country. Instead what we have demonstrated is the need to explain the performance of privatized firms beyond the myopic macro-level and financial analysis which has been widely adopted by the international financial community and policy makers and we encourage other researchers to adopt such multidimensional approaches.     

Risks and threats to civilization, humankind, and the earth

This paper is a brief look at a wide range of risks that are said to present great threats to humankind. It was stimulated by several interacting factors. First, too many books and articles about astrophysical catastrophes, in the scientific and semi-scientific press, give relatively little attention to their timeframe or the measures to anticipate and prepare for them. Second, and most important, is that the overblown effects of 9/11 have distorted the United States of America's perspective and agenda on catastrophes. The result is that billions of dollars have been wasted and attention turned away from threats that could be truly catastrophic for the United States and, in many cases, for the rest of the world. Third, are books that have become popular by raising the threat that what will happen to us will be similar to what happened to earlier societies such as the Maya and the Easter Islanders. Most notably among these is Jared Diamond's Collapse [Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Penguin Group, 2005]. The failure in these doomsday arguments is to overlook the greater sophistication, knowledge, awareness, monitoring and preparation currently in the United States and in other parts of the globe. The institutional structure and scientific knowledge today would either prevent or deal with the kind of socio-economic decline anticipated by the “collapse” arguments. In contrast several geophysical and celestial risks do imply global catastrophe. The value of this paper is as broad background to the specific scenario papers that follow. While it leans heavily on the work of others, it offers three new features for the analysis of any extreme risk. First is a scale of devastation, based on deaths. Second is a comprehensive time frame—now to the end of the Earth. Third is an outline of general questions that must be addressed for any risk, however large or small, if it is to provide insight into policy choices and promote systemic thinking.     

Executive compensation: a calibration approach

Summary. We use a version of the Grossman and Hart principal-agent model with 10 actions and 10 states to produce quantitative predictions for executive compensation. Performance incentives derived from the model are compared with the performance incentives of 350 firms chosen from a survey by Michael Jensen and Kevin Murphy. The results suggest both that the model does a reasonable job of explaining the data and that actual incentives are close to the optimal incentives predicted by theory. Received: August 12, 1997; revised version: October 27, 1997     

Globalisation: A New Growth,New Trade Perspective

The current crisis in Asia has seen the case for more open economic policy come under attack in the developing world. In this article Michael Chui, Paul Levine, Mansoob Murshed, and Joseph Pearlman argue that any reversal of the trend towards globalisation would be a great mistake for policymakers. The association of openness with higher growth is one of the most robust empirical results in economics. Here we explore the mechanisms that explain this result. We argue that current high growth rates in Asia are unsustainable and there is a long-term as well as a short-term problem of ‘over-investment’ in Asia. However, we report research findings that show how international knowledge spillovers and free trade can enable the world economy to grow, the developing countries to progress, and the developed countries to benefit.     

The Diffusion of Management Innovations: The Possibilities and Limitations of Memetics

abstract    This paper applies a theory of memetics to help explain the diffusion of management innovations as a dynamic evolutionary process. Existing analyses of diffusion frequently note the variation, selection or replication of management innovations, yet few have linked these together with the common observation that some innovations seem to 'evolve'. This paper draws on qualitative evidence from two case-studies of BPR implementation to illustrate that the replication, selection and variation of management innovations can form evolutionary algorithms ('memes') which support diffusion processes, and, in doing so, clarifies the ways in which innovations contribute to their own replication and explains how the high 'failure' rates associated with BPR can sometimes improve its chances of reproduction.     

Consumer profiles section: Consumer profiles for conventional bed and waterbed owners in Canada

This study examines consumer profile data on waterbed and conventional bed consumers. Five hundred conventional and waterbed consumers in Canada were randomly selected from two national lists of waterbed/mattress purchasers from 1981 to the present. A 73-item questionnaire was sent by mail to all of the selected respondents. The cover letter stated the purpose of the project; to study why people bought the bed that they are presently using. One hundred and sixty-two completed, useable questionnaires were returned, yielding a response rate of 37%. Following a series of multivariate analyses, a consumer profile for the two bed users was developed. Both groups tended to be married. The conventional bed consumers had: (a) either no children or one child at home; (b) a mean age of 44; and, (c) an average income in the $30,000-$40,000 range. Waterbed consumers had: (a) a mean age of 36, (b) one child living at home; and, (c) an average income in the $20,000-$30,000 range. On the Adorno F scale, the conventional bed user was found to be more conservative and authoritarian as compared to the waterbed user. The results did not support the notion that waterbed users are abnormally sexually-oriented or “kinky”. For both groups, the price paid for the purchased bed fell in the $600 to $650 range. Implications for retailers were discussed.