Budget repair or budget spectacle? The passage of Wisconsin’s Act 10

Strategic planning processes use budgets to implement control and accountability. However, budgets can also be used to generate support for strategic decisions, for example by creating a political spectacle. A political spectacle is a problem engineered to have a specific political impact. This paper investigates politicians’ use of a state budget as a political manoeuvre to defend strategic decisions regarding public employee unions in Wisconsin. The analysis shows how the 2011 state budget in Wisconsin was used to create a political spectacle to generate support for eliminating collective bargaining for public workers, especially public (state) school teachers.     

Estimating the Gains from New Rail Transit Investment: A Machine Learning Tree Approach

Urban rail transit investments are expensive and irreversible. As people differ with respect to their demand for trips, their value of time, and the types of real estate they live in, such projects are likely to offer heterogeneous benefits to residents of a city. Defining the opening of a major new subway in Seoul as a treatment for apartments close to the new rail stations, we contrast hedonic estimates based on multivariate hedonic methods with a machine learning (ML) approach. This ML approach yields new estimates of these heterogeneous effects. While a majority of the “treated” apartment types appreciate in value, other types decline in value. We cross‐validate our estimates by studying what types of new housing units developers build in the treated areas close to the new train lines.     

Situated Cyborg Knowledge in Not so Borderless Online Global Education: Mapping the Geosocial Landscape of a MOOC

Theorising situated knowledge formation in relation to geopolitics, geoeconomics and the geosocial, this article adds to the growing literature that evaluates Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) by studying who actually participates in them, how, and with what sorts of outcomes. Doing so, this article argues against a geoeconomic view of MOOCs as the revolutionary technology of borderless ‘flat world’ education. Instead, it outlines the far-from-borderless landscape of MOOC participation in terms of geosocial unevenness using evidence from the discussion boards of a global MOOC on globalisation. Based on this empirical evidence, this article suggests that MOOCs can enable forms of connective action through online educational networking, but that these forms of cyborg knowledge formation are possible precisely because they are not ‘borderless, gender-blind, race-blind, class-blind and bank account blind’.     

Electronic Logging Device Compliance of Small and Medium Size Motor Carriers Prior to the December 18, 2017, Mandate

With few exceptions, motor carriers operating in the United States were required to install electronic logging devices (ELDs) as of December 18, 2017. Noncompliance exposed carriers to risk of fines from enforcement agencies. This research examines compliance behaviors of small and medium size carriers in the four months leading up to the ELD mandate, focusing on the effects of carriers’ size and geographic range of operation (e.g., regional vs. national). Drawing on sociological agency theory, new institutional theory, and theory regarding regulatory compliance, we explain why (1) carriers’ size displays a nonlinear relationship with ELD compliance, (2) the positive effect of carrier size on ELD compliance diminishes as the enforcement deadline approached, (3) carriers with operations covering wider geographic areas have higher rates of compliance, and (4) the effect of wider geographic range of operations on compliance will become more pronounced as the enforcement deadline approached. We test our theory using ELD compliance data collected by an industry data vendor, CarrierLists, from September 2017 through December 2017 from 3,910 motor carriers. Results from a series of discrete choice logistic regression models corroborate our predictions. These results have important implications for carriers, shippers, and regulators.     

Contextual advertising in games: Impacts of game context on a player’s memory and evaluation of brands in video games

Contextual advertising is growing in digital marketing communication. Previous research on traditional media has shown that the surrounding context affects advertising effectiveness. Similarly, the context in a game may influence a player’s processing of brands advertised in that game. To examine the effects of contextual advertising in games, the present article affords two independent experiments investigating how positive and negative game contexts influence players’ memories and attitudes with respect to brands advertised via billboards in games. Drawing from literature on the limited capacity model, the authors demonstrate that positive and negative game contexts decrease brand memory since they require a high level of cognitive effort. The authors also find that varying a game context influence the perception of brands advertised in the game via the contextual priming mechanism and that positive contexts generate more positive brand attitudes than negative or neutral contexts. The findings have important implications for consumer researchers and marketers, as they indicate how contexts in games can be utilized to establish brand awareness and increase positive brand perceptions in contextual advertising using games.     

Absorptive Capacity,International Business Knowledge Transfer,and Local Adaptation: Establishing Discount Department Stores in Australia

This article examines the ways that Australia's largest retail firms accessed and adapted external knowledge flows, largely from the USA, to develop discount department store chains from the late‐1960s onwards. In doing so, it extends work on retail internationalisation by focusing on the importation, rather than the exportation of business models. The three firms – Coles, Myer and Woolworths – exhibited differing degrees of absorptive capacity in identifying and commercialising knowledge flows. This was reflected in fluctuating levels of success, the scope of store networks and relative positioning in the Australian market. Further, the role played by informal associations between managers in non‐competing firms in different markets during the development of discount department stores in Australia advances the case for socialising analyses of business knowledge transfer more broadly.     

Supply Chain Game Changers—Mega,Nano, and Virtual Trends—And Forces That Impede Supply Chain Design (i.e., Building a Winning Team)

Strategic systems design is essential to structuring and governing a supply chain for competitive advantage. To effectively co‐create value, decision makers must manage the three rights of supply chain design: right players, right roles, and right relationships. Doing this well requires managers discern how the unwritten competitive rules are changing as well as determine firm readiness to compete. As part of this analysis, we briefly explore five emerging “game changers” that represent potential supply chain design inflection points: (1) Big Data and predictive analytics, (2) additive manufacturing, (3) autonomous vehicles, (4) materials science, and (5) borderless supply chains. We also consider four forces that impede transformation to higher levels of value co‐creation: (1) supply chain security, (2) failed change management, (3) lack of trust as a governance mechanism, and (4) poor understanding of the “luxury” nature of corporate social responsibility initiatives. How well managers address sociostructural and sociotechnical issues will determine firm survivability and success.