Travellers under fire: Tourists in the Tibetan uprising

Following the demonstrations in Lhasa in the fall of 1987, tourists who witnessed the events became the principal source of information to journalists denied access to Tibet and gathered material on arrests, torture, and imprisonment for human-rights organizations. A loosely knit network that arose in the first few days following the demonstrations continued to function for more than 2 years, recruiting new volunteers to take the place of those who left. Using material collected as a participant-observer among individual travelers in Tibet during 1987 and 1988, the article examines the growth of this network in terms of the response of different travel cultures to political unrest.     

Managerial evaluation of exogenous forecast sources

This paper concerns the managerial evaluation of forecast vendors—individuals or firms offering for sale future forecasts of random variables relevant to managerial decision making. Assuming the forecasts are exogenous in the sense they are generated by a methodology unknown or unproven to management, the paper uses a logistic regression model to present a statistical test for informativeness that allows for an interpretation of the vendor's abilities. The advantage of the approach is that it requires as input only knowledge of the unconditional probability distribution of the variable being forecast and a relatively small historical track record of the vendor's forecasting performance. No benchmark forecast is necessary and few assumptions are required about the statistical process that generates the forecasts. As an illustrative empirical application, the paper presents an evaluation of the informativeness of the published long-range price forecasts by a veteran analyst of the Iowa hog market.     

Product elimination: A barrier to successful financial service sector company mergers?

The UK's financial service sector is in a process of consolidation predominately via merger and acquisition activity. Driving this process is the desire to reduce costs, increase efficiency and acquire larger customer volumes. This may result in the amalgamation of product management functions and product portfolios, leading inevitably to the need for product rationsalisation. A key controlling factor within this is the inability easily to eliminate financial service products. This may jeopardise the organisation's ability to gain the objectives that have driven the merger/acquisition action. Two key factors were seen to hinder the portfolio amalgamation process. First, the incompatibility of IT-based product management systems. Secondly, the existence of a ‘knowledge gap’ which made it harder to plan and implement effectively large-scale product elimination and portfolio amalgamation. It is likely that this will lead to higher than desired operating costs, duplication in product and service function, and loss of freedom in managing customers.     

The impact of employee involvement on organisational commitment and ‘them and us’ attitudes

This article presents a measure of ‘them and us' as a basis for evaluating an employee involvement programme in British Rail. The results of a longitudinal study with control groups and various forms of post-training intervention show no change in organisational commitment but some evidence of a shift towards a more local pattern of identity which excludes union representatives from ‘us'.     

WHY HEDGE? SOME EVIDENCE FROM OIL AND GAS PRODUCERS

Despite the prevalence of corporate risk management, there are no widely accepted explanations for why companies hedge or how shareholders benefit from hedging. This article provides some evidence on these issues by reporting the results of a study of the risk management policies of 100 oil and gas producers from 1992 to 1994.
The first notable finding is the considerable variety of the hedging policies of the oil and gas producers. For example, in 1993 slightly more than half of the companies did not hedge, while a quarter of the firms in the sample hedged more than 28' of their production, and some firms hedged almost 100'. The second main finding was that the extent of hedging was related to a variety of factors, largely those related to financing costs. In particular, companies with higher leverage—and thus presumably facing greater difficulties in accessing the capital markets—tended to hedge a larger fraction of their output than firms with lower leverage ratios. This result is consistent with the idea that corporations manage risks to help ensure they have sufficient capital to finance their investment opportunities and to reduce the likelihood that low oil and gas prices will push them into financial distress. Under either of these interpretations, financial theory would suggest that corporate hedging increases shareholder value. Whether it actually does so is a matter for future research.     

Business reactions to the 2001 foot and mouth disease outbreak in Scotland

The paper focuses on two aspects of the 2001 foot and mouth disease (FMD) outbreak in Scotland that have been largely ignored: first, business managers perceptions of the impact of FMD during and immediately after the outbreak; and second, reactions to the outbreak in terms of action taken by businesses and advice sought. A panel survey of non-farm businesses conducted in April, June and September of 2001 is analysed to shed light on these issues. We find that even at the time, the vast majority of businesses did not report any real impact, although businesses in rural areas and in the tourism industry were more likely to feel some impact - either positive or negative. We show that business managers appeared to favour private sources of advice, although some public sources were found to be very useful, and that some actions, such as increased advertising in tourism businesses, could be more effective than others, such as making redundancies. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings for contingency planning in the event of future FMD outbreaks.