Building long-term orientation in buyer–supplier relationships: The moderating role of culture

This research investigates buyer–supplier relationships in international markets. Research and practice have shown that buyer–supplier relationships benefit when partners to the relationship exhibit a long-term orientation. The extant literature suggests that a buyer's trust of a supplier and the supplier's performance affect the buyer's long-term orientation toward the relationship. We propose that the relative effects of trust and performance on long-term orientation are moderated by culture – specifically the individualism/collectivism dimension. Hypotheses are tested on data from two individualist and two collectivist cultures, using responses from over 600 purchasing professionals in the United States, Anglophone Canada, Francophone Canada and Mexico. Taken together, empirical findings suggest that cultural differences warrant consideration in developing successful purchasing strategies.     

Standards and Institutional Capacity: An Examination of Trade in Food and Agricultural Products

The ability of developing countries to cope with emerging standards in food and agricultural products is influenced by their institutional capacity. This paper develops original measures of four dimensions of standards-related, institutional capacity: information, conformity, enforcement, and international standard-setting. These measures are incorporated into a gravity model to investigate whether these capacities offset the negative effects of Aflatoxin B1 standards on food and agricultural product trade. The results indicate that informational capacity and conformity capacity do indeed have such offsetting effects. The evidence with regard to enforcement and international standard-setting is less clear.     

Reasonableness and Section 4 of the Employment Act 1980

This article explains the origins of s.4 of the Employment Act 1980 and assesses the place of this provision in the corpus of labour legislation enacted by the Conservative government since 1980. Its principal aim is to concentrate upon the concept of reasonableness which is central to the operation of the provision and to evaluate critically the role of the EAT and the industrial tribunals in interpreting it. Finally, the article seeks to assess the impact of the tribunaľs interpretation of s.4 on union admission and expulsion procedures.     

Walter Adams and Chicago

Walter Adams is one of the strongest critics of the Chicago School of Economics. Yet he was trained at the University of Chicago. This article traces Adams' education in economics and delineates two distinct Chicago traditions of antitrust policy. Adams is linked to the earlier Chicago tradition of Henry Simons and, to some extent, Frank Knight. The consistency of Adams' policy views on antitrust is shown and the connection of these views to pragmatism and Jeffersonian precepts is argued.     

Budgeting and the propensity to create budgetary slack

This paper reports the results of a field study designed to investigate how managers' propensities to create budgetary slack are affected by the budgeting system and the technical context. The results show that propensities to create slack are lower where managers participate actively in budgeting, particularly when technologies are relatively predictable. But such propensities are higher if a tight budget requires frequent tactical responses to avoid overruns.