Emergenz organisationaler Fähigkeiten

The capabilities based view of the firm is a major approach in current strategic management research. It focuses on organizational capabilities as the fundamental unit of analysis and states that firms evolve through evolutionary processes. What organizational capabilities are and how they emerge and evolve are central research questions. Existing research focuses only on partial aspects of the emergence of organizational capabilities. Hence, an integrative framework to address these issues is missing. This contribution aims at developing such an integrative framework by a critical review of existing research. Different perspectives are combined to explain the emergence and evolution of organizational capabilities while focusing on a lifecycle model. This contribution starts with an explanation and a taxonomy of pivotal terms of the capabilities based view. Different ways of the emergence and the development of organizational competencies and their relationships will be systematically explained by examining theoretical backgrounds of evolutionary economics and path dependency theory. This contribution ends with a summary and discusses future research streams.     

Pipeline management for the acquisition of industrial projects

The management and controlling of the industrial project acquisition process, with its staged, funnel-like structure, has been neglected in empirical research so far—even though an effective acquisition process is crucial for economic success. In addition to profitability, the main goal of industrial companies is to implement a pipeline process that ensures that the pipeline is always filled with acquisition projects and results in a constant stream of orders over time. The projects considered are characterized by complexity, uniqueness, and discontinuity. Based on a large-scale survey among German industrial companies, we describe the industrial project acquisition process, where the projects mentioned above are sold on a non-continuous basis to industrial customers. We assess how the industrial project acquisition process is really structured, whether a sales funnel management is applicable and utilized by sales management to monitor and control this process, and whether a sophisticated sales funnel management contributes to enhanced economic success.     

The Methodology of Risk Perception Research

Risk perception is not strictly a matter ofsensory perception, but of attitudesand expectations. As such, it can be studied byreasonably well developed methods of attitudemeasurement and psychological scaling. Suchmeasurement needs to be applied in a pragmaticfashion, however, since the discussions of fundamentalmeasurement and requirements of scale levelsappropriate for various types of statistical analysis hasfailed in establishing a useful basis for empiricalresearch. The paper also discuses samplingprocedures and the response rateproblem. In risk perception work, there is usually abias involving too many respondents withan above average level ofeducation, but that variable tends to be weaklyrelated to risk perception variables. Finally,post-modern claims and their rejection ofquantitative methods are critically discussed.     

Fernseherziehung in der Deutschschweiz

Parents’ influence on and monitoring of children’s television use has been investigated intensely. In recent years international research has identified different environmental and family factors which influence active mediation, restrictive mediation, and co-viewing. However, there has been no systematic simultaneous comparison of the impact of these factors in German-speaking Switzerland. Therefore the present study analyzes the impacts of parental attitudes as well as family and environmental factors on parental mediation of children’s TV use simultaneously. 252 parents of children aged 3 to 14 answered questions concerning the impact factors, their mediation behaviour as well as children’s media use. Results confirm findings from international research: Most important for parental mediation styles are parental attitudes and the family communication style as well as children’s age. Structural and other sociodemographical factors seem to be less important.     

Time-specific disturbances and cross-sectional dependency in a small-sample heterogeneous panel data unit root test

In their seminal work, Im et al. (1997 Im, KS, Pesaran, MH and Shin, Y. 1997. Testing for unit roots in heterogeneous panels. 1997. Working paper, Department of Applied Economics, University of Cambridge. Mimeographed [Google Scholar], 2003 Im, KS, Pesaran, MH and Shin, Y. 2003. Testing for unit roots in heterogeneous panels. Journal of Econometrics, 115: 53–74. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) suggested that time series for several cross-sectional units could be used to increase the power of the Dickey--Fuller unit root test. They argued that when cross-sectional correlation is a problem that can be modelled by a time-specific factor, demeaning across the cross-sectional units can solve the problem. In this study, this proposition is proven valid, but it is also shown that previously supplied standardizing moments are inappropriate when the number of cross-sections are small, causing size to differ from the significance level. To correct this size distortion, the current paper supplies response surface parameters that can be used to obtain moments that are valid when a time-specific factor suffices for modelling cross-sectional correlation in the heterogeneous panel data unit root framework. The correct size of the panel data unit root test comes at the cost of a somewhat lower power against a stationary alternative.