Empowerment of SME websites—Development of a web-empowerment scale and preliminary evidence

The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web has been argued to fundamentally reshape economic conditions and business practices of firms. It is seen as a promoter of rapid internationalisation of companies, particularly small and medium enterprises. In the aftermath of the burst of the electronic-bubble business practitioners and academics look with scrutiny on successful web-strategies, relevant dimensions of online-success and try to identify viable website practices which enable long-term rewards. The literature offers a rather patchy pattern for successful web-strategies and consumer perspectives on what is expected from websites is hardly available. Within this paper, we introduce the dimension “web-empowerment”. This is a multidimensional construct comprising of consumer views on various dimensions of relevant and successful websites. The web-empowerment scale is based on a large sample from Austria, and developed according to scale development procedures. The relevance of this construct and practical issues in the context of a cross-country sample of SME’s is empirically examined. The paper concludes by offering implications for SME practitioners and for research.     

Preference Structures of Negotiators and Negotiation Outcomes

Using a database collected during about 3,000 negotiation experiments, this paper analyzes how specific features of utility functions of negotiators, like attribute weights, monotonicity and convexity of marginal utility functions, are reflected in the outcomes of negotiations. We find that compromise values are to a considerable extent influenced by the utility functions. There are also significant impacts on the likelihood of achieving a compromise, but the model fit is considerably less than for compromise values.     

Vor der Europawahl: Wie lässt sich die demokratische Legitimität verbessern?

The EU suffers from a democratic deficit that arises not first and foremost from a lack of institutional competencies, but rather from the double weakness of politics vis-à-vis economics and law at the European level. This “functional democratic deficit” renders the existing mechanisms of democratic control increasingly ineffective. Especially for its citizens, a politically integrated Europen Union might be difficult to grasp, and it may only be reached gradually through a continuous process of dynamic development; however, “United in Diversity” seems to be the better alternative, and not only for historical reasons. The direct elections for the European Parliament, although not denying deficits of democratic legitimacy and participation at the Union level, should not be underestimated in their legitimising influence for the Union as an associated structure of members without obvious hierarchies.     

Rise in Occupational Mobility Especially Amongst Women and Young People

Original Papers

Rise in Occupational Mobility Especially Amongst Women and Young PeopleSuccessful jobsearch often based on personal initiative     

Understanding the impact of relational capital and organizational learning on alliance outcomes

This paper examines how relational capital influences the acquisition of knowledge among alliance partners. We propose that firms with higher levels of inter- and intrafirm learning are better able to achieve superior alliance outcomes. A conceptual framework is developed by integrating the relational view, organizational learning theory, and the resource-based view. We provide empirical evidence using large-sample data to test the model and find that trust and interaction creates a basis for knowledge acquisition across alliance partners. The results also indicate that when the firms are active in knowledge acquisition from alliance partners and dissemination of such knowledge within the organization, they are capable of enhancing satisfaction with the alliance relationship.