Invoking Satan or the Ethics of the Employment Contract*

ABSTRACT Studies of mergers of organizations focus upon the financial and economic outcomes, with little attention paid to the effect on the people working in the merging organizations. This paper reports the findings of a study of the impact on managers of an organizational merger. Rather than the cool calculations of accountants and economists and the rational application of a managerial logic, we found the impact on these managers was upon their emotions, which seemed sometimes too buffeted to allow them to continue in their work. A narrative analysis of the stories told by these managers suggested they experienced their involvement with the merging organizations as akin to a Faustian contract, whereby they had sold their souls to the organizational devil and were now reaping the costs. When we came to write this paper we found that using the usual rubrics of academic writing suppressed the sheer emotionality of their experiences. We have therefore followed the imperative of our conclusions, and written our analysis in the form of a play, based upon Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus, which allows us to use our interviewees’ own words to illustrate the impact of the merger. The play is, of course, in the format of a tragedy: it has four main characters – the narrator, the manager, Faustus and Mephistopheles – and five acts. We use the Prologue to insert our own words, where we argue for a turn away from the ‘hard’ school of human resource management towards one that is ethically informed. Programme notes contain the technical details which justify our research methods. We remain totally unapologetic for intruding emotions into the rational world of academia.     

The intertemporal stability of the concentration-margins relationship in Dutch and U.S. manufacturing

Factors influencing price-cost margins are investigated using a rich panel data base of the Dutch manufacturing sector. Attention is devoted to the intertemporal stability of the relationship explaining price-cost margins and to a comparison with U.S. results. Our results indicate that isolated cross-section analyses can be misleading. Evidence is provided for similarities and dissimilarities between the U.S. and the Netherlands when explaining price-cost margins. Dutch margins are influenced by industry-specific factors such as sales changes, import competition, capital intensity and operating expenses. Domestic seller concentration, aggregate capacity utilization and export intensity play no distinct roles.This research was sponsored in part by the Economics Research Foundation, which is part of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. We wish to thank H. W. de Jong, Leo Sleuwaegen, David Audretsch and Aad Kleijweg for their useful comments.     

Perception of marital roles in purchase decision processes: A cross-cultural study

Following the approach of the classic 1974 marital-role influence study of Davis and Rigaux, the present study focuses on differences in decision making (i.e., joint, husband dominated, wife dominated) across 24 product categories as a function of two key factors. These factors are stage of the decision process (i.e., problem recognition, information search, and the final decision) and culture (People’s Republic of China and the United States). The Jacobson Marital-Role Egalitarianism Scale is included to further assess individual differences in husband and wife traditionality-modernism. The major findings are that emphasis on joint, husband-dominated, and wife-dominated decisions vary by stage and by stage-culture interaction. Practical implications are presented with suggestions for future research. He graduated from the University of Georgia in 1985 with a Ph.D. in marketing. His research interests include global strategic market planning and cross-cultural research issues and methodologies. He has published in such journals asJournal of Advertising Research, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Columbia Journal of World Business, International Marketing Review, Journal of Business Strategy, andJournal of Consumer Marketing. He graduated with honors in 1986 from the University of Mississippi with a Ph.D. in marketing. His research interests include cross-cultural consumer behavior and emotional responses to advertising stimuli. He has published in such journals asJournal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Psychology and Marketing, Journal of Health Care Marketing, andInternational Marketing Review. He graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1986 with a Ph.D. in marketing. His research interests focus on cross-cultural consumer behavior. He has published in such journals asJournal of Advertising, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Health Care Marketing, Psychology and Marketing, and theInternational Journal of Purchasing and Materials Management.     

Revenue raising trade-restricting policies under uncertainty: The sub-optimality of the expected welfare criterion and some safety-first results

The analysis of trade-restricting policies under uncertainty has typically argued in favour of the specific tariff over alternative commercial policies such as the ad valorem tariff and the quota, when the raising of revenue and maintenance of consumer's welfare are the policy objectives. This paper reconsiders this result. It is demonstrated that, when the shape of the welfare probability distribution is considered explicitly, the quota may be the dominant trade-restricting policy. In addition, the analysis of trade-restricting instruments is analysed for the case where the principle of safety-first is applied to the revenue-raising objective.We should like to thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft.     

Structuring the organization for fast decision-making

As the No. 1 organizational problem, slow decision-making affects every large and medium-sized company. This, not size, makes these companies ponderous and cumbersome. After examining why slow decision-making occurs, the author details a new decision-making process designed not only to speed up decision-making, but to give management, for the first time, control over its corporate tempo.     

Involving consumers in the work of a data linkage research unit

We describe and reflect on the work of a Consumer Panel for a data linkage research unit in Wales, and show how the members are inputting into plans for the future. Our work is centred on conducting health‐related data linkage research using anonymously linked, routinely collected data from across Wales via the Secure Anonymous Information Linkage system. In recognition of the importance of including patients and the public in health‐related research, we have established a Consumer Panel to strengthen this voice in our work, and there are currently 10 members (4 men and 6 women) from across Wales, with a range of health‐related areas of interest. A review of Panel activities was carried out after the first year, and all members were invited to provide their views via a questionnaire survey using structured and free‐text responses. Initial feedback, obtained after the first meeting, was tentatively positive, and the questionnaire survey identified practical measures for improvement and future work. We have found the Consumer Panel to be a valuable addition to our work in the rapidly growing area of data linkage research. The views of Panel members provide a positive outlook and a fresh, and sometimes unexpected, perspective on various issues. The lessons we have learned, and our experience of involving the Panel in various aspects of our work, may be of value to others seeking to work with consumers in data linkage research, to researchers in general and to consumers themselves.     

Markets under the Microscope: Making Scientific Discoveries Valuable through Choreographed Contestations

This paper breaks new ground by revealing and conceptualizing the marketization of science as a process that transforms scientific discoveries and markets through a series of choreographed contestations: moments of valuation that occur when different social worlds collide. We follow a scientific discovery, from the moment it entered an incubator, to uncover how valuation practices and market devices enact and contest diverse social values (i.e., what is worth doing) to generate economic value (i.e., what is worth paying for) at the science‐market‐entrepreneurship nexus. In contrast with commercialization of science studies that focus on institutional arrangements, this study explicates the practices and devices used by multiple market actors to transform a scientific discovery into a marketable object. In so doing, we characterise choreographed contestations and the mechanisms through which they operate to explain how specific valuations are performed to work out innovative next steps that unfold the marketization of science.     

Internal competition in a nonprofit museum context: development of a scale

• External competition and marketing have been extensively researched in the for-profit environment and to a lesser extent in the nonprofit environment. However, the concept of competition within a nonprofit organization is indicative of another type of competition, that of ‘internal competition’. Internal competition, operating in the nonprofit's endemic environment of scarce resources, takes place between departments, between individuals, and even within individuals in terms of time and energy spent on differing objectives. Internal competition manifests itself as internal conflicts over not only objectives but also the means for achieving the objectives. This research examines the construct of ‘internal competition’ in the museum portion of the nonprofit sector where marketing is often seen as a ‘necessary but evil’ tool essential for survival. Museum retailing, which has taken on an increasingly vital role in the financial support of museums, offers an opportunity to analyze the nature of internal competition and for developing a scale for measuring internal competition.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.