Struggling with New Media and Old Expertise: Reconstructing the Professional Role of Communication Consultancy

This study investigates how communication consultants struggle to reconstruct their professional role in the digital media landscape. The extant literature on professional roles in public relations has a tendency to render roles as static pregivens. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to contribute conceptually and empirically to role research by focusing on the process of “role-making” and how role actors purposefully engage in role construction in order to maintain legitimacy. The qualitative study of Scandinavian communication consultants reveals how these actors effectively refashion their role as expert advisors by describing the client and her problems, the competitors, their own knowledge and values. The role construct is supported by a narrative strategy and an epic storyline, where social media serves as a vehicle for self-definition and the consultancy role is framed and reinforced by social media. However, the jurisdictional claims of professional expertise and values that constitute the core of a consultant’s role construct are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain in a digital society. A critical reading of the consultants’ narrative thus implies that social media may in fact constitute a professional identity crisis rather than a consolidation of the expert role.     

AIDS-Hilfe in Afrika

Tansanische Krankenschwestern im mobilen Einsatz — Tansania ist eines der ?rmsten L?nder der Erde. Und nur in drei L?ndern weltweit gibt es mehr HIV-Infizierte. Mit internationaler Hilfe werden in vielen Regionen Versorgungsprojekte initiiert und Therapiezentren gegründet. Seit 2007 gibt es au?erdem ein nationales HIV-Programm. Dadurch gelingt es, das Tabu um HIV langsam aufzubrechen. Doch der Weg zur Eind?mmung der Epidemie ist mühsam.     

How relevant are nominal contracting schemes for monetary policy?

Due to the scarcity of pertinent evidence, there is currently no general agreement on how to introduce nominal rigidities into monetary macroeconomic models. We examine the role of alternative assumptions about the wage and price setting mechanisms for the assessment of the welfare costs of nominal rigidities and the performance of alternative monetary policy rules in an otherwise standard New Keynesian general equilibrium model. We find that the choice of a particular price and wage setting scheme matters quantitatively for the welfare costs of nominal rigidities. However, the ranking of the welfare costs associated with alternative wage and price setting schemes is robust to changes in the monetary policy rule, and the ranking of the welfare costs associated with alternative monetary policy rules is robust to changes in the wage and price setting scheme. The difference between sticky nominal contracts and sticky information matters more than the difference in the age distribution of prices wages and information implied by alternative price and wage setting schemes.     

Produktbegleitende Dienstleistungen international vermarkten

Immer mehr Industrieunternehmen m?chten ihre produktbegleitenden Dienstleistungen auch international anbieten. Was müssen sie beachten, damit die Vermarktung im Ausland gelingt? Eine empirische Studie analysiert die Erfolgsfaktoren und gibt Handlungsempfehlungen, wie Unternehmen die Internationalisierung von produktbegleitenden Dienstleistungen vorantreiben k?nnen.     

EU accession: Negotiating “environmental dumping”?

“Environmental dumping” is a concern frequently raised in discussions on the potential risks involved in the eastern enlargement of the European Union¹ (EU).² There is a general concern that the Central and Eastern European accession countries may be neither willing nor able to fully apply the EU’s environmental acquis communautaire, the body of Community environmental legislation, once they have joined the EU. As a result, these countries would benefit from a competitive advantage when selling their goods on the Internal Market. This article asks whether, and in which specific cases, such concerns may be justified.     

A Delphi-based risk analysis — Identifying and assessing future challenges for supply chain security in a multi-stakeholder environment

Identifying and assessing the potential impact and likelihood of future events, which might evolve into risks, are a prerequisite to identify future security challenges. In particular, risks associated with global supply chains are special since they involve a multitude of international stakeholders with different perspectives on security needs and measures. Therefore, it is essential to determine which techniques and instruments are best suited for risk assessment in complex and multi-organizational environments. The Delphi expert survey technique has proven to be a valuable instrument for long-term decision making support as well as foresight, and has a potential value for risk assessment. We contribute to this research strand and conduct a Delphi-based risk analysis. Our research concentrates on man-made risks in global supply chains which are particularly uncertain in terms of type, location, and affected supply chain partners and can therefore be classified as inherently “wicked” issues, i.e. issues that are multidimensional with often unpleasant outcomes. We illustrate that Delphi research makes a fivefold contribution to risk analysis by: (1) identifying and quantifying risks; (2) analyzing stakeholder perceptions and worldviews; (3) stimulating a global communication process; (4) identifying weak signals, outlier opinions, and wildcards; (5) and facilitating risk scenario development.     

Too much of a good thing? On the growth effects of the EU's regional policy

The European Union (EU) provides grants to disadvantaged regions of member states from two pools, the Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund. The main goal of the associated transfers is to facilitate convergence of poor regions (in terms of per-capita income) to the EU average. We use data at the NUTS3 level from the last two EU budgetary periods (1994–1999 and 2000–2006) and generalized propensity score estimation to analyze to which extent the goal of fostering growth in the target regions was achieved with the funds provided and whether or not more transfers generated stronger growth effects. We find that, overall, EU transfers enable faster growth in the recipient regions as intended, but we estimate that in 36% of the recipient regions the transfer intensity exceeds the aggregate efficiency maximizing level and in 18% of the regions a reduction of transfers would not even reduce their growth. We conclude that some reallocation of the funds across target regions would lead to higher aggregate growth in the EU and could generate even faster convergence than the current scheme does.     

Those Who Know,Do. Those Who Understand,Teach. Disseminative Capability and Knowledge Transfer in the Automotive Industry

Innovations in the automotive industry are increasingly building on contributions from different technological fields. Correspondingly, firms in this industry more than ever tend to form research and development (R&D) alliances that aim at innovating new products through integrating separate fields and transferring knowledge. While, in symmetrical R&D alliances, each partner intends to ultimately maintain their distinctive and specialized knowledge base, overlapping knowledge facilitates cooperation and ultimately alliance success. Thus, the capability for knowledge transfer between partners is crucial in such R&D alliances. The literature provides ample evidence that such knowledge transfer is more likely to succeed if the recipient firm has absorptive capability. However, whereas the characteristics of the knowledge transfer process and the recipient firm are well understood, limited attention has so far been given to the issue of the knowledge source firm's ability to transfer knowledge to R&D alliance partners. This study focuses on the impact of source firm capability on successful knowledge transfer in R&D alliances. The study develops a theoretical framework of disseminative capability consisting of five dimensions and tests it on a sample of 59 projects in R&D alliances in the automotive industry. To ensure content validity and avoid common source bias, data were collected from both alliance partners. To test the hypotheses, multiple regression analyses were performed. The results reveal that the source firm's disseminative capability including the attainment of expert knowledge, assessing the recipient firm's knowledge base, and encoding knowledge are positively related to knowledge transfer success, while, surprisingly, detaching knowledge and support of knowledge application in the recipient firm are negatively related. Intentionally or unintentionally, disseminating knowledge across firm boundaries is widely perceived as detrimental to a firm's competitive advantage. Accordingly, the literature tends to downplay disseminative capability as an important means of exploiting external knowledge in collaborative settings. By demonstrating potential benefits for the source firm to transfer knowledge to the allying R&D partner firm, this paper reinvigorates the collaborative dimension in knowledge transfer. Further, the paper is the first of this kind to theoretically explain and empirically show that dimensions of disseminative capability of collaborators in R&D alliances are important for knowledge transfer, whereas disseminative capability is the complementary inverse of an organization's absorptive capacity.