Evaluating green supply chain management among Chinese manufacturers from the ecological modernization perspective

Green supply chain management (GSCM) has become an emergent ecological modernization tool amongst Chinese manufacturers to balance environmental performance with productivity and business performance gains. Ecological modernization at the society level is influenced by restructuring policies and regulations. Some of these policies and regulations in China are focusing on enhancing energy savings and pollution reduction (ESPR). Based on a survey of 376 responses, we investigate whether different Chinese manufacturer clusters varying in their extent of implementing GSCM exist from this ecological modernization perspective. We also examine if Chinese manufacturers’ awareness of domestic and international environmental ESPR-oriented compliance is related to GSCM implementation and whether a mediating effect of regulatory pressure plays a significant role. The results highlight the varying pace of Chinese manufacturers to ecologically modernize with GSCM practices and the significance of regulatory pressure to diffuse the practices adoption by Chinese manufacturing industry. Implications of this research go beyond the manufacturers investigated in this study where similar occurrence of these relationships may exist in other regions.     

Greening transportation fleets: Insights from a two-stage game theoretic model

The greening of organizational transportation fleets, especially trucks and automobiles, has gained increasing attention by companies in a variety of industrial sectors. The reasons for this concern and attention are due to regulatory and competitive pressures, but also increasing costs of fossil-fuels. Surprisingly the amount of research and modeling for fleet management overall has been rather limited, with the focus on managing green vehicle investments virtually non-existent. In this study we develop a two-stage game theoretic model that helps evaluate, from both policy and organizational perspectives, the implications of greening of transportation fleets. Various parameters are evaluated including factors such as innovations in green vehicle technology, levels of service differences, cost of fuel, adjusting tax policy, regulatory compliance requirements, and adaptation costs. This evaluation provides practical insights into actions that could be considered by regulators and organizations to encourage environmental investments.     

Worth waiting for: increasing satisfaction by making consumers wait

A truism in the marketing literature, and among many marketing practitioners, is that requiring consumers to wait negatively impacts quality evaluations, purchase intentions and a range of other important outcomes. However, it is also true that consumer waiting or queuing has historically been considered from an operations perspective. The present research takes a different approach and examines waits in the context of their ability to function as a signal of quality. Four experiments demonstrate a required wait can indeed signal quality to consumers and increase, rather than decrease, both purchase intentions and actual experienced satisfaction. Three moderators of this effect are examined: preexisting knowledge, consumption motivations, and the extent to which quality is difficult to objectively determine. The results suggest in situations where quality is important, unknown or ambiguous, managers may increase consumer satisfaction by making consumers wait.     

Green marketing strategies: an examination of stakeholders and the opportunities they present

As green marketing strategies become increasingly more important to firms adhering to a triple-bottom line performance evaluation, the present research seeks to better understand the role of “green” as a marketing strategy. Through an integration of the marketing, management, and operations literatures, an investigative framework is generated that identifies the various stakeholders potentially impacted through the environmentally friendly efforts of a firm. Specifically, the inter-connected nature of the core business disciplines of marketing, management (both strategy and human resources), and operations are examined as controllable functions within an organization from which strategies can be enacted to affect a firm’s stakeholders. The prior research in these areas is examined to identify potential research opportunities in marketing while also offering a series of representative research questions that can help guide future research in marketing.     

Financial Globalization and Banking Crises in Emerging Markets

Bank crises in emerging economies have been a feature of the recent global crisis, and their incidence has increased in the post-Bretton Woods era. This paper investigates the impact of financial globalization on the incidence of systemic bank crises in 20 emerging markets over the years 1976–2002 using measures of de facto and de jure financial openness. An increase in foreign debt liabilities contributes to an increase in the incidence of crises, but foreign direct investment and portfolio equity liabilities have the opposite effect. A more liberal de jure capital regime lowers the incidence of banking crises, while a regime of fixed exchange rates increases their frequency. The results of the econometric analysis is consistent with the experience of East European and central Asian emerging markets, which attracted a relatively large proportion of capital flows in the form of debt in recent years and have been particularly hard hit by the global financial crisis.     

Projective customer competence: Projecting future customer needs that drive innovation performance

Projective customer competence is the ability of a product development organization to both understand as well as shape the future needs of customers. To conceptualize this competence and establish its antecedents and performance implications, we draw upon the literature on inter-organizational relationships and innovation. Based on survey data from managers involved with business to business product development, validated with secondary financial data and in-depth interviews, we establish measurement properties for projective customer competence and demonstrate that this competence develops through customer relationships characterized by relational embeddedness, knowledge redundancy and interactivity. Projective customer competence is also shown to have positive implications for both innovativeness and financial performance. Surprisingly, relational embeddedness is shown to be the strongest predictor of projective customer competence, and, while knowledge redundancy helps build projective customer competence, it also has a negative impact on innovativeness.     

The Foundations of International Business: Cross‐Border Investment Activity and the Balance between Market‐Power and Efficiency Effects

The foundational international business (IB) scholarship grappled with whether multinational enterprises (MNEs) are largely efficiency‐enhancing or market‐power inducing institutions. Contemporary scholarship, however, often associates foreign direct investment (FDI) with efficiency‐enhancing properties and thus neglects the market‐power interpretation of the MNE. Such an imbalance is problematic given that the theoretical and empirical justifications behind the field's embrace of the efficiency interpretation are not fully evident. Instead, both efficiency and market‐power effects are seemingly present in cross‐border investment activity. Based on a comprehensive sample of up to 4,361 cross‐border investments materializing between 1986 and 2010, we present theoretically‐grounded hypotheses with regard to when market‐power effects will tend to dominate efficiency effects. We find that cross‐border investments undertaken by emerging‐market MNEs in both developed and emerging markets tend to involve substantial efficiency effects and minimal market‐power effects when compared with the cross‐border investments undertaken by developed‐country MNEs in both developed and emerging markets.