Analyzing Group Data in MIS Research: Including the Effect of the Group

A review of recent group experimental research in three major MIS research journals indicates a lack of understanding of how to analyze group data measured at the individual level. This paper draws on statistical analysis literature from various disciplines to explain why current analysis of group data in MIS research is often incorrect and demonstrates how to analyze such data correctly.     

On the North-South trade in the Americas and its ecological asymmetries

There has been a long and intensive debate within the scientific community about the role of international trade in the development of countries. During the last decades, the focus of attention has moved from the pure economic level to the environmental aspects of international trade. Establishing a simplified system of North-South trade for one reference period (2003), this paper attempts to test empirically the extent of potential asymmetries with regard to extracted material flows, and contrasts the results with the economic benefits from trade (in terms of value-added). The South is thereby represented by a selection of Latin American countries (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico), the North comprises one of their main commercial partners, the United States. At the methodological level, a multi-regional input-output analysis is used as the tool of investigation. Results generally support the hypothesis that the South was feeding the North's societal metabolism. South-North material exports were 1.6 times larger than North-South material exports, resulting in a net deficit for the South of 324 million tons. Moreover, material intensity of exported commodities from the South was twice as high as that from the North. It is worth highlighting, however, that part of the North-South hypothesis fails for the sample of countries since the larger part of the economic surplus has remained in the South, contrarily to what would have been expected.     

Failing by design

It's hardly news that business leaders work in increasingly uncertain environments, where failures are bound to be more common than successes. Yet if you ask executives how well, on a scale of one to 10, their organizations learn from failure, you'll often get a sheepish "Two-or maybe three" in response. Such organizations are missing a big opportunity: Failure may be inevitable but, if managed well, can be very useful. A certain amount of failure can help you keep your options open, find out what doesn't work, create the conditions to attract resources and attention, make room for new leaders, and develop intuition and skill. The key to reaping these benefits is to foster "intelligent failure" throughout your organization. McGrath describes several principles that can help you put intelligent failure to work. You should decide what success and failure would look like before you start a project. Document your initial assumptions, test and revise them as you go, and convert them into knowledge. Fail fast-the longer something takes, the less you'll learn-and fail cheaply, to contain your downside risk. Limit the number of uncertainties in new projects, and build a culture that tolerates, and sometimes even celebrates, failure. Finally, codify and share what you learn. These principles won't give you a means of avoiding all failures down the road-that's simply not realistic. They will help you use small losses to attain bigger wins over time.     

Learning to live with complexity

Business life has always featured the unpredictable, the surprising, and the unexpected. But in today's hyperconnected world, complexity is the norm. Systems that used to be separate are now intertwined and interdependent, and knowing the starting conditions is no guide to predicting outcomes; too many continuously changing interactive elements are in play. Managers looking to navigate these difficulties need to adopt new approaches. They should drop outmoded forecasting tools-for example, ones that rely on averages, which are often less important than outliers. Instead, they should use models that simulate the behavior of the system. They should also make sure that their data include a good amount of future-oriented information. Risk mitigation is crucial as well. Managers should minimize the need to rely on predictions-for instance, they can give users a say in product design. They can decouple elements in a system and build in redundancy to minimize the consequences of a partial system failure, and turn to outside partners to extend their own company's capabilities. They can complement hard analysis with "soft" methods such as storytelling to make potentially important future possibilities more real. And they can make trade-offs that keep early failures small and provide the diversity of thought needed in a nimble organization faced with complexity on virtually every front.     

Liberal and Communitarian Defenses of Workplace Privacy

In this paper, I survey liberal and communitarian defenses of privacy, paying particular attention to defenses of privacy in the workplace. I argue that liberalism cannot explain all our of intuitions about the wrongness of workplace invasions of privacy. Communitarianism, on the other hand, is able to account for these intuitions.     

Service Intensities in the Indian Economy: 1968/9–1993/4

This paper analyses the service intensities for production of different industries in the Indian economy during the period 1968–69 to 1993–94 with an input–output approach. Two different methodologies—(1) direct service intensities and (2) direct plus indirect service intensities—have been used to calculate the service intensity of different industries using six input–output tables. It is found from the exercise that service intensities have increased in the Indian economy over 25 years. To reflect the performance and trend of service intensity of each industry over the study period, the mean and coefficient of variation of the service intensities have been calculated. The empirical part of this study shows that Metal products, Machineries, Trade, and Banking have a high mean and a low coefficient of variation. According to their service intensities they were the key sectors, with consistently the largest consumption of the output of the service sector as an input for their production.     

Land Trafficking and the Fertile Spaces of Legality

Land trafficking, responsible for the unprecedented rate of urbanization in many Latin American cities, is often conceptualized through corruption as ‘abuses of public office for private gain’. While those involved in the practice rely at times on violence and illegality, their repertoire is sophisticated, allowing them to move in and out of legality as part of their cost–benefit calculations. In this article I argue that land trafficking is based on legalized corruption. I use an ethnographic approach to observe the strategic conduits that are technically embedded in, and opportunistically related to, different municipal processes to legalize illegality. I demonstrate how land traffickers use morphing possibilities between land tenure types (communal, private and government) and mimic development typologies that have gained legitimacy over time. I also show how conflicting, competing and humanitarian rationalities that characterize the state play a crucial role in promoting land trafficking, by grafting illegality and violations onto ‘formal’ practices.     

The management of sustainable development: A longitudinal analysis of the effects of environmental performance on economic performance

The literature on sustainable development has largely focused on investigating the relationship between companies' environmental and economic performance. However, many aspects remain unexplored, and empirical studies are far from reaching a consensus due to the heterogeneity of the environmental and economic measures and methodologies used. This study contributes to the literature on sustainable development by considering a panel of 998 US companies observed over the period 2003–2017 using both traditional panel data methods and an unconditional quantile regression technique. The empirical evidence confirms that environmental performance, measured in terms of environmental orientation and environmental innovation, positively affects returns on assets and equity. It also demonstrates that these returns change across quantiles and depend on the capacity of green companies to generate the same streams of income as nongreen companies but with less capital. In other words, green firms tend to be more efficient in generating future wealth.     

Paths Toward Radical Service Innovation in Manufacturing Companies—A Service‐Dominant Logic Perspective

Research on servitization of manufacturing companies concentrates on typologies of product–service bundles, on transition pathways to increased servitization, and on resource and capabilities configurations necessary to accomplish this transition. Missing from existing research is an analysis of the degree of novelty of service innovations introduced by manufacturing companies. Therefore, this article shifts the focus from the transition process itself to the question of how manufacturing companies can introduce radical service innovations to the market. This article links servitization literature with service innovation literature and investigates how manufacturing companies can introduce radically new services in terms of three forms of innovations: service concept innovations, customer experience innovations, and service process innovations. Service‐dominant logic (SDL) is applied as the theoretical lens because it covers four significant factors influencing the success of companies’ innovation activities: actor value networks, resource liquefaction, resource density, and resource integration. Based on a multiple case study of 24 Danish business‐to‐business manufacturing small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises and through a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, different configurations of the principles of SDL are analyzed. They describe the paths to radical service innovation. Digitalization appears as a central causal condition in the bulk of the configurations. Big and rich data generated internally within the focal company in combination with for instance customer data can enhance the innovativeness of the service offerings. However, digitalization is not a sufficient condition for launching radical service innovation—it should be combined with an efficient mobilization of resources internally within the focal company and/or collaboration with other organizations within the value system. In addition, the analysis hints to a need to detach from immediate customers as the prime driver of service innovation.     

Corporate social responsibility for poverty alleviation: An integrated research framework

There is a growing demand by United Nations development agencies and governments for a higher engagement of firms in sustainable development goals, including that of eradicating poverty. Nevertheless, the social issue of poverty has not traditionally been covered by firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. In addition, there is a need to integrate theories in order to better explain pro‐poor CSR in developing countries. Relying on a review of both conceptual and empirical research articles on CSR for poverty alleviation, this study contributes to the CSR research agenda by proposing an integrated research framework for assessing and explaining a firm's contribution to poverty alleviation. Besides discussing the existing evidence, the following issues are critically analysed with the general purpose of obtaining the framework and suggesting avenues for future research: the assessment of a firm's contribution to poverty alleviation, types of pro‐poor CSR initiatives that could be adopted by firms, and the factors influencing a firm's contribution. The framework, which intends to be useful for future research, can also assist the United Nations to increase the firms’ contribution to its alleviating poverty sustainable development goal.