Sales force obsolescence: Perceptions from sales and marketing executives of individual, organizational, and environmental factors

The trade and academic literature is replete with observations that many sales organizations are in the midst of a redefinition of the strategic role of their sales forces. With today's market forces, change is overdue in many sales organizations. Consequently, the issue of whether the sales force is becoming obsolete has come to the forefront in recent years. As business environments change rapidly, the relevance of the modern sales force comes into question. Data were gathered from 245 midlevel sales and marketing executives on perceived sales force obsolescence. Our findings suggest that obsolescence is a phenomenon for sales organizations to address. The main findings of our study are (1) obsolescence is a phenomenon that affects sales professionals' feelings toward the job (job satisfaction) and outcomes (performance); (2) a firm's market orientation is very important in lowering perceived obsolescence; (3) a learning orientation is important in detecting symptoms of obsolescence; (4) age and education are related to perceptions of obsolescence depending on the type of industry in which the sales force competes: high- or low-tech; and (5) organizational changes can also have a bearing on the sales force's perceptions of obsolescence.     

Entry and Exit in a Transition Economy: The Case of Poland

The purpose of this paper is to examine the industrialentry and exit in a transitioneconomy, over the interval of change from a predominatelystate-owned productivesystem. The data set employed offers a near-exhaustivecoverage of manufacturingfirms in Poland. The paper estimates entry and exit equationsacross 152 3-digitindustries, using an adaptation of an Orr–Shapiro/Khemani-typemodel to allow for thespecial circumstances of a transition economy. Theresults suggest that, despite theturbulence of the immediate post-transition period,the patterns of entry and exitbehaviour in Poland correspond closely to thoseobserved in more mature marketeconomies.     

Industrial relations and the European Community*

The affairs of the European Community reached a major crossroads at the December 1991 summit in Maastricht. This article reviews the attempts of the Community to match the development of the internal market with a social dimension.     

Ranking sectors using fuzzy output multipliers

Using input–output analysis to model the effects of changes in industry final demands is fraught with problems, many of which relate to the fundamental limitations of the concomitant linear framework. A further issue concerns the accuracy of the results, a consequence of the uncertainty surrounding the values of multipliers. Such uncertainty can create problems where the values of output multipliers are used to inform resource directions. This paper utilizes (and develops) a fuzzy input–output model and investigates the ranking of industries based on fuzzy output multipliers. The non-triviality of the fuzzy model is exposited in a general problem, where imprecision is defined by a proportional level of imprecision (fuzziness) in the technical coefficients. Through a nascent method for ranking fuzzy numbers, comparisons are made between the fuzzy and more traditional (non-fuzzy) analysis.