Analytic collaboration in virtual innovation projects

Researchers attend to innovation and collaboration issues. Yet, the relevant literature devotes scant attention to the relationship between collaboration effectiveness and virtual innovation team context, while there are clear indications that both subjects relate with growing concerns in today's business setting. This article reviews extant literature and state-of-the art collaboration systems, and elucidate dynamic contextual factors among virtual innovation team members. The results show the antecedents and interrelationship among these factors, suggesting an optimal collaboration model for virtual innovation project teams. This paper documents the empirical observations of a virtual innovation project for advanced textile manufacturing technologies, and examines the due collaboration taking place among different project participants. Understanding the set of contextual factors emerging from virtual innovation projects can help managers classify, and employ the most effective collaboration mechanism for enhancing the corresponding project performance and effectiveness pragmatically.     

Predicting teleworker success: an exploration of personality,motivational, situational,and job characteristics

This study explored personality and motivational traits related to teleworker performance and satisfaction, including sociability, need for achievement and autonomy, diligence and organisation. Situational factors were also compared between teleworkers and non‐teleworkers, such as number of children, job autonomy and job complexity. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Combating deceptive advertisements and labelling on food products – an exploratory study on the perceptions of teachers

People are becoming more health conscious nowadays, but most of them are not able to adopt a lifestyle with adequate physical exercise and a healthier eating pattern. Many attempt to compensate by taking ‘health foods’. Despite the recent economic recession, the functional food market expands rapidly in Asian countries. Recent statistics indicate a huge increase in weight loss and functional food product advertising expenditure in Hong Kong and other Asian countries. In a massive survey conducted by the Hong Kong Consumer Council, it was found that 85% of the medicines, health food and therapies sampled contain questionable claims and misleading messages (Consumer Council, 1999). In fact, young people do not understand much about modern food processing, in particular those present in low energy and functional foods, and they know very little about the modern food marketing strategies. The situation is detrimental to consumer welfare especially to the younger generation. This study attempts to reflect critically on the implications of these issues for the health and well‐being of young people in Hong Kong. It explores directions for designing relevant and effective education programmes to empower young people in understanding food advertising strategies and making informed decisions on food choice. The paper will begin with a critical review on the current situation in Hong Kong. An interview survey on preservice and in‐service teachers’ perception towards misleading food advertising and labelling will then be reported. The situations at schools will be defined and problems faced by teachers in providing relevant consumer education programmes to students will be identified. Finally, the study will look to the future, with a view to developing students’ critical skills in evaluating claims offered in food advertisements.     

Back to basics: Learning about employee energy and motivation from running on my treadmill

In an effort to understand how to optimize employee energy at work, we borrow from the sports physiology literature to develop and test several concepts that have now been used in more than 75 large and small organizations (e.g., automobile firms, banks, hospitals, manufacturing, high technology, service businesses, financial services, and more). Our focus on employee energy led us to develop new measures and processes for our research. The resulting studies presented in this article test two hypotheses focusing on the link between employee energy, turnover, job performance, and job satisfaction. Consistent with what we know about athletic performance, we found that energy is an optimization construct and that variation in employee energy at work has detrimental consequences for performance and satisfaction. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Poverty,gender and migrancy: Lesotho's migrant farmworkers in South Africa

During the 1990s, eastern Free State vegetable farmers increasingly relied on migrants from neighbouring Lesotho for seasonal labour. This coincided with a major downsizing of the mine labour force in South Africa, hitherto the major employer of Basotho migrant workers. However, there was no simple process of transfer of unemployed migrants from the mining to the farming sector; rather, decisions were mediated by domestic relationships and household poverty in Lesotho. Basotho women and girls have been a major casualty of mine retrenchments and the drying up of remittances, and those with domestic skills but little formal training have been forced into the labour market, mainly domestic work in towns and labour on farms. This article examines the Basotho migrants' experiences and conditions of employment, the regulatory environment within which they are recruited and employed, and their future in the context of changing immigration and migration legislation in South Africa.     

Factors Affecting Sales at Farmers' Markets: An Iowa Study

The 180 farmers' markets operating in a range of urban to rural communities in Iowa provide a useful setting to evaluate factors affecting sales at these markets. Higher average sales at markets tended to be associated with urban and higher income areas. Only 30% of vendors reported sales greater than $5,000, mostly in the produce category.     

Disentangling compensation and employment risks using the behavioral agency model

Employing survey and archival data from a sample of IPO firms, and extending the ideas of the Behavioral Agency Model, this study examines the influence of various forms of risk bearing created within the compensation contract on perceived risk taking. The results show that employment risk and variability in compensation each corresponds to greater risk taking, while downside risk and the intrinsic value of stock options correspond to lower risk taking. Among the implications from these results are the importance CEOs attach to relatively stable forms of pay, and to drawing distinctions between the potential for loss of pay and uncertainty about the amount of future pay. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Review essay

Clayne R. Jensen, Outdoor Recreation in America, 4th ed. (Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing, 1985), ISBN 0–8087–1082–6, 412 pp., $24.95.     

Beyond budgeting or budgeting reconsidered? A survey of North-American budgeting practice

Budgets have historically played a key role in management control; however, recently they have become the subject of considerable criticism and debate. Some argue that the problems with budgeting stem from the way budgets are used (Horngren et al., 2004) while others argue that budgeting processes are fundamentally flawed (Hope and Fraser, 2003a). Hansen et al. (2003), among others, have called for a systematic examination of these issues against empirical evidence. In this paper, we present the results of two surveys of mid- to large-sized North-American organizations to 1) update the literature on North-American budgeting practices, 2) collect empirical evidence to assess the criticisms, and 3) begin to identify strong tendencies or patterns in budgeting practice to inform future academic research. Overall, we find for the majority of firms that budgets continue to be used for control purposes and are perceived to be value-added. While problems exist with budgets, organizations are adapting their use to account for these problems rather than abandoning budgets altogether.