Strategy in the Public Sector: Management in the Wilderness

ABSTRACT The central question addressed in this paper is ‘Why have organizational strategies emerged in the public sector?’ Two broad answers are suggested. First, ‘strategies’ profile the organization through identifying aims, outputs and outcomes. Public services must, now, provide such transparency in order to secure on‐going funding from government bodies. Once ‘strategies’ are being produced, they also offer an organizational vision that potential additional funding agencies can buy into (with both commitment and money). And public services are short of resources. Second, ‘strategies’ signal greater devolved responsibility in the public sector for both acquiring resources and achieving results. They enable the inclusion of managerial priorities and values in setting the direction of public services. And politicians desire more control over the professionals that dominate public services whilst, simultaneously, wanting to make them more responsible for outcomes. This article explores the growth of strategic planning in a particular area of the public sector – the national parks. Strategies as ‘dormant documents’ and strategies as ‘funding pitches’ are discussed. It is suggested that, in the public sector, strategies should be the object of strategy.     

Modeling Consumers’ Adoption Intentions of Remote Mobile Payments in the United Kingdom: Extending UTAUT with Innovativeness,Risk, and Trust

Mobile payments (MPs) are predicted to be one of the future's most successful mobile services but have achieved limited acceptance in developed countries to date. PCs are still the preferred technology for online shopping in the United Kingdom but the continued growth of mobile commerce (MC) is highly correlated with the success of remote MPs (RMPs). Currently MP research has largely ignored the variations between different MP solutions, and existing MP adoption studies have predominantly utilized Davis’ (1989) Technology Acceptance Model, which has been criticized for having a deterministic approach without much consideration for users’ individual characteristics. Therefore, this study applied the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), extended with more consumer‐related constructs, to explore the factors affecting nonusers’ intentions to adopt RMP in the United Kingdom. Quantitative data were collected (n = 268) and structural equation modeling was undertaken. The findings revealed that performance expectancy, social influence, innovativeness, and perceived risk significantly influenced nonusers’ intentions to adopt RMP, whereas effort expectancy did not. Inclusion of MP knowledge as a moderating variable revealed that there was a significant difference in the effect of trust on behavioral intention for those who knew about MP than for those who did not. These findings have important theoretical and practical implications, particularly for the development and marketing of RMP, which will support the long‐term success of MC.     

Political Risk Assessment and the Arab Spring: What Can We Learn?

Whether dealing with debt issues in the Eurozone, investment prospects in emerging markets, or potential disruptions in patterns of global trade, the identification, assessment, and measurement of political risk (PR) are recurring issues for businesses and governments today. In the past few years, abrupt social and political change has become the rule in international relations. A prominent instance of this is the “Arab Spring,” the massive and unexpected wave of social and political turmoil that, starting in the winter of 2010‐2011, swept across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The Arab Spring has significantly affected the business climate of the countries involved. In doing so, it has also exposed the shortcomings of the extant approaches to PR assessment. This article discusses the performance of five different approaches to PR assessment (OECD, ONDD, EIU, PRS, SACE) vis‐à‐vis the Arab Spring, providing some specific suggestions on how to improve PR assessment and analysis. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Institutional Investors on Boards: Does Their Behavior Influence Corporate Finance?

We examine whether the behavior of institutional investors representatives on boards leads to observable differences in corporate finance. We find that directors representing pressure-sensitive investors (i.e., banks and insurance companies) prefer lower financial leverage whereas pressure-resistant directors (i.e., mutual funds and pension funds) show no particular preference. When analyzed separately, directors appointed by banks and insurance firms have different attitudes. Bank representatives on boards increase both the financial leverage and the banking debt. This result suggests that some types of institutional directors provide financial resources to the firms on whose board they sit, supporting the view that boards manage the uncertainty associated with strategic decision making and provide firms with preferential access to resources and financial expertise. This research has interesting academic and policy implications for the debate over the proper degree of institutional involvement in corporate governance. Different institutional investors have different agendas and incentives for corporate governance, and, therefore, both researchers and policy makers should no longer consider institutional investors as a whole. In addition, our paper calls for new research on the causes and implications of institutional investor involvement in the corporate governance of nonfinancial firms. This new research could require new insights on the dynamics within the boards and on the interplay among the knowledge, incentives and attitudes of quite different directors.     

Influence of CEO characteristics in family firms internationalization

This research uses a survey dataset of 187 Spanish family firms to study the characteristics that may influence family firms in their decision of internationalize their activity. Based on individual and demographic variables, the study concludes that the CEO academic level of achievement influences the level of success in international expansion. In addition, the capacity for generating resources of the family firm provokes a lower resistance from family members to export. Moreover, we confirm that industry characteristics do matter in internationalization processes, noting that the specific market, product/service and technology characteristics influence the family firm internationalization. Contrary to expectations, the gender variable and the percentage of family members sitting on the board do not significantly predict the propensity to export.Our findings suggest family firm leaders seeking greater levels of firm internationalization to seriously consider the qualification level of their CEO. These insights can be useful for regulators who have to develop programs for supporting sales internationalization, as well as owners and managers of family firms, who need to understand the CEO abilities that may improve their capacity to internationalize their business.     

Mapping symbolic (anti-) consumption

Rejection is at the heart of anti-consumption and is therefore key to some of the central relationships in symbolic consumption. However, researchers find rejection difficult to study because of the lack of material traces. This article draws on earlier frameworks to develop a new integrated and expanded conceptualization in order to achieve a more nuanced view of how rejection operates within symbolic consumption; and also to initiate research directions for investigating and theorizing rejection in anti-consumption. The focus on anti-consumption incorporates the interaction between avoidance, aversion and abandonment, and the relationship between distastes and the undesired self (mediated by the marketing, social and individual environments). A series of interrelationships and illustrations suggest how the expanded conceptualization is useful for theorizing and investigating anti-consumption.     

Regulating Borrower Hardship in Australia,Singapore, and Hong Kong: Payment Holidays During COVID-19 and Beyond

Journal of Consumer Policy - Borrower hardship, while a critical issue, is not often addressed by consumer protection frameworks across the Asia–Pacific. The widespread use of payment...     

A Himalayan triptych: narratives of traders,pilgrims and resistance in a landscape of movements

ABSTRACT

For centuries, if not millennia, the north–south valley systems of Nepal’s Himalayas have acted as a capillary network for communication, exchange, veneration, discriminating cultural difference and measuring out (early-)state power. One valley, in particular, the Kali Gandaki in Mustang, is a palimpsest overlaid with complex socialized and politicized movement. Drawing on the work of those affiliated with post-phenomenological thinking and using a mix of archaeological, archival and ethnographic data, this article disentangles and narrates five travels that emanate from this linear trail: the pilgrim, the salt trader, the resistance fighter, the explorer and the trekker. We start with the Buddhist pilgrim visiting the 2000-year-old Muktinath temple complex, for whom the route is a spiritual path. With each new vista unfolds a landscape of miracles and magic, the dusty road itself a medium for acquisition in the mysterious economy of merit. We then turn to the caravan traders who have plied their wares between gusty mountain passes and lowland jungle, exchanging Tibetan salt for Indian grains in a tradition of centuries. For them the trail is an exercise in risk management: when to move to fix the best price, navigating precipitous tracks, calculating how many animals to sell or to keep. Later this trade route would become a frontier zone when, in 1950, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army invaded Tibet. In the decades that followed, a Tibetan guerilla-fighting unit led by a former monk, Bapa Yeshe, mounted assaults from Mustang over the border into Tibet before ultimately being abandoned by their American Central Intelligence Agency supporters. Theirs was a receding trail, looking out over a dissolving field of cultural memories, their movement a heaving final resistance against a red tide of Mao’s intruders. Then there are the explorers – or nomadic cultural collectors – for whom the Annapurnas are a cornucopia of novelty. Each dusty step for them is further penetration into a landscape of alterity from which pieces of the other can be added to the collector’s satchel. Finally, we come to present-day trekkers, who dream of pristine nature and for whom the trail leads to escape, clarity of mind, the past or the edge of security. As they retrace the same routes and pathways to which of these historical narratives, if any, do they bear witness?