A systematic approach to conducting review studies: An assessment of content analysis in 25 years of IB research

Content analysis has become a popular method for qualitative and quantitative analyses in management and international business (IB) research. It is increasingly used in literature reviews to assess extant knowledge and understand intellectual structures. However, it is often poorly understood and incorrectly applied. In this article, we identify benchmark criteria and develop coding schemes that IB scholars can use in review studies. We also demonstrate the application of content analysis through a review of content analysis–based articles, published in the top eight IB journals from 1991 to 2015.     

Thinking critically about critical thinking: Assessing critical thinking of business students using multiple measures

Critical thinking is a skill that potential employers expect all graduates to possess. Hence, most business management programs consider critical thinking as an important student learning goal. Unfortunately, there is ambiguity about how to best assess critical thinking, both as a skill and a learning outcome. The authors empirically demonstrate how they measure the critical thinking ability of their students in different settings, and how their critical thinking ability improves as they progress through the business program.     

经济周期、融资约束与流动性管理--基于交通运输业的实证分析

经济周期波动对交通运输企业的流动性管理有显著影响。经济周期通过产品市场渠道、资本市场渠道影响企业的外部融资成本,从而导致企业在经济衰退期面临更加严峻的融资约束,并传导到流动性管理行为。与其他行业相比,我国交通运输企业的流动性管理整体上受经济周期的冲击更为显著。因此,交通运输企业必须实施有效的周期性流动管理,政府部门也应该实施周期性的差异化产业政策。     

So,you want to be an entrepreneur? Lessons from the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities

Based on helping dozens of military veterans refine their ideas for starting a business, we identify and discuss a series of potential pitfalls that aspiring entrepreneurs—veterans and civilians alike—must avoid in order to be successful. Potential entrepreneurs must not confuse the pursuit of hobbies and self-employment with the act of creating a business. People who wish to build a business around public speaking or consulting need to firmly establish why customers should be willing to pay for their advice. Individuals that seek to develop a new non-profit organization must have a viable value proposition even though they are not pursing a profit motive. Overall, the entrepreneurial ventures that are most likely to succeed are those that (1) are based on a sustainable business model, (2) leverage the entrepreneur's unique experiences and attributes, and (3) are built around a process or system that enables the venture to prosper even if the entrepreneur leaves the venture.     

Value Co-Creation Processes—Early Stages of Value Chains Involving High-Tech Business Markets: Samsung–Qualcomm Semiconductor Foundry Businesses

Purpose: This research aimed to identify both the specialized resources and competences for value co-creation when the value co-creation phenomenon is extended to the early stage of the value chain. Further, it proposes a framework that can analyze the value co-creation process in the high-tech business-to-business (B-to-B) market.

Methodology/approach: The research methodology was based on building a theory from a case study. The qualitative data was coded based on the grounded theory coding after collecting data from multiple sources.

Findings: Four critical resource types (financial resources, knowledge resources, efficiency resources, and intellectual resources) and five competence types (relational capability, collaboration capability, strategic capability, innovation capability, and managing capability) were constructed as the principal factors for value co-creation at the early stage in the value chain within the high-tech B-to-B market. Among the four resources and five competences, intellectual resource and strategic capability associated with value co-creation were unique findings in our case research.

Research implications: Our results provided new insights, which the value co-creation can be extended to the early stages in the value chain, such as the research and development (R&D) stage, in the high-tech B-to-B market, whereas extant value research was more focused on the late stages of the value chain. The reciprocal value co-creation process, which used four resources and five competences of both the supplier and customer, was proposed as an integrated framework to co-create value at the early stage of the value chain within the high-tech B-to-B market.

Practical implications: A supplier’s R&D, marketing, manufacturing, planning departments and the customer can utilize the defined resources as well as competences at different stages of the value chain in order to co-create value and improve their performance. In particular, the marketing department of the supplier needs to turn their eyes to the early stages in the value chain so as to seek a value co-creation strategy.

Originality/value/contribution: A value co-creation strategy was sought from a different perspective, extending from a late stage to an early stage in the value chain of the high-tech B-to-B market. The integrated research framework, combining resources and competences of the supplier and customer, was established to analyze the value co-creation phenomenon.     

Buyer Loyalty in Business Markets: Can the Firm and Salesperson Get What They Truly Desire?

Purpose: Prior literature has acknowledged multi-foci customer loyalties (loyalty to the selling firm and salesperson-owned loyalty) and argued that both entities (selling firms and salespersons) foster customer loyalty through respective loyalty-capturing efforts (relationship investments). However, scholars have not investigated the influences of different types of interfirm relationship-specific investment (RSI) activities and salesperson behaviors (brand-building and guanxi behavior) on customer loyalty to the selling firm and salesperson-owned loyalty, especially their simultaneous (interaction) effects. The current research attempts to address this issue and examines the impacts that RSIs and salesperson behaviors have on customer loyalties.

Methodology/approach: A survey of seller–buyer dyads was conducted to test the proposed theoretical model and hypotheses. Using 192 dyadic data from customers and salespersons in the Chinese business-to-business contexts, this study specifies the direct and interactive effects of sellers’ RSIs and salespersons’ behaviors on customer loyalties.

Findings: Results indicate that selling firms’ loyalty-capturing efforts—property-based and knowledge-based RSIs—have different influences on two types of customer loyalty. Salespersons’ relationship investments—brand-building and guanxi behaviors—also have asymmetric impacts on customer loyalty. Counterintuitively, salespersons’ loyalty-capturing efforts weaken the relationships between firms’ RSIs and customer loyalties.

Originality/value/contribution: This study specifies different types of relationship investments and examines their respective and interactive impacts on two types of customer loyalty—loyalty to the selling firm and salesperson-owned loyalty. The findings indicate that firms’ and salespersons’ efforts may lead to unexpected and unintended effects on multi-foci loyalties. Therefore, the current study enriches our knowledge about multi-foci loyalty management and relationship marketing.

Practical implications: Because firms’ and salespersons’ loyalty-capturing strategies exert positive direct influences on loyalty to the selling firm and salesperson-owned loyalty, both entities may actively leverage relationship investments’ impact on customer loyalty. However, as the interactive effects derived from concurrent loyalty-enhancing activities are negative, firms need to clearly assess the nature and

characteristics of their relationship with buyers and properly design relationship investments and guide salesperson behaviors. Managers should use property-based RSIs as a primary safeguard of customer loyalty to the selling firm. Meanwhile, internal branding and training programs can help salespersons develop brand building behaviors and better understand the potential unintended outcomes that different behaviors may induce. Aligning a branding goal between the firm and salespersons can benefit both parties while avoiding counter-productive outcomes.     

External pressure or internal culture? An innovation diffusion theory account of small retail businesses’ social media use

COVID-19 put unprecedented external pressure on small businesses to adopt or increase use of social media while not all small businesses are internally ready for this rapid change. This study investigated the roles of external pressures and organizational culture of openness and learning in driving small retail business owners'/managers' social media use decisions by impacting their perceived usefulness and barriers, based on the innovation-decision process model from the diffusion of innovations theory and the theory of reasoned action. An online survey with structured measurements was administered to 411 U.S. small retail business owners/managers. Results from structural equation modeling revealed that external pressures positively influenced small business owners'/managers’ perceived usefulness and barriers and social media use intention. In addition, the culture of openness and learning positively influenced the perceived usefulness while mitigating the perceived barriers, thereby directly and indirectly influencing the social media use intention. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.     

Institutional Impediments to Voluntary Ethics Measurement Systems

In this paper, we argue that calls for widespread implementation of ethics measurement systems would be better informed by institutional economic analysis. Specifically, we assert that proponents of such systems must first recognize and understand the institutions that potentially impede such efforts. We identify two potential institutional impediments to measuring ethics and social responsibility. First, we suggest that neoclassical economics, supported by traditional business education and legal precedent, serves to reinforce the notion that shareholders are the primary corporate constituency group. Such an emphasis on the needs of shareholders severely hinders implementation of measurement systems that address the needs of multiple stakeholder groups. Second, we argue that the threat of litigation may constrain corporate managers from measuring and considering ethics and corporate social responsibility matters. In particular, managers may be reluctant to quantify various ethical concerns if the resulting measurements could be used as evidence against the corporation in a lawsuit.     

Entrepreneurship and Risk Aversion

Evans and Jovanovic (1989, Journal of Political Economy 97(4), 808–827) find that wealth is an important determinant of business startups due to liquidity constraints. However, Cressy (2000, Economic Letters 66, 235–240) argues that if risk aversion is a negative function of wealth, Evans and Jovanovic’s empirical results could be spurious and the positive effect of wealth could be due to the omission of risk aversion in the regression equation. In other words, according to Cressy, one’s wealth does not have any effect on business startups once the degree of risk aversion is accounted for. This paper attempts to investigate the validity of Cressy’s conjecture. We empirically examine the effect of wealth on the transition into self-employment, while allowing for the effect of risk aversion. Our empirical findings show that Evans and Jovanovic’s (1989) results are robust, i.e., wealth has a positive effect on business startups even allowing for the confounding effects of risk aversion.