Resistance to technology adoption: The rise and decline of guilds

This paper analyzes the decision of a group of specialized workers to form a guild and block the adoption of a new technology that does not require their specialized input. The theory predicts an inverted-U relation between guilds and market size: for small markets, firm profits are insufficient to cover the fixed cost of adopting the new technology, and hence, specialized workers have no reason to form guilds; for intermediate sized markets, firm profits are large enough to cover the higher fixed costs, but not large enough to defeat workers' resistance, and so workers form guilds and block adoption; and for large markets, these profits are sufficiently large to overcome worker resistance and so guilds disband and the more productive technology diffuses throughout the economy. We show that this inverted-U relation between guilds and market size predicted by our theory exists in a dataset of Italian guilds from the 14th to the 19th century.     

Size and support ratings of US banks

We examine whether Fitch support ratings of US banks depend on bank size. Using quarterly data for the period 2004:Q4 to 2012:Q4 and controlling for several factors that make large and small banks different, we find that bank size is positively related to support ratings. However, the effect is non-linear in line with the ‘too-big-to-rescue’ hypothesis. After the failure of Lehman Brothers and the passing of Dodd-Frank the relation between size and potential support has become stronger.     

知识存量、双元学习与企业绩效关系研究

知识是企业的战略性资源，是企业竞争优势提升的重要源泉，但关于知识如何影响企业绩效的内在机理尚不明晰。本文引入企业双元学习中介，探索并检验知识存量对企业绩效的作用过程。采用回归方法分析了223家科研技术类企业数据后，本文得出结论：（1）企业知识存量对企业绩效有着促进作用；（2）知识存量是通过作用于双元学习而对企业绩效产生影响；（3）企业规模在此过程中有着显著调节作用。本文研究为企业有效开展知识积累及双元学习活动提供启示。     

The Three-Factor Model and Size and Value Premiums in China’s Stock Market

Using monthly data from China’s Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) A-share market between 2005 and 2012, this article performs an empirical study on the applicability of the three-factor model to China’s stock market. After testing twenty-five size-BE/ME stock portfolios and four stock sector portfolios, we found that the three-factor model, adjusted for the unique features of China’s stock market, generally fits the SSE A-share market well. The results show that size and value premiums are significant in China’s stock market, although there exist modest differences among industrial sectors. In addition, our empirical results are robust to factor sorting and construction methods.     

The Trouble With Flag Wars: Rethinking Sexuality in Critical Urban Theory

Critical urban theory (CUT) provides intellectual support for a politics of the right to the city. However, CUT has rarely engaged with the rich scholarship on sexuality and the urban, much of which directly addresses questions of social justice. CUT has most often treated sexuality as an attribute, rather than a diffuse discourse of subject‐producing power intimately connected with race, class and gender. This article highlights two strands in contemporary queer studies––queer subjectless critique and queer temporality––that can enrich understandings of the key concepts of alienation, deprivation and resistance in the city. I illustrate the salience of queer thinking for CUT through a close reading of Flag Wars (2003), a documentary film recognized for its engagement with gentrification and the politics of difference in the United States. While the film ostensibly explores the problem of gay gentrification in a working‐class black neighborhood, a queer subjectless approach asks how discourses on sexuality produce residents at risk of displacement as deviant, immoral and queer––regardless of sexual orientation. I argue that recognizing the wide range of ways in which narratives about sexuality can deprive and alienate urban subjects could generate additional alternative bases for solidarity in the struggle for a just city.     

Managing Complaints to Improve Customer Profitability

In this study, the authors aim to understand whether, to what extent, and under what circumstances, organizational responses to customer complaints improve customer profitability. To do so, they build upon the congruence approach and propose a contingency framework in which the effectiveness of three organizational responses to customer complaints (timeliness, compensation and communications) in improving customer profitability is contingent upon the strength of the relationship and the type of failure. The framework is tested empirically in the financial services industry applying latent class techniques to longitudinal data for a sample of complaining customers. The results reveal that: (1) different complaint-handling initiatives affect customer profitability differently for each of the four segments of complaining customers that are obtained; (2) these heterogeneous responses to complaint handling are explained by differences in the orientation of the relationship and in the failure context; and (3) complaint-handling initiatives are more (less) effective at improving customer profitability when the benefits they offer strongly (poorly) match the benefits sought by customers in each segment to recover from the failure. These results contribute to a better theoretical understanding of customers’ heterogeneous responses to complaint handling and offer managerial recommendations to allocate marketing resources across alternative complaint-handling strategies to improve profitability.     

Loving Diversity/Controlling Diversity: Exploring the Ambivalent Mobilization of Upper‐Middle‐Class Gentrifiers,South End,Boston

This article centers on a group of upper‐middle‐class gentrifiers living in a neighborhood in the South End of Boston, and their complex attitude towards diversity. I use data from my fieldwork in the South End, based on ethnographic observation and 77 interviews with residents active in local organizations, such as neighborhood associations. These residents explicitly stress their endorsement of diversity, in terms of class, race, but also sexual orientation, and their commitment to maintaining it. I examine the meaning they give to this principle, the actions they take in its name and the kind of relations they establish with those ‘others’ who embody such diversity. I argue that the gentrifiers' love of diversity, which cannot be reduced to sheer hypocrisy, is intrinsically linked to their capacity to control it, thus shedding light on the changing definition of social distinction in upper‐middle‐class culture.     

Why Cities? A Response

Why do cities exist? Geographers Allen Scott and Michael Storper recently put the question before the field of urban studies and provided a clear and concise answer in terms of economies of agglomeration and the urban land nexus. I argue that two other basic elements must be added to this duo: the spatial concentration of economic surplus by ruling classes and states and the creation of a built environment or urban landscape. In addition, I take issue with Scott and Storper's neglect of the problem of scale in urban theory and their overly tidy sense of what constitutes a scientific approach to complex phenomena like cities.     

Food fight! Immigrant Street Vendors,Gourmet Food Trucks and the Differential Valuation of Creative Producers in Chicago

Immigrant street vendors in Chicago have fought for decades without success to change the restrictive and punitive city ordinance governing their work. The failure of the immigrant street vendors stands in marked contrast to the successful efforts of gourmet food truck entrepreneurs, who within only two years convinced the Chicago City Council to pass an ordinance permitting their work. The differential regulation of street vending reveals how local politicians use the rhetoric of the ‘creative’ city to justify building a city that appeals to young urban professionals, while simultaneously marginalizing the possibilities of working‐class immigrants to shape the city to their desires. This article aims to add to the literature on the politics of the creative class by demonstrating how discourses of creativity and entrepreneurialism get mobilized by competing interests, and how racial‐ethnic attitudes become integral to these discourses. The contrasting experiences of the vendors force us to ask: Why is the creativity of food truck entrepreneurs valued over the creativity of street vendors when, according to Richard Florida, creative class cities are supposed to be tolerant and immigrant‐friendly? Whose ‘creativity’ gets to be part of the ‘creative’ city? I draw on interviews with street vendors and a discourse analysis of media coverage of vending debates.     

Combining Statistical Evidence

The combination of evidence from independent studies has a curious history. The origins reach back at least to the beginning of the 20th century. Since the mid‐1970s, meta‐analysis has become popular in several fields, among them medical statistics and the behavioural sciences. The most widely used procedures were perfected in early papers, and subsequently, a kind of groupthink has taken hold of meta‐analysis. This explains the need for a review in a statistics journal, destined for a statistical audience. Meta‐analysis is not a hot research topic among graduate students in statistics, and by writing this article, we hope to change this. We wish to point out the shortcomings of the mainstream view and exhibit some of the open problems that await the attention of statistical researchers. A host of competent reviews of meta‐analysis have been published, and several book‐length treatments are also available. We have listed many of these in the bibliography but cannot guarantee completeness.