The role of the entrepreneurial encounter in the emergence of opportunities: Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to explore the conceptual potential of the Deleuzian notion of the encounter in order to better understand the genealogy of opportunities. We adopt a processual perspective of opportunities. In order to translate this notion to the domain of entrepreneurship, we analysed and interpreted Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club. This film follows the creation of the first club in the United States that illegally allowed HIV-positive people to supply themselves with foreign antiretroviral drugs from Mexico or Japan. The article highlights encounters in this process that disturb the entrepreneur’s belief systems and allow him or her to be open to potential opportunity. It finally explores how the encounter may improve our understanding of the political becoming of opportunities within the entrepreneurial process.     

(In)equality and the South African Constitution

ABSTRACT

Does the South African Constitution constrain or empower government, courts and citizens in addressing systemic social and economic inequalities? This article argues that the Constitution is explicitly ‘transformative’, but is an enabling document, providing ‘scaffolding’ for political and legal activities. It is government, strong institutions and civil society that are ultimately responsible for securing its equality aspirations. Here the Constitution admits of different understandings of equality and different economic and social policy choices. This article identifies these contested meanings of equality and suggests that a liberal egalitarian/social democratic version is dominant in policy choices and the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. It illustrates this with reference to the Court’s jurisprudence on equality, and suggests that more radical and transformative interpretations remain possible. However, it concludes that we cannot escape politics, the need for good policy choices and effective implementation and enforcement.     

Transmission of information within transnational social networks: a field experiment

Several studies have shown a relationship between the stocks of migrants and country-level investment in the home country; however the mechanism through which this relationship operates is still unexplored. We use a field experiment in which participants who are recent immigrants send information about risky decisions to others in their social network in their home country. The results demonstrate how this information influences decisions in the home country. We find that the advice given by family members and decisions made by friends significantly affects an individual’s risky decision-making.     

In Search of Theory Development in Grounded Investigations: Doctors' Experiences of Managing as an Example of Fitted and Prospective Theorizing

This article draws on a study of doctors’ experiences of clinical managing to highlight research conventions that limit the development and use of middle range theories in grounded studies. Using sensemaking and the psychological contract as example frameworks, we illustrate how customary deductive evaluations of middle range theories turn grounded researchers away from theory building. As a correction to these conventions, we offer an inductive approach to building existing theory in grounded investigations that does not depend solely on working with frameworks under different empirical conditions. We suggest that forward theorizing is most likely to progress from a synthesis of fitted explanation and prospective thinking that presses at the limits of the data's usefulness. To illustrate this approach, trialled thinking about novel theoretical juxtapositions and alternative sources was used in conjunction with our clinical director data. The value of this approach was supported in two ways. First, a number of fitted and prospective conjectures are offered about how social identity articulates with psychological contracts and sensemaking in role change situations. Second, new light is shed on the process by which particular social conditions differentially modify employees’ social categorizations, and how these inform employee responses to the evolving experience of role change. The article concludes with some tentative proposals for promoting more discussion of theory building in grounded investigations.     

Entry and regulation: evidence from health care professions

In many countries, pharmacies receive high regulated markups and are protected from competition through geographic entry restrictions. We develop an empirical entry model for pharmacies and physicians with two features: entry restrictions and strategic complementarities. We find that the entry restrictions have directly reduced the number of pharmacies by more than 50%, and also indirectly reduced the number of physicians by about 7%. A removal of the entry restrictions, combined with a reduction in the regulated markups, would generate a large shift in rents to consumers, without reducing the availability of pharmacies. The public interest motivation for the current regime therefore has no empirical support.     

INDUSTRIAL POLICY IN GREAT BRITAIN AND ITS EFFECT ON TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY IN MANUFACTURING PLANTS, 1990–1998

Industrial policy in any economy has a number of varying and occasionally conflicting objectives, but the overarching intention of the various grants, subsidies and support schemes, arguably, must be to improve the economic performance of the plants they assist directly. However, in the absence of counterfactual evidence, whether or not assistance does improve performance is hard to establish. In this paper, we consider the impact of two UK government industrial support schemes (Regional Selective Assistance and the Small Firm Merit Awards for Research and Technology) on UK manufacturing plant level total factor productivity in an attempt to answer the question, ‘did assistance make a difference?’     

Airport infrastructure spillovers in a network system

Airports in the US air transport network have become increasingly congested, leading to delays for business travelers and freight shipments. Since disruptions in one part of the network exacerbate problems throughout the system, airport infrastructure expansions to enhance air traffic flows confer travel-time savings and reliability benefits, and thus increased worker productivity and shipping efficiency for manufacturing firms. We evaluate such spillovers, and find that higher own-state airport infrastructure implies lower manufacturing costs from both labor- and materials-savings. Airport expansion in connected states has a comparable effect for states with hub airports, and an even greater impact for other states.     

Introduction: What Role Can Experiments Play in Research on Regulation?

Journal of Regulatory Economics -