Crafting successful strategic technology partnerships

Despite the trend towards an increasing use of strategic technology alliances, mortality rates of cooperative agreements have always been extremely high. In this paper we argue that rapid economic and technological developments have overthrown traditional thinking about alliances and that firms could benefit from a new perspective on partnering. This new approach is referred to as High Touch Partnering. The new framework stresses the need for a balanced attention to strategic (re-)positioning, establishing adequate alliance capabilities, building business communities with partners and improved partner selection.     

How to investigate the information processing strategies of students in competence-based pre-vocational secondary education: selection of the right instrument

In the Netherlands, many Pre-Vocational Secondary Education schools are implementing elements of competence-based education. These learning environments are expected to elicit the use of deep information processing strategies and to positively influence learning outcomes. While questionnaires are often used to investigate the preferences of students for particular types of information processing strategies in other educational contexts, these instruments cannot simply be adopted unaltered for use in Pre-Vocational Secondary Education where several characteristics of the students must be taken into account. This study explores the psychometric properties of three instruments for the measurement of student preferences for deep or surface information processing strategies in competence-based Pre-Vocational Secondary Education. The utility of a semi-structured interview, a questionnaire, and the think-aloud method was investigated. The questionnaire appeared to be the most accurate instrument and allowed easy classification of students in terms of their information processing preferences. The think-aloud method provided profound insight into the information processing strategies that the students preferred for a learning task and the frequencies with which the strategies were used. The interview results largely corresponded to the results produced by the other measurement instruments, but the interview data lacked the expected richness and depth.     

Banking Products: You <Emphasis Type="Italic">Can</Emphasis> Take Them with You,So Why Don’t You?

Policymakers around the world call for more competition in the banking sector. One prerequisite to achieving this is customer mobility. Despite its policy relevance, surprisingly little is known about consumers’ bank switching behaviour. We show that the principal reasons to stay at one’s bank are a good bank-customer relationship, practical barriers, and the perception that there is not much benefit in switching. Moreover, we find that the reported propensity to switch varies across banking products. For the main current and savings accounts, this propensity is most strongly related to the bank-customer relationship, while for mortgage loans it is especially linked to switching experience. These findings have important implications for antitrust policy; they provide an argument against using a cluster-based legal standard for the analysis of competition and in favour of a disaggregated approach. Regarding the effectiveness of hypothetical policy initiatives to lower switching barriers, we find that the reported switching propensity with current accounts is higher in the case of account number portability, while more knowledge of the existing switching service has no significant effect. Lastly, scenario analysis shows that a policy of allowing new foreign banks to enter the savings market is less promising for enhancing mobility than a policy that increases the number of domestic players.     

Retail stores as brands: performances,theatre and space

The scholars of Consumer Culture Theory studies as well as practitioners have recognised the potential power of spatial design in stores in constructing and communicating retail brands. Retail space and the aesthetic structuring of a range of expressive artefacts have become the stage on which shop attendants perform. This paper focuses on how management and shop attendants of Dutch menswear fashion house Oger communicate and construct the Oger brand, with a special focus on the spatial settings of the retail store. This study shows how the management carefully combines elements generally found in Italian ateliers, English gentlemen's clubs and boardrooms. The symbolic message behind the spatial design of the Oger flagship store is that of human quest for wealth and fame removed from the everyday life. In addition to this earlier observed interplay between design, display and consumption processes, this study indicates the important role of shop attendants in constructing and communicating retail brands. By forging links with organisation studies, we show how retail management carefully designed, managed and orchestrated retail space, objects and shop attendants’ roles to construct and communicate the Oger brand. The selling of products through performances in designed theatres connects organisation and economic and aesthetic realms. Finally, the paper introduces “internal design proxemics” as an extra analytical concept of spatial settings.     

Heterogeneous preferences for altruism: gender and personality,social status,giving and taking

Some of the earliest work on heterogeneity in social preferences focuses on gender differences in behavior. The source of these gender differences is the main interest of this paper. We report on dictator game experiments designed to identify heterogeneity of other-regarding preferences according to personality, gender, status, and whether the choice is framed as giving or taking. We find that the effect of gender on giving is more subtle than previously understood, and is explained collectively by various personality factors. We also find that women, high status treatment individuals, and individuals in the giving language treatment give less, and are also less sensitive to the price of giving.     

‘Employability-miles’ and worker employability awareness

This article studies the use and impact of a (‘Employability-miles’) voucher scheme. These vouchers could be used for participation in a restricted number of training courses, which all aim to stimulate employees to develop a more active attitude towards their own employability. Using data from two surveys of one firm’s workforce, we find that voucher use is related to various personality traits and personal characteristics. In particular, a worker’s ambition, goal setting and education level are positively related to voucher use. In addition, workers with longer tenure spend their vouchers more often. Conversely, workers with a more positive self-image as well as those who are negatively reciprocal spend their vouchers less often. The negative relation between voucher use and negative reciprocity suggests that workers who are more negatively reciprocal perceive the voucher as an HR tool for outplacement. Further, we find that voucher use positively affects worker employability awareness and willingness to train. Remarkably, participation in non voucher training shows little relation to personality traits. From a human resources (HR) perspective, this finding suggests that by employing a voucher scheme, the firm makes training participation more dependent on employee personality and individual characteristics instead of the HR development strategy of the firm.     

Defining technology and technological education: A crisis,or cause for celebration?

This paper originated from a two-year technological education teacher development project at the Faculty of Education, The University of Western Ontario. The authors searched for an understanding of technology and technological education through traditional scholarly means, i.e., a literature review, and through an action research venture that, it was thought, would reveal the parameters of ‘technology’. The paper, beyond helping to give the authors and the reader a better understanding of what it means to define an elusive concept, serves to give technology educators a conceptual starting point from which to build insight into the elements of their life's work. The function and form of the paper evolved from the project process. They [the function and form] were determined by the nature of and ambiguities associated with technology. The reader is invited, for example, to consider the historical, social, cultural, and philosophical dimensions of technology. Rather than draw parallels about technology from those diverse disciplines, a daunting task, the paper charts a terrain from which investigators who seek a definition of technology and a framework for the subsequent study of technology, might get their bearings. The paper includes approaches to defining technology, a literature review, a comparison of science and technology, and an epilogue. While a definition is offered as part of the epilogue, the larger purpose of the paper is to improve one's understanding of an ubiquitous phenomenon. The central question of the ongoing debate, in Ontario and elsewhere, about the role and direction of technological education, is inherent in the paper and in the mandate of the teacher development project. What is technology and where and in what form does it belong in the curriculum of the schools?     

How Foundations Exercise Power

Foundations (and philanthropy in general) have great political power in the United States and worldwide, yet this is hardly noted by political analysts or journalists. Their power is exerted in many ways, such as by funding progressive organizations and movements; sponsoring policy “think tanks” and organizations of public officials; influencing the political culture through media, academic researchers, and university programs (including public interest law in law schools); and co‐opting activists and potential rebels among the rich and poor. Because of their resources and prestige, they are powerful members of coalitions and collaborations with overt and covert government departments, U.N. agencies, universities, and nongovernmental organizations. Foundations have been major actors in the “Cold War,” which continues as the attempt to deflect any movement towards socialism here or abroad. Globalization has amplified the power of foundations, for many of the global institutions were created by foundations and continue to be fostered by them. The sponsorship of civil society institutions worldwide by private foundations, now with additional billions from governments and international governmental institutions, supports U.S. hegemony: military, political, and economic. We cannot know what the world would have been like absent foundation activities, but the current one does not appear to have a democratic, peaceful, or sustainable future.     

Common Value Auctions with Default: An Experimental Approach

This paper examines a common value auction in which bidder default is explicitly allowed. The lack of contractual enforcement has implications for the formation of bids as well as the revenue properties of the auction. Using a common value procurement auction, we explore these implications in an experimental setting. Our results show that bidders are more aggressive when default is allowed. A theoretical result shows that allowing default can actually be in the best interest of the auctioneer. Experimental evidence, however, indicates that this result does not hold true in practice. One possible reason for this discrepancy is that the data in our experiments is consistent with winner's curse behavior.