Telling their own stories: Māori entrepreneurship in the mainstream screen industry

We examined how factors from Indigenous entrepreneurship research (social capital, cultural capital, self-efficacy) help explain the high level of Māori entrepreneurial performance in the mainstream screen industry. Results, based on ten case studies and a one-year series of structured interviews, extend prior research by showing that these Indigenous entrepreneurs benefit jointly from two forms of capital: cultural and social. We found high levels of both forms to increase the desire for emancipation of cultural and community identity – not just individual identity – through entrepreneurship. Self-efficacy and storytelling helped ameliorate discontinuities across Indigenous and mainstream contexts. Our research sheds new light on how Indigenous ventures can pursue mainstream entrepreneurship while maintaining cultural identity. It also makes several distinct contributions to the Indigenous entrepreneurship literature. First, it provides an integrative theoretic review. Second, it illustrates a culturally appropriate methodology for researching Māori entrepreneurs with implications for other Indigenous communities. Third, it proposes cultural capital and social capital as a two-part framework for explaining Indigenous entrepreneurial action. Fourth, it shows how entrepreneurship can be empowering for Indigenous communities. Finally, our paper demonstrates that entrepreneurship is a promising mechanism for preserving and promoting the cultures of Māori and other Indigenous peoples.     

Modelling household conservation behaviour among ethnic consumers: the path from values to behaviours

This article tests a model that explains household conservation behaviour among ethnic consumers. Increasing immigration into Western countries has raised serious questions about the extent to which emerging ethnic communities contribute to environmental degradation or sustainability in their host countries. Previous research focused mainly on measuring ethnic consumers' environmental attitudes, worldviews and concerns, assuming that these ultimately lead to pro‐environmental behaviours. However, these studies overlooked the reality in which pro‐environmental attitudes are not automatically being translated into corresponding behaviours. This study explores the relationship between a set of factors that drive pro‐environmental behaviour, proposing a hierarchical model that depicts a flow from values to household conservation behaviours (i.e. recycling, water, electricity and energy conservation) and the intervening cognitive, affective and psychological variables. Results from a sample of 410 American Hispanic students indicate that the cultural value of collectivism influences conservation behaviour through the more specific factors of environmental values, environmental concern, perceived consumer effectiveness (PCE) and concrete environmental knowledge. Interestingly, the influence of PCE was more apparent in routine, easy‐to‐perform behaviours such as water conservation and the behavioural aspect of electricity conservation. The influence of concrete environmental knowledge was more powerful in predicting recycling, the use of electricity‐efficient home appliances and energy conservation. Implications for the promotion of conservation behaviour and consumer education as well as directions for future research are discussed.     

A systematic comparative analysis and synthesis of two business-level strategic typologies

Two important business-level strategic typologies were systematically evaluated, analyzed and compared in this study: Porter'S Overall Cost Leadership, Differentiation, Focus, and ‘Stuck in the Middle’ generic competitive strategies, and Miles and Snow'S Defender, Prospector, Analyzer, and Reactor types of organizational adaptation. On the basis of strategic theory, and following a pilot study, 31 strategic variables were evaluated by judges on a seven-point maximum-minimum scale, for each strategy, within its typology. Analysis of variances and concordance among judges regarding the ranking of the strategies on each variable were examined, and a strategic profile was built for each strategy. Proximities between strategies of the two typologies were analyzed using monotonic multidimensional scaling. The analysis indicated similarities and differences between the two typologies. A synthesis of the two typologies is suggested along two dimensions: internal consistency of the strategy, and level of proactiveness.     

Consumers as legitimating agents: How consumer‐citizens challenge marketer legitimacy on social media

Previous research has shown that consumers increasingly challenge the legitimacy of marketers and unsolicited marketing communication in online contexts. Based on a qualitative study, this article examines how and for what reasons consumers challenge marketer legitimacy—the perceived appropriateness of marketers and their activities—in the empirical context of Reddit, a popular social news and community website. The study suggests that consumers challenge or accept marketer legitimacy in online communities based on particular, community and situation specific, legitimacy criteria that reflect and reproduce the values and norms of the community. In doing so, it is argued, consumers play a role as legitimating agents—consumer‐citizens that have the power to confer or deny legitimacy in the context of business‐society relations. Overall, the study advances knowledge in the field of consumer studies in two ways. First, it builds a symbolic interactionist perspective on consumer‐citizens as legitimating agents who enact their active citizenship role in the marketplace by assessing and constructing marketer legitimacy in online communities. Second, it offers an empirically grounded account of how and for what reasons consumer‐citizens challenge or accept the legitimacy of marketers and unsolicited marketing communication in online communities.     

All About Size

在邮轮公司工作，被人问的最多的问题是你们的船有多大？当得到8层楼高、188米长的答案时，提问者脸上会显出羡慕的神情。     

Interrelationships between environmental dependencies: A basis for tradeoffs to increase autonomy

General managers of large industrial plants in Israel were asked to evaluate the effects of environmental dependencies on their freedom of action. It was found that most segments of the environment were perceived as homogeneous—affecting the firms' autonomy in similar ways. Different components of government, however, were perceived as having conflicting interests both within the segment and with other segments of the environment. When a segment of the environment is heterogeneous, it is possible that managers use a tradeoff strategy, in which pressures generated by one component of the environment can be used as a means to reduce pressure of the other components.     

Strategy,strategy-making,and performance in a business game

In a recent study, Segev (1987) examined the relationships among strategy, strategy-making, and performance, focusing on the connection between two important typologies: Miles and Snow's (1978) concept of strategic types and Mintzberg's (1973) concept of strategy-making modes. The findings of that study clearly indicated links between the two, and partially supported propositions asserting the effects of the strategy/stategy-making fit on organizational performance. In the current study a business game served as the vehicle for examining this tripartite relationship. The two typologies were applied to the firms' in the game, and then an inquiry was made into the relationships between them. An hypothesis regarding the effect of fit on performance was tested, and the findings compared with previously reported empirical results.     

The minimum weighted covariance determinant estimator

In this paper, we introduce weighted estimators of the location and dispersion of a multivariate data set with weights based on the ranks of the Mahalanobis distances. We discuss some properties of the estimators like the breakdown point, influence function and asymptotic variance. The outlier detection capacities of different weight functions are compared. A simulation study is given to investigate the finite-sample behavior of the estimators. The research of Stefan Van Aelst was supported by a grant of the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) and by IAP research network grant nr. P6/03 of the Belgian government (Belgian Science Policy).     

The long-term volume of East Europe's foreign trade: An estimate

The transformation process of East European (EE) countries led to the disappearance of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the former Soviet-bloc economic integration scheme, as well as to other changes in the foreign trade sector of those economies. This study seeks to identify the potential long run modifications in the volume of trade of EE countries by using a well-established model employed in the foreign trade literature, the gravity equation. Quantitative results suggest that in the next decades trade between East and West European countries could double from its present level.