Poverty in Palanpur

The meaning and identification of poverty are examined usingthree indicators of standard of living in the North Indian villageof Palanpur. The first is intended as a measure of "apparentprosperity" based on the personal assessments of investigatorsafter intensive field work in the village over the full agriculturalyear 1983–84. The other two are income in 1983–84,and a measure of permanent income obtained by averaging incomesfrom four surveys conducted over a twenty-six-year interval.A comparison of these three indicators shows that income measuredin any one year may give a misleading impression of the incidenceof poverty. The risk of poverty for households is calculated.Vulnerability is high among low-caste households and those whichare involved in agricultural labor. Categories, however, arenot homogeneous; for example, whereas the landless and widowsare more likely to be poor, some of such households are quitewell off. It is argued that poverty in a good agricultural yearis a better indicator of sustained poverty than poverty in abad year. Occupational mobility out of agricultural labor islow, and changes in the distribution of land are largely accountedfor by demographic processes such as household splits.     

China Adopts EVA: An Essential Step in the Great Leap Forward*

At the start of 2010, the Central SASAC initiated a three‐year “Performance Assessment Policy” that has the potential to transform Chinese business practices. Since 2010, return on capital has been a major criterion in the performance evaluation and compensation of the senior managements of the 100 largest Chinese state‐owned enterprises. Although sales growth will still count for 60% of executive assessment, 40% will be determined by a simplified version of EVA, or Economic Value Added. The guiding principle behind the new policy is simple and straightforward: Executives of state‐owned enterprises are now being asked to manage capital more efficiently than they have in the past—and in much the same way that private enterprises are now expected to do. Observers might be inclined to downplay this change. The assessed cost for capital, at 5.5%, is well below the market's required rate of return. And SASAC may not allow the firms to close plants, make positions redundant, and lay off employees. Veteran managers may try to outlive the interest in EVA, expecting SASAC's new standards to be unenforced. But SASAC's leaders expect a few pioneering companies to take the framework farther than the guidelines demand. To the extent they succeed in creating value for their shareholders, these companies could help bring about important change at many other Chinese companies.     

Regulating,joint bargaining,and the demise of precedent

Recent decades have seen a fundamental shift in the nature of economic regulation in the United States. Unauthorized by congress, and largely unnoted in legal and academic circles, regulatory agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission have changed the regulatory process by linking otherwise unrelated regulatory issues. Examples include tying merger approval to firm commitments to engage in conceptually unrelated build‐outs and other projects of political importance. This linking of issues has several effects, the most prominent being (a) tying regulatory issues changes the outcomes obtained, plausibly in predictable ways; (b) tying in some circumstances allows regulators to extend their authority to issues for which they have little or no legal authority; and (c) tied regulatory bargaining fails to produce valid legal precedent for firm decision making. We provide an analysis of these conclusions by examining the increasing use of consent decrees, voluntary merger commitments, and merger conditions by the Federal Communications Commission, referencing our discussion with a simple model of joint bargaining applicable to regulatory practice.     

Integrating Results from Children's Television Advertising Research

Children's television advertising is rapidly becoming a major concern to government agencies, citizens' groups and researchers in many areas of the social sciences. To this point there has been little integration of research efforts. This article presents a model of the processing of television advertising by children in order to organize and integrate previous research results and to act as the basis for suggesting future directions for research. The authors indicate that more involvement by advertisers is needed.     

Decomposing the effects of organizational memory on marketing implementation

There is limited evidence to explain the effect of organizational memory on marketing implementation. This paper addresses this gap by identifying multiple components of organizational memory and examining how each affects marketing implementation. Organizational memory is a collective recollection of the past that is embedded within firm culture, procedures, and expertise. The findings demonstrate potential tradeoffs to linking versus locking into the firm’s past, particularly in turbulent environments. By decomposing organizational memory’s effects, this paper explains how organizational memory can both enable and constrain marketing implementation.     

Writing the differences: Poststructural ist pluralism,retextualization, and the construction of reflexive ethnographic narratives in consumption and market research

Representing social realities in a narrative form is central to the interpretive processes by which market‐oriented ethnographies are constructed. In recent years, the process of textualization has shifted from a taken‐for‐granted aspect of the ethnographic enterprise to a central focus of ethnographers’ reflexive considerations. This shift reflects the realization that textualization poses dilemmas of representation that can not be resolved through additional fieldwork or other methodological procedures. This paper addresses these workbench problems by devising an alternative narrative formretextualization‐based on a poststructuralist version of critical pluralistic analysis. We first discuss how non‐realist genres of ethnographic writing have emerged in response to a heightened sensitivity toward ideological positions embedded in research narratives. We then discuss how the use of retextualization can facilitate the development of reflexivity in consumption research by destabilizing the representational authority of the ethnographic text through expressions of divergence, dissensus, and contested interpretations.