The looks of a winner: Beauty and electoral success

We study the role of beauty in politics using candidate photos that figured prominently in electoral campaigns. Our investigation is based on visual assessments of 1929 Finnish political candidates from 10,011 respondents (of which 3708 were Finnish). As Finland has a proportional electoral system, we are able to compare the electoral success of non-incumbent candidates representing the same party. An increase in our measure of beauty by one standard deviation is associated with an increase of 20% in the number of votes for the average non-incumbent parliamentary candidate. The relationship is unaffected by including education and occupation as control variables and withstands several other robustness checks.     

Managing uncertain,complex product development in high‐tech firms: in search of controlled flexibility

This paper investigates ways of managing complexity and uncertainty in R&D simultaneously. Previous research on the subject indicates that these dimensions require different approaches, but these studies tend to provide suggestions either on managing complexity in stable industries or on handling uncertainty in less complex projects. In this paper, the two dimensions are studied simultaneously in three commercial product development projects at a firm that may be viewed as an extreme case of complexity and with multiple dimensions of uncertainty. The paper illustrates that a critical issue in this kind of high‐tech development is the search for and development of approaches that integrate and balance needs for formal organizational control with high levels of project flexibility. Four key elements of such integrated approaches are identified: hybrid formal systems, structured interaction in public arenas, transparent visual communication tools, and a system of participative reflection.     

Control Aversion and The Search for External Financing in Swedish SMEs

The discussion on growth (see Storey, 1997) and control aversion (Cressy, 1995; Chittenden et al., 1996; Cressy and Olofsson, 1996) in small and medium sized firms has been attracting an increasing amount of attention. Our purpose in this article is to identify under what circumstances small and medium sized firms are prepared to accept outside control in the business firm in order to grow. In the article it is argued that technology development, financial strength, size and perceived need to grow, change firms attitudes towards external financiers. The change in attitude towards more openness eventually leads to an actual behaviour where the principals choose to apply for external finance in the form of bank loans. A linear structural equation modelling program, LISREL, is used to analyse a sample of 281 Swedish firms. The firms all have less than 200 employees, and the sample includes both manufacturing and service firms. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Does belief in objective morality lead to coercion? An analysis of the arguments of Kelsen and Buchanan

Two leading scholars of the 20th century – Hans Kelsen and James Buchanan – both suggested that belief in an objective morality entails a disparaging attitude towards political and individual freedom. The main point was similar: Why let people decide for themselves, whether in politics or ordinary life, if what is objectively right is known? This paper presents their arguments and evaluates them, both by specifying three conditions that need to be met for the arguments to hold (the objective morality must be believed to be known, a belief in a known morality must entail a motivation to see it followed and the content of the known morality must not block coercion) and by relating them to recent experimental research (which nevertheless provides some empirical support).     

Born global or local? Factors influencing the internationalization of university spin-offs—the case of Halmstad University

A wealth of research in the past decades has examined born globals or international new ventures, which are firms that from inception view the whole world as a market and as a source to access resources. Many of these firms build their competitive advantage on high-tech knowledge. However, although many studies have shown how born globals can achieve success if they access resources through their relationships from actors in their networks, few studies have explored the relationship between born globals and universities. Universities are important actors in creating new technology knowledge, and many studies have shown how new firms, or so-called university spin-offs (USOs), are formed around universities. The current study explores why some USOs are successful in their international growth strategy and discusses the factors that influence and facilitate the internationalization process. The study investigates 10 USOs around the newly established Halmstad University in Sweden and finds that universities have a positive effect on firm creation and initial international growth. The regional competence base increases from the establishment of a local university, primarily by strengthening the regional human capital and by increasing university research. This study shows that researcher entrepreneurs’ ventures start as born globals, but that these firms do not continue to grow. Born global business models, per se, do not lead to competitive advantage and successful internationalization. Instead, a strategy built on customer focus and an ability to adapt to different customer demands lead to growth, and the location of growth is dependent on the size of the home market. This study also shows that student entrepreneurship can be a successful growth strategy for USOs focusing on both international and local markets.     

Antecedents of firm performance in emerging economies: Business groups,strategy, industry structure,and state support

A rich literature has investigated the antecedents of firm performance in developed economies, resulting in a consensus view that firm resources and strategy are the key determinants. Several arguments, however, suggest that in emerging economies other factors are more important for firm performance. This study analyzes the impact of firm strategy and industry structure as well as business group membership and state support on firm performance in an advanced emerging economy, Turkey. Using a data set compiled from a selection of the 1000 largest manufacturing firms in this country, the study employs several regression models to identify the main determinants of firm performance as measured by productivity and net profit margin. In contrast to studies of developed economies, the investigation finds that firm-related factors (competitive strategies) do not significantly influence performance; instead factors related to industry structure and business group membership are the strongest determinants of firm performance; further, state support interacts with business group membership and is positively related to productivity.     

Choosing one’s own informal institutions: on Hayek’s critique of Keynes’s immoralism

In the main, Hayek favored rules that apply equally to all and located such rules in tradition, beyond conscious construction. This led Hayek to attack Keynes’s immoralism, i.e., the position that one should be free to choose how to lead one’s life irrespective of the informal institutions in place. However, it is argued here that immoralism may be compatible with Hayek’s enterprise since Hayek misinterpreted Keynes, who did not advocate the dissolving of all informal rules for everybody. By avoiding this misinterpretation, immoralism can be seen as institutional experimentation at the margin, which Hayek himself favored.

A Preference-Utilitarian Foundation for the Generality Principle

The generality principle advocated by Buchanan and Congleton (1998), stating that only legislation which treats all citizens equally as citizens is permissible, is normally motivated on contractarian grounds. It is shown that the generality principle can also be motivated on preference-utilitarian grounds. This is in line with Hayek (1960), who defends the rule of law by reference to consequentialist considerations. Using Hare's (1981) terminology, on a critical level we realize that everyday political decisionmaking tends to generate rash and non-general outcomes and that a rule limiting the action space of politicians can induce a higher degree of total preference satisfaction.     

Managing asymmetries in information flows and interaction between R&D,manufacturing, and service in complex product development

Studies of new product development have demonstrated the value of effective interaction between research and development (R&D) and manufacturing, but few studies also include service operations despite their growing importance. Building on in‐depth studies of two firms in the capital goods sector, the paper illustrates how the structural differences between the R&D‐manufacturing and R&D‐service interfaces result in serious information and interaction imbalances, and presents managerial means to handle these. The paper makes three contributions. First, it shows the value of moving beyond a dyadic perspective to studies of more complex structures involving triads of specialized functions. Second, the paper underlines the role of informational flows that can compensate for asymmetries in such triads and facilitate thoughtful trade‐off decisions. Third, the paper highlights the importance of creating conditions for integrated knowledge‐based approaches across functions, which involve the generation and sharing of new knowledge. The paper ends with an emerging management agenda to support such integrative efforts in complex product development projects.