Maintaining Climate Change Experiments: Urban Political Ecology and the Everyday Reconfiguration of Urban Infrastructure

Climate change governance is increasingly being conducted through urban climate change experiments, purposive interventions that seek to reconfigure urban sociotechnical systems to achieve low‐carbon and resilient cities. In examining how experiments take effect, we suggest that we need to understand not only how they are made and assembled, but also how they are maintained within specific urban contexts. Drawing on literatures from urban political ecology and the specific debate on urban repair and maintenance, this article examines maintenance in two case studies of climate change experiments in housing in Bangalore (India) and Monterrey (Mexico). We find that maintenance is a crucial process through which not only urban obduracy is preserved, but also the novel and innovative character of the experiment is asserted and reproduced. The process of ‘maintaining’ experiments is a precarious one, which requires a continuous external input in terms of remaking the experiment materially and discursively. This process causes further reconfigurations beyond the experiment, changing the patterns of responsibility attribution and acceptability that configure the urban fabric.     

Monetary Union Viability: A Criterion Proposal

We propose a model that represents the dynamic behaviour of a monetary union comprising two countries whose natural interest rates are initially unequal. This initial disparity and the subsequent application of a common monetary policy generate different national inflation rates and lead to losses of competitiveness, foreign deficits, and the indebtedness of one country with respect to the other. We propose as a viability criterion for the modelled monetary union a combination of non‐explosive foreign debt and the ability of the central bank to neutralize the contracting effects of taking on additional debt to avoid falling into a liquidity trap.     

Why do entrepreneurs use franchising as a financial tool? An agency explanation

When and why one type of entrepreneur (franchisor) attracts to its ventures another type of entrepreneur (franchisees) instead of passive investors is a central concern in entrepreneurship literature. Based on the informativeness principle of the principal–agent model, we claim that franchisees are not such an expensive financial tool as has been argued in the literature because their compensation (return) is more efficiently designed: it directly depends on variables which are under franchisees' control. We therefore link agency and financial explanations for franchising. Most of our findings show that, once the agency argument is controlled for, the higher the cost of alternative funds for the franchisor (estimated through different variables), the more the franchisor will rely on expansion through franchising as opposed to company-ownership. We interpret this as a clue that franchising is also used as a financial capital source.     

Operations flexibility and outsourcing benefits: an empirical study in service firms

Outsourcing is a widely extended practice for many industries competing at the global level. Through outsourcing, firms are able to clearly define their core field of activities while transferring non-core activities to organizations enabled to perform them with higher degrees of efficiency. However, outsourcing is not exempted from some risks, especially those derived from process coordination, information sharing, or oportunistic behaviours. Operations flexibility can play a fundamental role in moderating these risks while increasing the benefits from outsourcing by decreasing the level of dependence on the outsourced activities. In this paper, a structural analysis is performed to analyse the relationship between operations flexibility and outsourcing benefits in service firms. Results show that higher levels of flexibility in the informations systems, markets, expansion, and personnel dimensions are directly related to higher outsourcing benefits.     

Trends in family business research

This study describes the structure and trends of the family business literature. We analyze the content of the papers focused on family firms published in any journal of the categories ‘business’, ‘business finance’, ‘economics’ and ‘management’ of the Social Science Citation Index during the 1961–2008 period. Bibliometric methods are used to describe the evolution of publication activity, the most representative contributors, the methodologies applied, and the content of the articles in order to explore the main themes researched. These analyses enable the identification of potential avenues for future research that could be meaningful to advance in the consolidation of the discipline.