The role of schedule delays on passengers’ choice of access modes: A case study of Japan’s international hub airports

We empirically study passenger modal-choice behavior to access an international hub airport, by using stated preference (SP) data and by constructing a binomial logit model. We found that passenger modal choice is affected by the service level of the access modes: travel time, travel cost, waiting time, and delay cost. The results also indicate that if passengers choose access mode in advance they consider service frequency: departure timing from home, and the arrival timing at the airport. Moreover, our results indicate that travelers’ willingness to pay for saving time differs by time of a day. They are apt to pay more in the morning than in the afternoon. These outcomes must contribute to improve the access flight service from local to hub airports to handle the needs of passengers.     

Impacts of Prime‐age Adult Mortality on Labour Supply: Evidence from Adolescents and Women in South Africa*

This paper examines the impact of prime‐age adult mortality on the transition made by adolescents from school to the labour market and on female adult labour force participation decisions in South Africa. We find, first, that deaths of prime‐age adults significantly increase both male and female adolescents’ labour force participation as they stop their schooling. Secondly, the death of prime‐age adults in general also decreases school enrolment ex ante. Thirdly, female adults tend to join the labour force following the death of prime‐age adult males. These findings imply that prime‐age adult mortality increases labour supply and disrupts human capital formation.     

Reflexive Organizing for Knowledge Sharing: An Ethnomethodological Study of Service Technicians

This study examines how organizing is done reflexively through practice in the context of knowledge sharing. Organizing concerns reduction of equivocality and sensemaking so that actions can be interpreted and coordinated. Reflexivity refers to the fact that this organizing is done through talk, and that talk is an action that requires organizing. To examine how this reflexive organizing is accomplished, detailed analysis of video‐recorded interactions among photocopier service technicians revealed various interactional methods to make actions of requesting and offering assistance understandable and relevant. To explain these methods, Goffman's concept of embedding is applied. By embedding other social situations in the current talk, one can project a certain sense of one's talk. This reflexive organizing clarifies that organizing is part of, not separate from, any practice and that knowledge sharing is accomplished not through a retrospective narrative but through reflexive construction of the situation in which talk is made possible.     

Brands as labour rights advocates? Potential and limits of brand advocacy in global supply chains

There is a growing phenomenon of brand advocacy, where brands pressure a producer country government to take pro‐worker actions such as respecting the rights of activists and raising minimum wages. This article examines the potential and limits of brand advocacy by developing a conceptual framework and analysing three recent cases of brand advocacy in Cambodia's garment industry. The study shows that brands' action and influence are shaped by issue salience, mobilization structures, political opportunities/contexts, and resource dependency. This article makes both empirical and theoretical contributions. This is one of the first studies delving into the advocacy role of brands in promoting labour rights and conditions vis‐à‐vis government. Moreover, the article develops a testable framework specifying the conditions under which brands are likely to respond, act collectively, and influence government for pro‐worker change. It also offers novel insights by applying social movement lenses and casting brands as social movement actors.     

Social learning,neighborhood effects,and investment in human capital: Evidence from Green-Revolution India

This paper empirically identifies social learning and neighborhood effects in schooling investments in a new technology regime. Social learning implies that learning is most efficient when observed heterogeneity in schooling is greatest. The estimates of learning-investment rule, from farm household panel data at the onset of the Green Revolution in India, show that (i) agents learn about schooling returns from income realizations of their neighbors, and (ii) the speed of learning is high when the variation of schooling is large. Thus, schooling distribution of the parents' generation in a community has externalities to schooling investments in children. Simulations show that the variations in schooling within and across communities generate variations in child enrollment rate and average household income.     

Japanese nonprofit sector in comparative perspective

Nonprofit organizations have long been less visible in Japan than in most other developed countries. But this does not imply that Japan does not have a sizable nonprofit sector. To the contrary, large numbers of Japanese hospitals, universities, social service organizations, and community groups are essentially not‐for‐profit in form.     

Local assimilation of an enterprise system: Situated learning by means of familiarity pockets

Once a new information system is introduced to the workplace, individuals confront it and struggle to make sense of it. Over time, it must be somehow learned and assimilated into everyday work practices. Enterprise systems, because they are complex and integrate work across functions and distance, pose special challenges to learning at the firm's periphery, where local users are distanced from both the centralized system and others elsewhere, and where a community of learning may be thin or lacking. The present study, using direct observations and interviews at a bank in which a new CRM system was introduced across small regional branch offices, explicates the local learning process. Findings suggest that in assimilating the system, bank representatives created familiarity pockets within which they routinely worked with it and outside of which they competently ignored it. Even within familiarity pockets, routine use of the system, while skilled, masked much that was not known by the bank reps. In short, in local assimilation of enterprise systems, knowing in practice may be constituted as much from what can be competently and routinely ignored by users, as from any deep knowledge of the system itself.     

Structural Variations of Agriculture in the Pacific

Agricultural shares of output and employment in thirteen Pacific basin countries are analyzed with reference to a global baseline for 1980. Per-capita output parity ratios are lower in the ASEAN, ANICs, and Japan as compared to their trading partners in North America and Oceania. Wide differences in land-labor ratios influence the directions of technological change, economies of scale, and dynamic comparative advantage. Differential changes in the partial productivities of land and labor between the high and middle income economies suggest that there has been a narrowing of the gap in land productivities and a widening of the gap in labor productivities across the Pacific. The implication is that there has been a regressive international impact on wages for farm labor. Further, since agriculture's share of land resources does not tend to fall as fast as its share of output and labor, increasing structural imbalance in terms of differential land rents to agriculture vis-à-vis non-agriculture results in greater adjustment pressures on the property and derived institutional systems that control natural resource allocation decisions. The results are consistent with the heavy adjustment burdens that agriculture and developing economies have been bearing as a result of expanding trade and capital flows, and the need to focus more attention on the structure, functioning, and performance of the different institutional systems that control resource allocation decisions in these countries.     

Agricultural policy adjustments in the Korean rice economy

A political preference function is used to endogenize government actions in a simultaneous equation model for South Korean rice policy. The effects of economic changes on rice pricing decisions through estimated political weights are tested to improve our understanding of policy adjustments in that country and open the way for further research in East Asia.     

Should reciprocity be a part of the UNCITRAL Model Cross-Border Insolvency Law?

In 1997, the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law adopted a Model Law on Cross Border Insolvency. Since then, many countries have passed it or a revised version of it. In many cases, the adopting country wrestled with the issue of whether to include a reciprocity provision in its version. Some have included such a provision, others have not. The inclusion of a reciprocity provision is not consistent. This article discusses the concept and argues that a reciprocity provision could be detrimental to the operation of the Model Law and prejudicial to the parties; especially those in the country whose legislation includes such a provision. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.