bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Innovation and Organizational Learning: the Case of Computer‐Aided Production Management
Authors: Bessant John , Buckingham Joanna 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYRecent experience of unsuccessful implementation of integrated advanced manufacturing technology suggests that much of the problem is due to a lack of innovation in organizational in parallel with the technological dimension. Discussion of this issue argues the need for some kind of ‘organizational learning’ to obtain the full benefits of AMT. This paper reviews the topic of organizational learning in technology and explores its relevance to the problem of AMT implementation through the case example of computer‐aided production management systems.
The Market Provision of Management Services, Information Asymmetries and Service Quality—Some Market Solutions: an Empirical Example
Authors: Clark Timothy 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYThis article examines the problems of information asymmetry associated with the market provision of managerial services. Such problems are heightened by those characteristics which differentiate services from goods. Two unique, and central, characteristics of services, are intangibility and perishability. These create special problems for the market provision of services. In particular they make for difficulties in assessing quality; whereas the producer may know product quality, the buyer often does not. The asymmetry between sellers and buyers is of two types: Adverse selection and moral hazard. Adverse selection occurs when the buyer cannot observe the relevant characteristics of the seller or the conditions under which they work. The problem of moral hazard is the buyer's inability to observe the action taken by the sellers. If these difficulties are not overcome, the market could collapse as companies withdraw and internalize service provision. However, each market has a number of in‐built mechanisms which remedy the harmful effects associated with information‐related problems. The institutional arrangements which predominate in particular markets are dependent upon the trust‐producing mechanisms within those markets. Consequently, market responses to information asymmetries are far from uniform. The argument is illustrated using the example of the executive recruitment industry. In this respect the paper is a highly focused study of those mechanisms which overcome information asymmetries in one service market.
Managers' Perspectives on Making Major Investment Decisions: the Problem of Linking Strategic and Financial Appraisal
Authors: Grundy Tony , Johnson Gerry 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYMajor investment decisions are an important factor shaping strategic change in complex organisations. Traditionally, they have been primarily regarded as the domain of financial theory, with a few notable exceptions. This paper explores how the apparent gulf between strategic and financial appraisal of major investment decisions can be bridged. The approach taken in this research study was to explore linkages between strategic and financial appraisal from managers' own perspectives. These perspectives were examined through a learning process. This enabled managers to reflect and debate on their experiences and issues ‐ upon both strategic and financial theory(s). Unlike many prior studies, this research took a qualitative approach to data analysis and interpretation. This yielded a range of insights ‐ some of these amplified findings in earlier research studies; others suggested a more radical shift in thinking on strategic/financial appraisal linkages towards a closer fusion of the two disciplines.
On Being Stuck in the Middle or Good Food Costs Less at Sainsbury's
Authors: Cronshaw Michael , Davis Evan , Kay John 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYThe idea that successful companies should pursue only one strategy and avoid being ‘stuck in the middle’ between several strategies – originally articulated by Michael Porter – has become an important tenet of corporate strategic thinking. This paper attempts to distinguish and appraise several different interpretations of the advice.It is sometimes interpreted as advice about market positioning in a narrow sense; it is sometimes presented as prescribing broad strategic clarity; and it is sometimes viewed more descriptively as a scheme for classifying firms by strategic outcomes.When interpreted narrowly as referring to the appeal of a product to its target buyers, the proposition that firms should not be ‘stuck in the middle’ should not be taken to imply that companies must be down‐market or up‐market, but nothing in‐between. Such a view is belied by the evident success of companies such as Sainsbury's, which earn substantial economic rents in a mid‐market position.Porter can be interpreted more broadly as suggesting that firms need strategic clarity and that they will do better to pursue one or other of cost or quality objectives than to seek a mix of the two. PIMS data and other evidence shows, however, that intermediate positions are indeed profitable and are successfully exploited by many firms.We conclude that ‘don't be stuck in the middle’ is best employed as a classification scheme of strategic outcomes – it says that firms which fail in both cost and quality dimensions perform poorly.
UK International Joint Ventures: An Analysis of Patterns of Activity and Distribution
Authors: Glaister Keith W. , Buckley Peter J. 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYTo date no study has presented data which systematically considers the detailed activity of UK firms in joint venture formation over a significant period of time. This paper attempts to rectify this position by providing key statistics on the formation of joint ventures between UK firms and partner firms in Western Europe, the USA and Japan over the 1980s. The study examines several dimensions of activity: Trends in UK joint ventures over time, geographic distribution, industry characteristics, joint venture purpose, number of partners, contractual form and the equity share of UK partners.
Statistics in Management Education
Authors: Stray Stephanie , Naude Peter , Wegner Trevor 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYResults of two surveys are presented and indicate the statistical knowledge of past students from Master of Business Administration programmes, their usage of statistics together with their opinions about the statistical content of Master of Business Administration degree courses. These views are contrasted with the results of a second survey of academic staff who teach statistics on such programmes. We find that past students recommend a greater statistical content than is currently taught but, paradoxically, most of the academic staff associated with teaching the subject believe that the statistical content of their programme will decrease in future years.
An Exploratory Study of the Managerial Implications of Valuing Brands
Authors: Guilding Chris , Pike Richard 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYThis paper reports the results of interdisciplinary research extending the work of Mather and Peasnell (1991) reported in an earlier issue of this journal. Mather and Peasnell conducted an empirical analysis of the economic circumstances surrounding decisions to capitalize brands. This study investigates the managerial implications of periodically assessing and capitalizing the value of brands. Exploratory interviews were conducted with the key players in brand valuation activity, namely marketing and finance officials in brand‐valuing companies and two senior personnel in the leading international brand‐valuing agency. The recent inception of brand valuation in the accounts of several strong branded British companies provides an excellent research opportunity to explore a relatively novel managerial activity and its internal implications. These implications are reviewed under the headings: planning and control, the accounting/marketing interface, authorization of brand‐related expenditure and brand‐related decision making. An important finding of the study is that, while the original impetus for brand valuation came from balance sheet considerations, other unforseen managerial advantages are now widely perceived to accrue from brand valuation. The majority of current brand valuation activity appears to be driven more by management information needs, which are served by the evaluation phase of the exercise, than by a desire to capitalize brands in the published statements.
Stealing from thy Neighbour: Leveraged Recapitalizations and Wealth Redistribution
Authors: Markides Constantinos C. , Oyon Daniel 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYLeverage‐increasing transactions such as recapitalizations and leveraged buy‐outs are known to create shareholder wealth. It has been argued that the only sources of this value are efficiency improvements and tax benefits brought about by the higher debt load. This paper shows empirically that contrary to popular belief a portion of this wealth comes at the expense of current bondholders. It is estimated that between 20 per cent and SO per cent of the value created during a leveraged recapitalization can be attributed to wealth transfers from bondholders to shareholders.
The Learning Organization: Adult Learning and Organizational Transformation
Authors: Jones Alan M. , Hendry Chris 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYThe concept of the ‘learning organization’, with its roots in self‐development and action‐learning, has recently caught the imagination of many organizations and researchers. However, emerging definitions are creating ambiguity. There is, therefore, a need to add substance to them, and widen our understanding of what the concept means, by concentrating on what is meant by ‘learning’, and focusing on exactly how adults learn. Understanding and facilitating adult learning in organizations is, by and large, a confused activity that fails to connect with an individual's other experiences and needs, and with what modern psychology and research have to teach us. In particular, learning and skills need to be linked to the questioning of purpose and value in an organization.
An Examination of the Impact of Career‐Oriented Mentoring on Work Commitment Attitudes and Career Satisfaction Among Professional and Managerial Employees1
Authors: Aryee Samuel , Chay Yue Wah 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYData obtained from 164 proteges in managerial and professional positions in public and private sector organizations in Singapore were used to examine the impact of career‐oriented mentoring on three work commitment attitudes (career, organization and job) and career satisfaction. Factor analysis of the 15‐item career‐oriented mentoring scale (Ragins and McFarlin, 1990) revealed a five‐factor solution – coach, sponsor, protection, challenging assignments and exposure. These career‐oriented mentoring roles were differentially related to job involvement, organizational commitment and career satisfaction, and explained modest amounts of the variance in these outcome variables. T‐test results indicated that mentored respondents (N = 164) reported significantly higher levels of the outcome variables than non‐mentored respondents (N = 225). Limitations of the study, directions for further research and implications of the findings are discussed.
The Emergence of Flexible Networks in the UK Television Industry
Authors: Barnatt Christopher , Starkey Ken 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARY‘Flexibility’ became a management buzz word in the mid‐to‐late 1980s. Environmental pressures drove firms in many industries towards more flexible structures – away from internal, classical hierarchies towards agent networks brought together on individual project‐task grounds. The goal of many organizations, according to proponents of this trend, became that of seeking ‘flexible specialization’– integrating specialist resources in a dynamic, flexible fashion. Critics of the drive towards flexibility argue that the phenomenon has been overemphasized, and that large‐scale bureaucracies geared for mass production are still the dominant structural form. This paper overviews the arguments concerning flexibility and related arguments concerning the emergence of networked forms of organization. Flexibility trends within the UK television industry are then explored to illustrate the emergence of ‘flexible specialization’ and a ‘dynamic network’ form of organization. Television thus serves as an important counter‐factual to the dismissive claims of the critics of flexibility.
Measuring Research Performance in Business and Management Studies in the United Kingdom: The 1992 Research Assessment Exercise*
Authors: Taylor Jim 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYThis paper presents the results of a statistical analysis of the 1992 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE92) for the 85 business and management departments in UK institutions of higher education. The aims of the paper are, first, to construct a set of quantitative indicators of research outputs and inputs which can be used by individual departments for comparative purposes and second, to investigate the extent to which variations between departments in the research rating obtained in the RAE92 can be explained by these indicators of research outputs and inputs. One of the main findings is that around 80 per cent of the variation in the research rating obtained by business and management departments are accurately predicted by a regression model that contains only a small number of regressors. These include: size of department, articles in refereed academic journals, research students and research income.
The Economic Circumstances Surrounding the Decision to Capitalize Brands—A Comment
Authors: Cleaver K. C. , Ormrod P. 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYThe paper offers a reappraisal of the empirical study by Mather and Peasnell (1991) of 13 UK brand‐capitalizing companies. It argues that the findings of this study can be questioned on a variety of grounds including: method appropriateness, indirectness, timing and data issues. Specifically, it is suggested that their use of market reaction testing on this topic fails to capture the wide variety of economic consequences that may flow from brand capitalization.
Consumer Initiators: Adaptors and Innovators
Authors: Foxall Gordon R. 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYTheoretical and practical studies of ‘consumer innovativeness’ are currently beset by two problems. First is the proliferation of terms referring to ‘innovators’, ‘use‐innovators’, ‘innovative personality traits’ and so on which are both confusing and conceptually inexact. Second is the failure to account for the mass of weak evidence on which the notion of an innovation‐prone personality is based. The paper proposes a more coherent set of terms to designate the behavioural and psychological dimensions of innovative consumer behaviour, after which five empirical studies are presented of the cognitive style/personality profiles related to new brand/product purchasing and the use of computers for novel purposes. Contrary to the literature on adoption and diffusion, while many of the consumers with a propensity for these behaviours showed the cognitive/ personality styles widely attributed to ‘consumer innovators’, a substantial proportion, sometimes a majority, had the obverse profile. In terms of Kirton's adaption‐innovation theory, so‐called consumer innovators might exhibit either adaptive or innovative cognitive styles. Personal involvement with the product field also emerged as a powerful explicator of ‘innovative’ consumer behaviour. Hence purchasers of the highest level of food innovations were adaptors who were also highly involved in the product field; and while the heaviest users of software applications were those who were highly involved, both adaptors and innovators figured strongly among them. The findings suggest a more complicated psychographic composition of consumer innovators than is generally appreciated in managerial prescriptions for new product development and marketing, and in theoretical explanations of consumer behaviour which rely on conceptual abstractions such as ‘innate’ or ‘inherent’ innovativeness.
Exploring the Symbolic Meaning of Brands
Authors: Elliott Richard 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYThe symbolic meaning of brands of trainers is explored using a free‐response stimulus‐bound methodology. Gender differences in the meaning of brands are related to thresholds of elaborative processing of advertising messages. Age differences are related to transformational aspects of advertising for fashion products. The implications for meaning research and strategic brand concept‐image management are discussed.
Differences in Managerial Cognitions of Competition1
Authors: Daniels Kevin , Johnson Gerry , de Chernatony Leslie 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYIt has been assumed that strategic decision making and implementation are both achieved through managers' sharing homogeneous cognitions of competition (e.g. Porac and Thomas, 1990). This paper tested the assumption of homogeneity of cognitions of competition, using a sample of 24 managers from the off‐shore pumps industry. A variety of cognitive mapping techniques were used and maps were compared using a self‐rating methodology. The results indicated that managers' mental models of competition are diverse, rather than homogeneous, but that this diversity increases as company boundaries are crossed and as functional boundaries are crossed. Therefore, it is concluded that future cognitive studies of competitive industry structures should assume diversity of cognitions rather than homogeneity. Specific propositions with regard to such research are drawn from the findings.
Strategic Planning and Financial Performance in UK SMEs: Does Formality Matter?
Authors: McKiernan Peter , Morris Clare 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYThe majority of the literature on corporate performance in SMEs has indicated that the absence of formal strategic planning (or inadequacies in its process) can be directly linked with failure, while its presence can be linked to success (Bracker and Pearson, 1986; Stoner, 1983). However, other empirical evidence fails to find a relationship (Robinson and Pearce, 1983). These differences are due to methodological and theoretical problems facing research in this domain. This paper attempts to improve on both issues. The hypothesis that ‘formal planning is not associated with better‐than‐average performance’ is tested on a sample of SMEs, controlled by sector, using a 5‐year operating period. Five measures of financial performance are utilized, including both the arithmetic and geometric measurements of central tendency as appropriate. Moreover, perceptions of CEOs, rather than the aggregation of scale‐based measurements of organizational variables, are used to prescribe the measure of formality used in the analysis.
Crafting Evaluation Research in the Public Sector: Reconciling Rigour and Relevance
Authors: Gregory David , Martin Steve 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYThis paper examines some of the complexities involved in crafting evaluation research. In particular, it focuses upon the major methodological issues which confront researchers seeking to evaluate area‐based economic initiatives. It starts by examining the implications for the design of evaluation research of the political context within which it takes place and the multiplicity of stakeholders who have an interest in its findings. It then examines a number of key methodological issues which need to be addressed by evaluators in order to derive reliable assessments of the success of programmes and discusses the ways in which evaluators can communicate findings in order to secure greater influence both upon the academic and the policy‐making communities. We conclude that the need to reconcile applied policy research with the development of theories and concepts has important implications for the conduct and resourcing of evaluations undertaken by management researchers.
Market Orientation and Company Performance: Empirical Evidence From UK Companies
Authors: Greenley Gordon E. 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYThere has been little empirical investigation of a relationship between market orientation and performance, which is assumed to exist in the strategic management and marketing literatures. This limited empirical evidence is equivocal, and is dominated by only two US studies. The overall aim of the study reported in this article was to build on this limited empirical evidence about a relationship, by achieving new insights from another national business culture, namely the UK. Unlike the US evidence, the results from this study suggest that the influence of market orientation on performance is moderated by environmental variables. They suggest that market orientation may not be advantageous in highly turbulent markets, and in conditions of low customer power and high technological change.
Privatization and Agency Status: Identifying the Critical Factors for Performance Improvement
Authors: Parker David 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYEarlier research into the impact of public and private ownership on economic and financial performance concluded that performance may be affected but that the relationship is more complicated than policy makers have often assumed. This paper is concerned with explaining these earlier results in terms of changes in the internal environment of organizations. Six key internal characteristics are identified from the management literature and the history of ten UK organizations is summarized in terms of these characteristics. The model appears to be robust. Performance changes and lack of change are explained by the internal environment. The results are congruent with organizational theory which suggests that the internal environment has to adapt to changes in the external environment.
Accounting for Strategic Positioning: Responding to the Crisis in Management Accounting1
Authors: Roslender Robin 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYRecent diagnoses of a debilitating crisis within management accounting have quickly given way to the development and dissemination of many new techniques intended to restore the lost relevance of the discipline. Some of these techniques promise to have significant consequences for the future nature not only of management accounting but accounting in general. This paper identifies three generic approaches to relevant management accounting which are collectively termed accounting for strategic positioning, discusses the range of techniques which presently exist within these approaches and considers some of the difficulties involved in ensuring their widespread adoption. The paper concludes with some brief thoughts on how best to realize the full potential of accounting for strategic positioning.
Extending the Cognitive Approach to Strategic Change in Organizations: Some Theory
Authors: Sillince J. A. A. 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYThis paper claims that organizational cognitions are manifested as argumentation. Such argumentation can be represented as organizational construct systems (systems of constructs shared by important organization members). Such organizational construct systems enable us to detect structural features of an organization's cognition which indicate its chances of survival or failure.
Organizational Risk Perception and Reduction: A Literature Review
Authors: Mitchell Vincent‐Wayne 
Published: March 2005

SUMMARYDespite there being a considerable literature concerning risk in organizational buyer behaviour, necessary reviews of the area are not easy to find. This article attempts to organize, describe and appraise the current literature with a view to gaining a critical perspective for the benefit of future researchers. The discussion begins with the way managers view risk and factors which affect that perception and then considers the role of various risk reducing strategies employed in the organizational setting. Comments are made on the state of the literature and the further research required.