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ON October 19 the Minister of Aviation formally opened the two new high‐speed wind tunnels which have been constructed at Wharton, Lancashire, for English Electric Aviation Ltd.

IT was in September, 1950, that Alcan Industries Ltd. (or the Northern Aluminium Co. as it then was) opened the continuous strip mill at Rogerstone in South Wales. In March, 1958, new plate handling facilities were inaugurated, and it was announced at that time that the company had embarked on a four‐year programme of expansion which would involve an investment of a further £8 million in new plant and buildings, with the intention of increasing the output of rolled aluminium to 75,000 tons a year. This ambitious programme has now reached the halfway stage with the installation of a 144 in. hot rolling mill, and on October 6 Alcan Industries Ltd. invited us to inspect the present stage of development at the Rogerstone works.

THE paper began with a brief historical survey of the cold extrusion process since its first practical use over sixty years ago. The extrusion of special materials such as molybdenum, beryllium and zirconium was described. The problems relating to the production of suitable tooling for the extrusion process and the preparation, heat treatment and lubrication of extrusion billets and slugs were discussed. Following discussion on temperature and speed effects, prestrain of work material, presses for extrusion and component design, the paper concluded with an outline of the applications and advantages of the cold extrusion process.

Manufacturers use communication strategies to inform potential consumers of their product's existence, its main features and benefits, its advantages over competing products, with the aim of persuading them that purchase is a desirable action. This set of promotion objectives is based on models of consumer decision making which are coming under increasing attack. The relevance of the accepted process of choice with other conceptions is compared. How manufacturers may have to modify their promotional activities to satisfy our present knowledge of how consumers acquire and use information is considered.

Semi‐structured focused interviews were used to analyse the supposedly extended decision process involved in the choice of video recorder. The results suggested that the proposed three‐stage model was a meaningful reflection of the decision‐making process. First the respondents clarified the problems and benefits of video recorders. Next they created consideration and choice sets excluding more extensive searching. Conjunctive decision rules (weirs) were used to simplify the final decision. The implications for manufacturers are discussed.

Retailer bankruptcy provides an opportunity for studying the relationships among members of a channel of distribution because bankruptcy disturbs the ongoing pattern of such relationships. This study employs qualitative research to model the criteria that suppliers use in selecting their response to a bankrupt retailer. Results show that suppliers who continue cooperative behavior with a retailer employ a model that assesses whether the risks in continuing to supply that retailer are in balance with the outcomes generated from the relationship. However, behavioral variables appear relevant as well: retailers appear to benefit from adopting a collaborative communication strategy and building supplier confidence so that a turnaround will in fact occur.

This study seeks to explicate how institutional disruptions impact multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiary control choices. It uses institutional theory to understand the influence of formal and informal institutions across countries on the type of control system employed in an MNC manufacturing subsidiary.

This study’s sample is based on a unique dataset from five trustworthy sources. We use multi-level models to account for the hierarchical nature of the sample of 1,630 multinational subsidiaries spread across 26 host countries by firms from 21 home countries.

The institutional distance between the host and the home country has a negative relationship with strategic control. In contrast, the home country’s power distance has a positive relationship with strategic control.

Study findings indicate the need to incorporate formal and informal institutional elements in the control system’s conceptual framing and design. This notion complements existing visualizations of optimizing MNC controls through extant articulations of minimizing governance costs through organizational design choices or strategic needs.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.

This article reviews the extensive history of dynamic performance research, with the goal of providing a clear picture of where the field has been, where it is now, and where it needs to go. Past research has established that job performance does indeed change, but the implications of this dynamism and the predictability of performance trends remain unresolved. Theories are available to help explain dynamic performance, and although far from providing an unambiguous understanding of the phenomenon, they offer direction for future theoretical development. Dynamic performance research does suffer from a number of methodological difficulties, but new techniques have emerged that present even more opportunities to advance knowledge in this area. From this review, I propose research questions to bridge the theoretical and methodological gaps of this area. Answering these questions can advance both research involving job performance prediction and our understanding of the effects of human resource interventions.

How do organizations respond to negative feedback regarding their innovation activities? In this chapter, the authors reconcile contradictory predictions stemming from behavioral learning and from the escalation of commitment (EoC) perspectives regarding persistence under negative performance feedback. The authors core argument suggests that the seemingly contradictory psychological processes indicated by these two perspectives occur simultaneously in decision makers but that the design of organizational roles and reward systems affects their prevalence in decision-making tasks. Specifically, the authors argue that for decision makers responsible for an individual project, responses given to negative performance feedback regarding a project are dominated by self-justification and loss-avoidance mechanisms predicted by the EoC literature, while for decision makers responsible for a portfolio of projects, responses to negative performance regarding a project are dominated by an under-sampling of poorly performing alternatives that behavioral learning theory predicts. In addition to assigning decision-making authority to different organizational roles, organizational designers shape the strength of these mechanisms through the design of reward systems and specifically by setting more or less ambiguous goals, aspiration levels, time horizons of incentives provided, and levels of failure tolerance.