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Deficits in fiscal and current account balances in a large number of countries reveal interesting implications of the causal relationship between internal and external imbalances. Empirical evidence about the occurrence of so-called twin deficits or twin surpluses provides crucial information about the validity of an intertemporal approach. However, most recent dynamic cyclical changes during the crisis period revealed many questions about the direct interconnection between macroeconomic performance and twin imbalances. In the paper we observe substantial features of twin imbalances in European transition economies. Event study (identification of large fiscal and current account changes and their parallel occurrence) and vector auto-regression methods will be employed to examine key aspects of twin imbalances. Our results suggest that current account deteriorations were predominately associated with negative public investment and savings balances (fiscal deficits), while current account improvements were predominately associated with positive private investment and savings balances, confirming empirical evidence about twin deficits in European transition economies.

Relationships are socially constructed by companies in interaction. This study explains the dynamic character of business-to-business relationships with the aid of rules theory, a theory borrowed from the communications field. Two forms of rules are identified: constitutive rules guide the interpretation of the other's acts, and regulative rules guide the appropriate response to the interpreted act. Rules theory asserts that companies act as if applying these rules. Relationships provide not only the context in which the parties’ acts are performed but are also the result of such acts. Thus, relationships are potentially reshaped each time one party performs an act and the other party gives meaning to that act and reacts.

Organisational decline has far-reaching, negative emotional and financial consequences for staff and customers, generating academic and practitioner interest in turnaround change processes. Despite numerous studies to identify the stages during turnarounds, the findings have been inconclusive. The purpose of this paper is to address the gap by defining these stages, or episodes. The characteristics of leaders affect the outcome of organisational change towards turnarounds. This paper focusses, therefore, on the leadership requirements during specific episodes, from the initial crisis to the full recovery phases.

A total of 11 semi-structured interviews were conducted with executives from the public sector in South Africa who went through or were going through turnaround change processes and 3 with experts consulting to these organisations.

Contrary to current literature in organisational change, this study found that, in these turnaround situations, leadership in the form of either an individual CEO or director general was preferable to shared leadership or leadership distributed throughout the organisation. This study found four critical episodes that occurred during all the public service turnarounds explored, and established that key leadership requirements differ across these episodes. The study shows how these requirements relate to the current literature on transactional, transformational and authentic leadership.

The findings on the leadership requirements ultimately inform the selection and development of leaders tasked with high-risk turnaround change processes.

Four episodes with corresponding leadership requirements were established in the particular context of public sector turnaround change processes.

For the benefit of those who want to address gaps in our understanding of business relationships, this paper seeks to conceptually frame investigation into critical interaction episodes that fundamentally strengthen or fatally weaken relationship development. It also considers the importance of non‐critical episodes in business relationships. Particular attention is paid to the enduring yet frequently modified critical incident technique associated with Flanagan.

Episode relationship theory, the qualitative/quantitative debate, and the critical incident technique (CIT) literature are selectively reviewed and critically assessed.

First, because business relationships tend to persist, episode research must advance beyond relationship dissolution studies and progress into investigations of how different types of interactions change relationships. New types of episodes need to be studied, such as the generative, degenerative, and neutral episodes discussed here. Also, functionally distinct characteristic and non‐critical episodes are conceptualized. Second, the methods review suggests that useful qualitative methods deserve more attention. Third, though CIT research is prevalent in the marketing literature, it is at present incompletely adapted to business marketing research and needs development along the lines suggested in this article.

The interaction perspective on business relationships is given a dynamic framework at the interaction episode level while keeping the connection to the more macro relationship development models that conceptualize relationship states and processes.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to understand how and why employee attitudes to change might change over time; and to demonstrate what type of research might best capture this change.

The paper brings together three studies of the same organization, conducted at different times by the same researchers.

Employee attitudes to change in the three episodes are portrayed in terms of the assumptions that seem to underpin them. The first episode is characterized by a challenge to the basic assumptions employees have about their work; the second, by a fragmentation of assumptions according to sub-group; and the third, by the confirmation of a new set of assumptions about what work involves.

The paper concludes that fieldwork of a longitudinal nature is something quite rare, and its incorporation into research design needs to move beyond dealing with it through an uneasy combination of retrospection and extended organizational exposure.

The paper provides a rare and valuable account of how employee attitudes to change might change over time. The research design on which it is based, though fortuitous in nature, overcomes a number of the weaknesses of more conventional studies in this area.

This paper surveys published economic studies and judicial decisions that contain 1,040 quantitative estimates of overcharges of hard-core cartels. The primary finding is that the median long-run overcharge for all types of cartels over all time periods is 25.0%:18.8% for domestic cartels and 31.0% for international cartels. Cartel overcharges are positively skewed, pushing the mean overcharge for all successful cartels to 43.4%. Convicted cartels are on average as equally effective at raising prices as unpunished cartels, but bid-rigging conduct does display somewhat lower mark-ups than price-fixing cartels. These findings suggest that optimal deterrence requires that monetary penalties ought to be increased.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interdependency of corporate architecture and organisation cultural change. Corporate headquarters have become symbols of corporate change ambitions to endure cultural value sets. The paper seeks to contribute to the growing interest in the re‐materialization of organisational change.

The study of spatial setting give rise to new methodological questions. There is a hermeneutic relationship between elements of spatial design and the meaning‐making of their designers and users. The reading of built space and other physical arrangements requires interpretative methods. Methods such as interviewing, observation and participant observation have been used to study three headquarter buildings of a Dutch telecom operator in a longitudinal study (1995‐2007).

It is argued in the paper that the organisation's spatial position in relation to the Dutch Government buildings is a reflection of the privatisation process. During this change process three symbolic and aesthetic different headquarters have been designed. Each of the headquarters is an embodiment of the change ambitions in the different phases. The building is a physical embodiment of the organisational change history.

The paper stresses the symbolic richness of physical arrangements, artefacts and aesthetic dimensions and the embodiment of cultural change processes. Given the large interest of organisations in architectural design to support organisational change the interdependency, change managers should be included in the architectural design process at an early stage.

Although many scholars ask for a spatial turn in organisation studies, not many empirical studies have been done. This paper tries to fill in this gap.

Robots face fundamental challenges in achieving reliable and stable operations for complex home service scenarios. This is one of the crucial topics of robotics methods to imitate human beings’ advanced cognitive characteristics and apply them to solve complex tasks. The purpose of this study is to enable robots to have the ability to understand the scene and task process in complex scenes and to provide a reference method for robot task programming in complex scenes.

This paper constructs a task modeling method for robots in complex environments based on the characteristics of the perception-motor memory model of human cognition. In the aspect of episodic memory construction, the task execution process is included in the category of qualitative spatio-temporal calculus. The topology interaction of objects in a task scenario is used to define scene attributes. The task process can be regarded as changing scene attributes on a time scale. The qualitative spatio-temporal activity graphs are used to analyze the change process of the object state with time during the robot task execution. The tasks are divided according to the different values of scene attributes at different times during task execution. Based on this, in procedural memory, an object-centered motion model is developed by analyzing the changes in the relationship between objects in the scene episode by analyzing the scene changes before and after the robot performs the actions. Finally, the task execution process of the robot is constructed by alternately reconstructing episodic memory and procedural memory.

To verify the applicability of the proposed model, a scenario where the robot combines the object (one of the most common tasks in-home service) is set up. The proposed method can obtain the landscape of robot tasks in a complex environment.

The robot can achieve high-level task programming through the alternating interpretation of scenarios and actions. The proposed model differs from traditional methods based on geometric or physical feature information. However, it focuses on the spatial relationship of objects, which is more similar to the cognitive mechanism of human understanding of the environment.

The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the speed and magnitude of exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) to consumer prices in Ghana.

The Johansen Maximum Likelihood approach is employed in the estimation of different models of symmetric and asymmetric ERPT. Specifically asymmetric ERPT models with respect to the direction and size of exchange rate changes are estimated.

Results reveal that even though a depreciation in the nominal effective exchange rate will lead to an increase of consumer prices in the long-run, it is not statistically significant. Evidence also suggests a significant asymmetry with respect to direction and size of exchange rate changes. This indicates that the right ERPT model is an asymmetric model. Specifically ERPT is found to be incomplete but relatively higher in periods of depreciation than in periods of appreciation; that is 53 percent against 3 percent. ERPT is also higher during episodes of large changes (about 51 percent).

It would have been interesting to analyze the impact on consumer prices through changes in import prices. That approach was not adopted due to lack of consistent data on import prices in Ghana.

It is imperative that the monetary authorities critically monitor exchange rate movements in order to be able to take swift policy action so as to counteract any inflationary pressures from the external sector. In particular, much attention should be paid to events and arrangements that could result in large depreciation of the exchange rate.

While previous studies have assumed a symmetric ERPT model for Ghana, this paper is unique in that it investigates the most appropriate model for examining ERPT in Ghana whether symmetric or an asymmetric.

Adding to the theoretical view of relationship development, this paper holds the view that relationship change encompasses not only smooth incremental change but also includes crises which can trigger relationship weakening, dissolution and/or recovery. The aim is to develop a theoretical view that allows understanding of both smooth incremental and critical changes in the process of relationship development.

Based on a business network perspective, the paper's relationship view holds uncertainty, commitment and trust as central explanatory elements. The process view is composed of three episodes: incremental relationship development; relationship crisis; and ending or survival. The paper employs a longitudinal case study method and discusses how the relationship between the Swedish firm, Ericsson, and its counterpart, Telefónica, develops in the emerging market of Argentina during the period of 1998-2004.

Conclusions demonstrate the vulnerability of relationships due to counterparts' behaviour and network embeddedness. This is a risk of commitment deterioration, and remedial actions like investment in new commitments will reduce distrust and uncertainty. Re-energizing relationships incrementally requires behaviour like waiting strategies, when otherwise the choice is to exit.

Few researchers have combined the findings from stable relationship development studies with the findings from research on crisis into one model handling both stability and instability in business relationships. This is despite the fact that episodes of turbulence and instability are becoming more common in business relationships, due to entrance into more unstable markets, and markets crises of various types.