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The consumer is currently feeling the consequences of the global economic crisis, leading to decreased spending by tourists. An important economizing strategy appears to be that vacationers do not give up their holiday but are likely to travel closer to home, a phenomenon called “staycation”, but this is just one of a variety of options vacationers can use. If they make economies within a holiday, where do they get their ideas about economizing from? The purpose of this paper is to study information searching from the perspective of economizing on vacations.

The work reported on is a survey of Dutch vacationers who stated that they economized on their 2009 holiday.

The research shows that different sources have strong and weak points in relation to the different subdecisions that constitute a vacation. Information sources are used in concert for subdecisions; the strongest joint use involves marketer‐generated sites and e‐WOM, and brochures and travel guides. In the family context, a tendency is found to use more information sources the more economizing decisions are discussed.

For tour operators, it seems to make sense to make it easier to compare vacation alternatives that differ on subdecisions such as booking moment and period, and to offer a range of options from expensive to inexpensive. Also, making options more flexible in terms of downgrading on vacation features could assist vacationers who want to economize. Consumer‐generated sources could focus more on providing information and comparison opportunities for subdecisions.

Information searching is a widely studied area in vacation decision making. Two extensive literature reviews give an overview of factors influencing this search process. In this literature, a contribution on information searching to obtain economizing ideas in difficult times is absent. In this article, with the aid of five research questions, the role of information searching in relation to economizing on vacations is investigated.

To provide a framework for understanding and analyzing economizing in differentiated distribution networks.

The paper is conceptual and reviews and develops some of the concepts and ideas provided by Wroe Alderson. The developed framework is then used in combination with some principle empirical examples from the PC industry to illustrate how the framework can be used in order to understand economizing in differentiated distribution networks. The paper also brings forward some methodological concerns regarding the use of the transvection concept in an empirical setting.

The paper concludes that by using a transvection approach three key concepts with regard to economizing in differentiated distribution networks can be identified; crossing points, sorting, and uniformity. These are interrelated and together they provide insight with respect to the logic of economizing in these kinds of networks.

The paper brings forward some “old” Aldersonian concepts in a “modern” setting and shows how these concepts can be used to understand economizing in differentiated distribution networks. The transvection is reintroduced as a useful concept for analyzing distribution structures, and the author found, in particular, that the concept is highly useful for understanding today's modern distribution arrangements.

Much has been made of economizing. Yet, social scientists have paid little attention to the moment of economic failure, the moments that precede it, and the calculative infrastructures and related processes through which both failing and failure are made operable. This chapter examines the shift from the economizing of the market economy, which took place across much of the nineteenth century, to the economizing and marketizing of the social sphere, which is still ongoing. The authors consider a specific case of the economizing of failure, namely the repeated attempts over more than a decade to create a failure regime for National Health Service (NHS) hospitals. These attempts commenced with the Health and Social Care Act 2003, which drew explicitly on the Insolvency Act 1986. This promised a “failure regime” for NHS Foundation Trusts modeled on the corporate sector. Shortly after the financial crash, and in the middle of one of the biggest scandals to face NHS hospitals, these proposals were abandoned in favor of a regime based initially on the notion of “de-authorization.” The notion of de-authorization was then itself abandoned, in favor of the notion of “unsustainable provider,” most recently also called the Trust Special Administrators regime. The authors suggest that these repeated attempts to devise a failure regime for NHS hospitals have lessons that go beyond the domain of health care, and that they highlight important issues concerning the role that “exit” models and associated calculative infrastructures may play in the economizing and regulating of public services and the social sphere more broadly.

Boundary setting is identified as an important and highly useful factor, both in management practice and in dealing with phenomena in management research. It has significant implications for how circumstances and phenomena will be analysed and interpreted. Change – moving or change in nature – is a key factor in all attempts to strategise and economise. The authors argue that boundary setting is critical in analysing and interpreting business problems, both in the practice of management and in business research. The nature and function of boundaries vary. It can be exemplified with two archetypes of organisation – the integrated hierarchy and the connected company. In the first, the basic principle for boundary setting is buffering to protect the company from external variations. In the second type, it is bridging – connecting the company with specific changing factors. One important consequence is that when analysing and handling boundaries, both location and permeability become the central aspects to consider.

Economic development is the outcome of an interaction between creative intelligence and adaptive economizing. Inventors and innovators continually perturb the possibilities for production, consumption, and social organization. Adaptive economizing enables individuals to cope with changing conditions and take advantage of new opportunities. Any seemingly stable situation that emerges is temporary. The process as a whole evolves out-of-equilibrium.

This study examines how carbon tools, including carbon accounting and management tools, can be created, used, modified and linked with other traditional management controls to materialise and effectuate organisations’ response strategies to multiple interacting logics in carbon management and the role of sustainability managers in these processes.

This study utilises the construct of accounting toolmaking, which refers to practices of adopting, adjusting and reconfiguring accounting tools to unfold how carbon tools are used as means to materialise responses to multiple interacting carbon management logics. It embraces a field study approach, whereby 38 sustainability managers and staff from 30 organisations in New Zealand were interviewed.

This study finds that carbon toolmaking is an important means to materialise and effectuate organisations’ response strategies to multiple interacting carbon management logics. Four response strategies are identified: separation, selective coupling, combination and hybridisation. Adopting activity involves considering the additionality, detailing, localising and cascading of carbon measures and targets and their linkage to the broader carbon management programme. In adjusting carbon tools, organisations adapt the frequency and orientation of carbon reporting, intensity of carbon monitoring and breadth of carbon information sharing. Through focusing on either procedural sequencing, assimilating, equating or integrating, toolmaking reconfigures the relationship between carbon tools and traditional management control systems. Together, these three toolmaking activities can be configured differently to construct carbon tools that are fit for purpose for each response strategy. These activities also enact certain roles on sustainability managers in the process of representing, communicating and/or transferring carbon information knowledge, which also facilitate different response strategies.

The study demonstrates the various carbon toolmaking practices that allow organisations to handle the multiple interacting logics in carbon management. The findings provide suggestions for organisations on how to adopt, adjust and reconfigure carbon tools to better embed the ecological logic in organisations’ strategies and operations.

The authors identify how carbon toolmaking materialises and effectuates organisations’ responses to multiple interacting logics in carbon management.

Focuses on the basic concepts and principles of alternative economics; a new doctrine of economic thought centred around human communities and their natural environments. The ideas of Karl Polanyi, Ernst F. Schumacher, and Herman E. Daly are presented as the most important antecedents. Considering the economy as multiple interplay among natural ecosystems, economic organizations and human communities, alternative economics tries to find ways in which economies could have been made more ecologically benign and humane. Demonstrates the practical relevance of alternative economics to two fields: first, the responsibility problematics of economizing and, second, the question of how to form economic policies which serve real development.

The purposes of this study are to empirically test the differences among three major cities in India by their affluence level, selected factors related to consumer purchase behaviors, and to examine the regional differences in purchase behaviors.

A total of 652 usable data were collected from consumers of age 18 years or older residing in Mumbai, New Delhi, and Bangalore, India via mall intercept surveys.

Overall, the findings confirmed that affluence level in each region explains the variances in region's values, attitudes, lifestyles, and consumption patterns of foreign branded goods. That is, Mumbai (i.e. the highest GDP among the three cities) showed individualistic characteristics (i.e. lower levels of face saving and group conformity). Attitude toward economizing was found to be inversely related to a city's affluence level with Bangalore (least affluent) having the highest attitude toward economizing and Mumbai (most affluent) having the lowest attitude toward economizing. Mumbai and New Delhi consumers purchased significantly more foreign jeans than Bangalore consumers. In purchasing foreign brand goods, social attributes (i.e. brand name and latest fashion) were more prominent in Bangalore consumers who are the most collectivistic in this study.

The findings of this study convey a clear message: assuming Indian consumers are the same across regions is a mistake and a localization approach should be considered to market to each region.

This study is one of the first attempts to examine regional differences in the Indian market. This study adds empirical evidence that differing economic affluence levels are critical in estimating consumption differences by region.

Compared to external audit, internal audit has been charged with having no theory to guide academic research and practice. Suggests that the claims that internal audit has no theory have overlooked the theory of transaction cost economics. A variation of agency theory, transaction cost economics provides a conceptual framework for internal audit. Explains the theory that transaction cost economics provides for internal audit, and tests the theory with an experiment involving the usefulness of internal audit findings for senior executives in government organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the institutional context of the entrepreneurial discovery of blockchain applications.

This paper draws on institutional and entrepreneurial theory to introduce the economic problem entrepreneurship in the early stages of new technologies, examines the diversity of self-governed hybrid solutions to coordinating entrepreneurial information and draws policy implications.

To perceive a valuable and actionable market opportunity, entrepreneurs must coordinate distributed non-price information under uncertainty with others. One potential class of transaction cost economising solution to this problem is private self-governance of information coordination within hybrids. This paper explores a diverse range of entrepreneurial hybrids coalescing around blockchain technology, with implications for innovation policy.

This paper points to the problem of how the defining of the innovation problem as either choice-theoretic or contract-theoretic changes the remit of innovation policy. Innovation policy and blockchain policy should extend beyond correcting sub-optimal investments or removing barriers to action, to incorporate how polices impact entrepreneurial choices over governance structures to coordinate information.