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Ed Chung reviews Alan Gregerman's Lessons from the Sandbox

This article is premised on the idea that social networks represent an important, but often overlooked, unit of analysis in management and entrepreneurship studies. The concept of embeddedness, emphasizing the significance of social relationships, is of particular relevance as more and more frequently minorities and immigrants engage in small businessownership. This article borrows from the ethnicity and social network traditions, and offers that an analysis of the ethnic homogeneity of an entrepreneur's strong and weak social ties would be fruitful in gauging entrepreneurial success.

The College of St. Germain is a private, liberal arts college in the U.S. Midwest. Several faculty members developed and launched an academic business and economics conference. Despite of a lack of funding from the college, and a general apathy among other colleagues, the conference became financially self-sufficient and grew each year, with increasing attendance and submissions from many international scholars. Part A of the case focuses on the beginning, planning, and growth stages of the conference, and culminates with the successful conclusion of the third annual conference and planning for the fourth conference. Part B focuses on the fourth and fifth conferences, and concludes with the surprising cancellation of the sixth annual conference. The case highlights the challenges and accomplishments of the conference chairpersons and the organizing committee, as well as management, marketing, and leadership factors that contributed to the ultimate demise of the conference.

The functionalist paradigm has informed much of marketing research. In the last several decades, however, there has been increasing debate about the philosophy of science in marketing research. Today, some of the best‐known marketing researchers subscribe to a more interpretive paradigm. But how is this translated into publications in top marketing journals? Attempts to gauge marketing academe’s receptivity of alternative paradigms by surveying a sample of articles published in some of the top journals in the field. From 1970 to 1997, a slight shift towards the interpretive paradigm was found, but these researchers face an uphill battle in terms of acceptance as “mainstream”.

Attempts to show the underlying layers of contradictions and tensions beneath the illusions of harmony that have been socially constructed. Shows how organisation members may not be cognisant of the repressive structure that they themselves help to build and looks at how this structure is held together through hegemonic story‐telling. Reveals that while a strong sense of cohesiveness and group identify is often applauded as humanising, domination and control can be exercised through this process of identity development and that a common out‐group “enemy” can be adopted to divert attention away from the anxieties and tension of the current state.

The paper seeks to build on a model from extant literature which utilized a similar historical analysis approach in a study of strategic decision making. Using the (unsuccessful) defence of Hong Kong in World War II as the historical case, the paper seeks first to apply Chung and McLarney's model in the analysis, and then extend the model so as to better handle the unique sequence of events that took place in 1941.

The paper employs a historical case event in an analysis of competitive strategies. The first section provides a descriptive historical account of the battle of Hong Kong. The second section describes the decision‐making model, while the third section applies the model to explain three sets of decisions: the decision to defend the colony, decisions made during the battle and the decision to surrender. The fourth section draws implications for strategic decision making in organizations, while the last section presents conclusions.

Organization theorists seem to be fascinated with planning and strategy formulation, at the expense of strategy implementation. While designing organizational strategy is often more glamorous than execution, it is the execution of strategy that ultimately determines an organization's competitive advantage. Clearly, the strategy of the Allied Forces in Hong Kong was not hard to figure out (Mintzberg). However, there is growing research on how lower organizational levels have a tremendous contribution in fundamentally changing, formulating organizational strategy and sometimes even obstructing strategy formulated at the top. The decision to defend Hong Kong in the face of the Japanese invasion, decisions made during the battle and the decision to surrender were all major, critical decisions, especially susceptible to such biases as overconfidence, problem framing, availability heuristics and confirming‐evidence. Overconfidence is particularly dangerous.

The study not only modifies and extends the model, but also contributes to the literature by augmenting the validity of previous case research.

It is recognised that a sustainable competitive advantage is a necessary condition for a firm to survive and prosper. Specifically, companies need to embark on real, substantive business initiatives that will accrue to the company an asymmetrical, firm‐specific resource that will not be perfectly imitable by competitors, to borrow from Barney’s (1986) parlance. Barney’s notion of imperfect imitability is see as crucial in ascertaining the long run efficacy of any potential source of competitive advantage. A sustainable competitive advantage is one which is of value, is rare, has few if any substitutes, and in particular is not easily copied (Barney, 1986). The acquisition of such a sustainable competitive advantage is seen as the whole point of planning and executive business level strategies.

Examines two important streams of migrant consumer research, specifically the contributions made by the study of cultural values and migrant acculturation. Noting the inadequacies of focusing on just one single perspective, reports an interpretative research conducted with ethnic Chinese migrant consumers. Emergent themes are extracted to illustrate the lived worlds of migrant consumers as they negotiate their way in a new society.

Hong Kong is often portrayed as a society where conspicuous consumption rules. We wanted to find out whether this peculiar consumer behavior would still be transparent among Hong Kong people who have emigrated to Canada. Through a survey, we tested the subjects’ propensity towards conspicuous consumption (as measured by two established scales) and attempted to find relationships between the dependent variables and a person’s ethnic identification as well as the strength of the person’s ethnic social ties. We failed to find support for the proposition that conspicuous consumption is related to a person’s ethnicity. Offers explanations and directions for future research, and also serves as a warning to the marketer that blindly accepting stereotypes could be erroneous in a practical as well as moral sense.

Considers the pluralistic cultures which exist within a nation and outlines the history of previous research into this field. Introduces the concept of embeddedness which means that the society within which a person lives will influence their behaviour. Discusses intracultural differences and presents some research strategies for looking at the ethnic consumer.