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The purpose of the study is to introduce the idea of arena-relevant marketing capabilities and examine their impact on firm performance. Arena-relevant marketing capabilities are capabilities particularly relevant for success in a specific competitive arena in which rivals from different industries try to satisfy customer needs with alternative products and services. The authors focus on the luxury arena and pose the following research questions: Which are the arena-relevant marketing capabilities in the luxury competitive arena (i.e. luxury-arena-relevant capabilities)? (2) What is the relative importance of luxury-arena-relevant vs general marketing capabilities for firm performance in the luxury competitive arena?

To identify luxury-arena-relevant marketing capabilities, the authors conduct a qualitative study among 21 top managers of luxury brands. A subsequent large-scale managerial survey empirically tests the effects of luxury-arena-relevant vs general marketing capabilities on firm performance.

The study identifies four luxury-arena-relevant marketing capabilities: perfection in product creation, exclusive pricing, luxury-congruent storytelling and luxury brand inspiration. It confirms empirically that they have a higher impact on firm performance within the luxury competitive arena than general marketing capabilities.

The study takes an innovative perspective on marketing capabilities by linking them with the concept of a competitive arena and underlines the academic relevance of the concept of arena-relevant marketing capabilities for explaining firm performance.

These details and drawings of patents granted in the United States are taken, by permission of the Department of Commerce, from the ‘Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office’. Printed copies of the full specification can be obtained, price 10 cents each, from the Commissioner of Patents, Washington, D.C., U.S.A. They are usually available for inspection at the British Patent Office, Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, London, W.C.2.

THE aim of this paper is to calculate the natural frequencies and to consider the influence of the damping parameter on a wing's natural flexural and torsional vibration. The author took into account only the elastic hysteresis of the material because the structural damping, depending on the type of the aeroplane, cannot be taken into account in a general consideration.

This paper aims to study the impact of CEOs’ personality and social connections on corporate risk-taking in the Russian market.

Using a sample of 93 large listed Russian corporations between 2008 and 2016, this study tests a range of personal traits, including the classical personal characteristics like age and tenure, some country-specific traits such as connections and military experience, as well as other human and social capital characteristics.

This study finds non-linear relationships between corporate risk-taking and CEO age and tenure. This study also finds that firms run by CEOs with military experience take more corporate risk. On the CEOs’ social capital side, this study’s results suggest that both political and educational connections are positively related to corporate risk-taking.

This study also tests some traits that have usually been ignored by the literature, such as marital and family status.

A piece of frequently given informal advice to those starting in the world of research is to ‘pick a topic you'll be able to stick with for three or four years’ – and often that's the end of it. This chapter suggests that we should understand the importance of confronting the ‘affective gap’ in how research is currently conceived. It does so by considering how usually we do not engage with the issues underlying this ‘sticking with’ and what allows us to sustain our attention and effort across the years of a research project. Through a case study of my own confrontation with the question of how I chose and changed my own PhD research topic, this chapter introduces the idea of affective research through an exploration of the concept of affect and its relevance to research. The first part of this chapter explores affect through a brief overview of four different scholarly literatures, to provide an initial framework and some clarity for what is often an opaque subject. This is then grounded through an affective engagement with the issue of choosing a research topic and how this affects our research. It concludes with a brief overview of the other chapters in the volume.

Leading representatives of the European grocery industry formed the European efficient consumer response initiative in 1995. The goal of this strategic alliance is set to reengineer the way in which business is done in the industry by implementing cooperative strategies between retailer and manufacturer in order to fulfill consumer wishes better, faster and at less cost. Efficient consumer response appears thereby in many facets, from a “simple” dyadic value‐adding partnership to a sophisticated form of co‐opetition, where supply chain members have both relationship types – competition and cooperation – at the same time. Our paper discusses these issues first on theoretical bases and then presents empirical results of a comprehensive analysis within a selected European efficient consumer response initiative showing the success factors of managing efficient consumer response partnership relations.

Anthropologists have long discussed the ways in which their discipline has been entangled, consciously and unconsciously, with the colonized populations they study. A foundational text in this regard was Michel Leiris' Phantom Africa (L'Afrique fantôme; Leiris, 1934), which described an African ethnographic expedition led by Marcel Griaule as a form of colonial plunder. Leiris criticized anthropologists' focus on the most isolated, rural, and traditional cultures, which could more easily be described as untouched by European influences, and he saw this as a way of disavowing the very existence of colonialism. In 1950, Leiris challenged Europeans' ability even to understand the colonized, writing that “ethnography is closely linked to the colonial fact, whether ethnographers like it or not. In general they work in the colonial or semi-colonial territories dependent on their country of origin, and even if they receive no direct support from the local representatives of their government, they are tolerated by them and more or less identified, by the people they study, as agents of the administration” (Leiris, 1950, p. 358). Similar ideas were discussed by French social scientists throughout the 1950s. Maxime Rodinson argued in the Année sociologique that “colonial conditions make even the most technically sophisticated sociological research singularly unsatisfying, from the standpoint of the desiderata of a scientific sociology” (Rodinson, 1955, p. 373). In a rejoinder to Leiris, Pierre Bourdieu acknowledged in Work and Workers in Algeria (Travail et travailleurs en Algérie) that “no behavior, attitude or ideology can be explained objectively without reference to the existential situation of the colonized as it is determined by the action of economic and social forces characteristic of the colonial system,” but he insisted that the “problems of science” needed to be separated from “the anxieties of conscience” (2003, pp. 13–14). Since Bourdieu had been involved in a study of an incredibly violent redistribution of Algerians by the French colonial army at the height of the anticolonial revolutionary war, he had good reason to be sensitive to Leiris' criticisms (Bourdieu & Sayad, 1964). Rodinson called Bourdieu's critique of Leiris' thesis “excellent’ (1965, p. 360), but Bourdieu later revised his views, noting that the works that had been available to him at the time of his research in Algeria tended “to justify the colonial order” (1990, p. 3). At the 1974 colloquium that gave rise to a book on the connections between anthropology and colonialism, Le mal de voir, Bourdieu called for an analysis of the relatively autonomous field of colonial science (1993a, p. 51). A parallel discussion took place in American anthropology somewhat later, during the 1960s. At the 1965 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Marshall Sahlins criticized the “enlistment of scholars” in “cold war projects such as Camelot” as “servants of power in a gendarmerie relationship to the Third World.” This constituted a “sycophantic relation to the state unbefitting science or citizenship” (Sahlins, 1967, pp. 72, 76). Sahlins underscored the connections between “scientific functionalism and the natural interest of a leading world power in the status quo” and called attention to the language of contagion and disease in the documents of “Project Camelot,” adding that “waiting on call is the doctor, the US Army, fully prepared for its self-appointed ‘important mission in the positive and constructive aspects of nation-building’” a mission accompanied by “insurgency prophylaxis” (1967, pp. 77–78). At the end of the decade, Current Anthropology published a series of articles on anthropologists’ “social responsibilities,” and Human Organization published a symposium entitled “Decolonizing Applied Social Sciences.” British anthropologists followed suit, as evidenced by Talal Asad's 1973 collection Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. During the 1980s, authors such as Gothsch (1983) began to address the question of German anthropology's involvement in colonialism. The most recent revival of this discussion was in response to the Pentagon's deployment of “embedded anthropologists” in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. The “Network of Concerned Anthropologists” in the AAA asked “researchers to sign an online pledge not to work with the military,” arguing that they “are not all necessarily opposed to other forms of anthropological consulting for the state, or for the military, especially when such cooperation contributes to generally accepted humanitarian objectives … However, work that is covert, work that breaches relations of openness and trust with studied populations, and work that enables the occupation of one country by another violates professional standards” (“Embedded Anthropologists” 2007).³ Other disciplines, notably geography, economics, area studies, and political science, have also started to examine the involvement of their fields with empire.⁴

Popular constitutionalists seek to recover the popular sovereignty foundations of American constitutionalism, bringing the people in as active participants in the constitutional enterprise as they create and refashion the Constitution by “majoritarian and populist mechanisms” (Amar, 1995, p. 89). The result is to recover an understanding, in FDR's words, of constitution as a “layman's document, not a lawyer's contract” (Kramer, 2004, p. 207). This understanding has deep roots in American constitutionalism, tracing its lineage back to the founding and, as popular constitutionalists insist, finds powerful expression in the likes of The Federalist and Abraham Lincoln (Ackerman, 1991; Tushnet, 1998). In exercising popular sovereignty, the people founded the Constitution, but they did not simply retreat from the trajectory of constitutional development. Rather, as Bruce Ackerman argues, since the Constitution of 1787 the people have spoken in a manner that has re-founded the Constitution giving us a “multiple origins originalism” (Kersch, 2006a, p. 801; see also Amar, 1998 and 2005). In turning to founding era thought and the notion of constitutional foundations, popular constitutionalists like Ackerman and Amar make common cause with conservatives who turn to original intent, but then they seek to synthesize this understanding with democratic expressions of popular will by emphasizing both formal and informal constitutional change, giving us layered “foundings,” and a more complex version of “living constitutionalism.” Such constitutional change, however, can only legitimately come from an authentic expression of “We the People.”

LIBRARIANS in Britain stand at the threshold of great possibilities. Having passed through the ages of the ecclesiastical library, the rich collector's private library, the academic institutional library, and the rate‐supported public library—all general libraries —they have reached the age of the special library. The next will be that of the co‐ordinated, co‐operative library service.