Search results

Geographical location has been of noted importance for technology entrepreneurship, i.e. technology clusters. While social resources have been investigated as strategic in management literature, media reputation appears to be an overlooked reason why technological entrepreneurship has been less prevalent in some geographical locations, despite there being fertile economic parameters. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Utilizing methodology developed by Rindova et al. to explore how media (local and foreign) describes technological entrepreneurship (local and foreign), the paper compares Boston, MA and Kolkata, India in terms of positive or negative valenced recognition and explores their relation to technology entrepreneurship location.

Geographical media reputation is contextualized and does not transfer readily. Unlike the absolute positives of economic reasoning, positive media reputation in the local context does not scale globally. Also, negative reputation is very hard to overturn at the global level. Social resources often have their own social dynamics that are localized in culture and environment.

This paper is an exploratory, illustrative analysis of the relation between geographical reputation at local and global levels and the location choice of technology entrepreneurship. Other factors do exist that the paper does not examine specifically but tries to match through sample selection, realizing no two geographical locations can ever be exact matches and in this case are rough equivalents.

Geographical location imputes social resources – namely media reputation – that can affect the location choice of technology entrepreneurship beyond economic considerations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the geographical location of and thus the geographical distance between buyer and supplier impact on the efficacy of purchasing practices (i.e. strategic purchasing management, tactical purchasing management, relational purchasing management) in terms of operational performance.

The authors utilise cross-country data collected through the International Purchasing Survey group across a variety of countries and industry sectors. The authors conduct exploratory factor analysis to assess construct validity and regression analysis to test the varying effects of purchasing practices on operational performance. The authors split the sample to compare potential differences in the efficacy of purchasing practices between buyers and suppliers through geographical characteristics.

The results indicate that the efficacy of purchasing practices does indeed vary depending on differences in geographical location. Specifically, the authors identify that in cases where the buyer and supplier are located in the same country tactical and relational purchasing tools have a positive impact on operational performance. However, in cases where they are situated in different countries none of the purchasing tools seems to significantly improve operational performance.

Research that has taken a cross-country perspective on the efficacy of supply chain practices is surprisingly sparse. Since most supply chains are becoming more and more global it is important to consider the geographical location of the supply chain members when assessing the performance benefits of supply chain practices such as purchasing tools. Thus, the authors introduce and test the concept of geographical distance on the efficacy of purchasing practices at the dyadic level. To test the implications of geographical distance for purchasing practices the authors use a large-scale cross-country survey.

Observes, while most school site management personnel are familiar with the multitude of visual representations of statistical data, via graphs and charts, the value of visual representations of geographical information remains largely unknown in educational management. Explains that geographical information systems (GIS), in addition to determining the exact geographical street address location of a client, can also overlay important SES, thematic information such as demographic characteristics (per capita household income, percentage, minority, etc.), and man‐made, and when natural geographical barriers are combined a powerful visual representation or picture of a client service area emerges. Describes how these visual representations of educational service areas can then be used to support educational policy analysis and school site management. Presents several illustrations of how GIS mapping procedures can be applied to school site management, planning and policy analysis. Draws three illustrations of GIS mapping from the school management areas of co‐ordination of school site outreach services to educational policy areas of ensuring “equity” in access to instructional services. Explores extensions of GIS mapping procedures to other areas in educational policy analysis and school site management.

Through an intervention from a geographical perspective on organizational space, this article aims to offer a new horizon in understanding international business strategy.

Starts with two interrelated questions: does space exist in organizations and how does an organization manipulate and produce this organizational space in order to gain competitive advantage? By tackling these questions in the context of international business activities, this paper engages existing (international) management theories.

This article critically reviews the narrow focus of most international business theories on physical location and distance as a significant determinant of foreign direct investment and diverse activities of transnational corporations (TNCs). Quantitative empirical studies in this genre tend to emphasize physical space as a mere “container” of different locations of TNC activities and to measure the distance between these locations as an independent variable in statistical models. Drawing upon recent theoretical developments in economic geography, the paper develops a relational perspective on business organizations. In such an organization space, there are no fixed locations manifesting themselves in physically measurable forms. Instead, locations and distances in an organizational space are relational and thus discursively constructed through actor‐specific strategies and practice. The paper argues that one key strategic goal of business organizations is to continuously expand its organizational space (viz. physical space) and to economize on this spatial expansion.

Reveals the need for a critical reexamination of existing management and organization theories to take account of how space and boundaries may influence the strategy, structure, and performance of business organizations.

Examines the properties of organizational space and applies the proposed concept to the case of TNCs.

A wide number of technologies are currently in store to harness the challenges posed by pandemic situations. As such diseases transmit by way of person-to-person contact or by any other means, the World Health Organization had recommended location tracking and tracing of people either infected or contacted with the patients as one of the standard operating procedures and has also outlined protocols for incident management. Government agencies use different inputs such as smartphone signals and details from the respondent to prepare the travel log of patients. Each and every event of their trace such as stay points, revisit locations and meeting points is important. More trained staffs and tools are required under the traditional system of contact tracing. At the time of the spiralling patient count, the time-bound tracing of primary and secondary contacts may not be possible, and there are chances of human errors as well. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to propose an algorithm called SemTraClus-Tracer, an efficient approach for computing the movement of individuals and analysing the possibility of pandemic spread and vulnerability of the locations.

Pandemic situations push the world into existential crises. In this context, this paper proposes an algorithm called SemTraClus-Tracer, an efficient approach for computing the movement of individuals and analysing the possibility of pandemic spread and vulnerability of the locations. By exploring the daily mobility and activities of the general public, the system identifies multiple levels of contacts with respect to an infected person and extracts semantic information by considering vital factors that can induce virus spread. It grades different geographic locations according to a measure called weightage of participation so that vulnerable locations can be easily identified. This paper gives directions on the advantages of using spatio-temporal aggregate queries for extracting general characteristics of social mobility. The system also facilitates room for the generation of various information by combing through the medical reports of the patients.

It is identified that context of movement is important; hence, the existing SemTraClus algorithm is modified by accounting for four important factors such as stay point, contact presence, stay time of primary contacts and waypoint severity. The priority level can be reconfigured according to the interest of authority. This approach reduces the overwhelming task of contact tracing. Different functionalities provided by the system are also explained. As the real data set is not available, experiments are conducted with similar data and results are shown for different types of journeys in different geographical locations. The proposed method efficiently handles computational movement and activity analysis by incorporating various relevant semantics of trajectories. The incorporation of cluster-based aggregate queries in the model do away with the computational headache of processing the entire mobility data.

As the trajectory of patients is not available, the authors have used the standard data sets for experimentation, which serve the purpose.

This paper proposes a framework infrastructure that allows the emergency response team to grab multiple information based on the tracked mobility details of a patient and facilitates room for various activities for the mitigation of pandemics such as the prediction of hotspots, identification of stay locations and suggestion of possible locations of primary and secondary contacts, creation of clusters of hotspots and identification of nearby medical assistance. The system provides an efficient way of activity analysis by computing the mobility of people and identifying features of geographical locations where people travelled. While formulating the framework, the authors have reviewed many different implementation plans and protocols and arrived at the conclusion that the core strategy followed is more or less the same. For the sake of a reference model, the Indian scenario is adopted for defining the concepts.

This paper aims to study the determinants of hotel performance, especially the role of location, in the Spanish hotel market.

The sample is composed of 1,034 hotels located in 97 tourist destinations in Spain during the period 2005-2011. The estimations were made by generalised least squares using panel data.

Overall, the results show that hotel attributes are the main determinant of performance. In particular, there is a minimum efficient scale in the hotel business. Location is the second most important determinant. This paper confirms that geographical location models, agglomeration models and competition models are relevant in the study of the effect of location on hotel performance. Regarding management practices, the performance is positively affected by good asset management.

Hotel managers can improve the total net revenue per available room by individually making decisions regarding its characteristics and management practices, especially size and asset efficiency. Moreover, they can collaborate with others (managers and policymakers) to manage tourist destination factors, particularly, demand level, accessibility, negative externalities and market concentration.

This research includes hotel characteristics, management practices and location as determinants of performance, by providing a broader framework of analysis than in previous studies. Regarding location, the empirical analysis considers simultaneously geographical location models, agglomeration models and competition models. The paper studies the Spanish hotel market, which is very important worldwide and which has heterogeneous tourist destinations, thereby making it a good context to analyse the relationship between location and performance.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a way of using already existing archival resources in the geographic information system (GIS).

The essence of the methodology used was to identify semantic relations of archival documents with geographical space and develop their metadata into spatially related metadata, ready to use in GIS and to join geographical names occurring in these metadata with exact places to which they were related to. Research was based on two digital collections from the Library of Contemporary History in Stuttgart on-line service. These collections were related to the First World War and they included metadata prepared in MAB standard.

As the results of the research, two sample metadata sets related to posters and ration coupons were developed. Thesauruses of coordinates of places and regions mentioned in documents metadata in different semantic context were also created. To complete the methodology, the assumptions of the GIS structure and concept of applying metadata in them, have been proposed.

The research also presents limitations in effective implementation of the proposed solutions, which lie mainly in lack of rules and consequences in recording geographical names in metadata.

The value of the proposed solution is easy way of using already existing data in GIS and possibilities of gathering, managing, presenting and analyzing archives with one parameter more than in traditional databases – with spatial information. The added value and an effective use of already collected data lies in the strong recommendation of defining and implementation of rules for recording geographical names in archival documents metadata. This will help in a wide use of collected data in any spatial-based solutions as well as in automation of process of joining archives with geographical space, and finally in dissemination of collected resources.

Several works have focused on defining an organisation mission. Ansoff, Levitt and Drucker, among others, have made seminal contributions. However, globalisation has brought new challenges and changes, in terms of both new risks and new opportunities. Thus: How does globalisation impact on how a firm should define its business? What remains valid, as before, and what must be adapted? And why? are questions to be answered. This study aims to accomplish this.

This paper discusses the task of defining an organisation mission on a global age.

One of its main conclusions is that, more than ever, defining a business mission, requires now that one incorporates location in the definition. Location includes three different things: geographical area, distribution channels, and time location.

It may seem paradoxical that, as globalisation advances, location becomes more important in a business definition. This paper explains why.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the relationship between firms' inventory accumulation and financial structure. It further investigates the impact of geographical locations on firms' inventory investment decision after controlling for firms' financial structure.

This paper uses a large panel of over 1,400 Chinese listed firms that issued.

Firms' financial structure, as reflected in the availability of internal and external capital, has significant impact on firms' inventory decisions. In addition, it is found that firms headquartered in major economic development areas (EDA) tend to have slower inventory growth than firms located in rural areas. Moreover, the results reveal that locating in major EDA facilitates firms' stockpiling of inventories through easy access to external capital.

This study not only contributes to the studies on the interactions between firms' location and their financing and investment policy, but also improves our understanding about emerging markets such as China.

Building on the Lau and Murnighan’s theory of fault line strength, Flache and Mäs (2008b) proposed a computational opinion dynamics model to explore the effect of demographic fault line strength on team cohesion. This study aims to extend the Flache–Mäs (FM) model to incorporate geographical location and the dyadic communication regime in opinion formation process. More specifically, we make spatially proximate agents more likely to interact with each other in the dyadic communication regime. Our results show that when agents update their opinion after each pairwise encounter, opinion polarization is lower at steady state compared to when they update their opinion after interacting with all agents. In addition, if nearby agents are more likely to interact with each other, we see greater polarization compared to the FM model with the dyadic communication regime. An immediate policy implication of this result is that organizational managers should design work space in a way that encourage wider communications between members of a team and avoid geographically local communication.

We introduce our computational models to study the effect of location and the dyadic communication regime on team performance (as measured by agents’ opinions on various work-related issues) in the presence of a strong demographic fault line. Our models are extensions of the FM model. For clarification purposes, first we describe the FM model and then elaborate our extensions.

The most important finding of this paper is that the timing of interactions plays an important role in steady state of opinion space in a given population. The reason can be traced to the path-dependent nature of social systems, in which initial adopters of a certain opinion or an ideology can significantly change the final configuration of a population. For example, if an early adopter of a given work-related issue in an organization has an extremely positive view toward that issue, and s/he interacts with nearby employees who have similar demographic attributes, we would expect to find an extreme opinion cluster with respect to that issue after a while. However, depending on factors that affect the timing of interaction between individuals, we would expect different outcome in the same organization. If, for instance, more extreme people are more likely to interact, the results would be different compared to when moderate agents are more likely to interact.

One immediate policy implication of the results of this paper is that organizational managers should design work space in a way that encourage wider communications between members of a team and avoid geographically local communication, if they are to temper the negative effect of a strong demographic fault line. However, they should be cautious and take other related findings into account to avoid undesirable outcomes. For example, according to Flache and Mäss’s results, managers can also initially encourage discussion within demographically homogenous groups and avoid controversial work-related issues. In addition, previous studies showed that more contacts between agents may increase opinion polarization. Our results provide no evidence for more complex and modern organizational designs where individuals or teams do not have a fixed location or stable geographical pattern. For instance, in a modern car manufacturing shop floor, it is possible that workers have to move with cars, or operational engineers have to move between different sections and places. Furthermore, there may be a flexible and dynamic work schedule for workers such that they share a same work station but in different time, which requires a more complex model than what we presented in this paper. In this sense, the geographical setting analyzed in this paper should not be generalized to all organizations or companies. We also have no evidence about other critical factors that might affect the communication and activation regime of individuals. For example, one could imagine a case that workers with the same level of skill in a specific work-related issue are more likely to interact with each other. Moreover, some specific organizational structures could impose additional restrictions on who can/should interact with whom.