Search results

The relationship between the economy and wider social structures and the extent to which these could be studied independently were important issues for both Marshall and Schumpeter. Marshall had clear views on the issue. As noted in the chapters by Arena, Hodgson, and Nishizawa, for Marshall, economics was concerned with the study of mankind in the ordinary business of life. Marshall warned against the separation of the study of economics from other social phenomena although he remained skeptical about the extent to which a comprehensive social science was possible.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

Purpose: The main goal of this discussion is to explain how competitiveness could be an important source of knowledge and economic power in a society, especially in the period of higher demands on knowledge, innovation and organisational base growth. Our focus of the discussion will be tourism as an important service sector economic activity in countries all over the world.

Methodology: The chapter will be conceptually based on its goal to develop the theories of competitiveness and to discuss how competitiveness influences knowledge, organisational processes and forms with a focus on tourism services.

Findings: Competitiveness in tourism depends on many factors. As an intangible source of knowledge, organisational culture processes and organisational forms generally influences tourism activity. For this reason, not only is comparative advantage important in the competitiveness concept, but also competitive advantage and the way of deploying resources play an important role.

Significance: Resources are not only based on labour, capital and land (neoclassical theory approach), but resource-advantage theory underlines the importance of financial, physical, legal, human, organisational, informational and relational capital. In this process, new processes and organisational forms must be created, as well as innovative approaches to processes and the importance of knowledge capital.

Practical Implications: New ideas about this process could be helpful for researchers and practitioners to recognise the importance of competitiveness for their work and research.

Learning object developers need to understand that presently there are powerful organizations of “intellectual property” owners, and vendors of music, videos, books and software that are making a concerted attack on copyright, attempting to convert it from a law to promote knowledge and the useful arts into a mechanism to protect and serve their special interests. This paper represents an attempt to overturn the misconception that copyright is simply about protecting the rights of authors and re‐introduce an understanding of the original foundational role of copyright in “promoting science and the useful arts” and inform U.S. and international readers of the concerted assault on our “fair use” copy rights as educators in the digital environment. The paper argues for the need to put an end to the “quasicopyright” laws that have severely curtailed the traditional rights of educational institutions and passed on responsibilities that previously were the purview of the copyright owners. It calls for a restoration of the balance returning copyright to its original educational focus.

I. INTRODUCTION This study attempts to extend and expand previous research conducted by the Department of Marketing at Strathclyde on the adoption and diffusion of industrial products.

Political economies evolve institutionally and technologically over time. This means that to understand evolutionary political economy one must understand the nature of the evolutionary process in its full complexity. From the time of Darwin and Spencer natural selection has been seen as the foundation of evolution. This view has remained even as views of how evolution operates more broadly have changed. An issue that some have viewed as an aspect of evolution that natural selection may not fully explain is that of emergence of higher order structures, with this aspect having been associated with the idea of emergence. In recent decades it has been argued that self-organization dynamics may explain such emergence, with this being argued to be constrained, if not overshadowed, by natural selection. Just as the balance between these aspects is debated within organic evolutionary theory, it also arises in the evolution of political economy, as between such examples of self-organizing emergence as the Mengerian analysis of the appearance of commodity money in primitive societies and the natural selection that operates in the competition between firms in markets.

The purpose of this paper is to present an objective decision-making framework and conduct a benchmarking study in the air cargo industry.

The decision-making framework and benchmarking methodology evaluates the aircraft value for money (VfM) as a benefit-to-cost ratio calculated adopting a measure of relative efficiency. This efficiency score is measured as a comprehensive efficiency index obtained by combining several efficiency scores calculated by implementing four data envelopment analysis (DEA) models.

The framework is used to carry on a benchmarking study in the air cargo industry on a sample of 27 airplanes. The average VfM is 67.04 percent, with measurements between 39.96 and 116.03 percent. Only three airplanes achieve full VfM and behave as benchmarks to the remaining airplanes. Boeing B727-200 is a broad player in the market. Some old cargo models (DC 9-30F) deliver the same amount of VfM as more recent aircraft models (i.e. MD-11F and A300-600F).

The decision-making framework and benchmarking methodology can usefully support managers to make sound decisions and plans. Even though DEA generates attributes weights to different alternatives that are independent of the buyer preferences, the framework flexibility allows introducing a weighting scheme to take into account the managers preferences for certain aircraft performance/functional features. It can easily include new functional/performance measurements and adapt the VfM measurement to the particular economic context, strategy, and business model of the airlines, or be transferred to different industries.

The framework combines technical, functional performance, and economic cost measurements to get a unique efficiency index to evaluate the airplane VfM.