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In the rapidly changing and globalizing environment, mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have become increasingly important. In this study, we paid specific attention to the voluntary announcements of M&A budgets by Japanese firms. We discussed the antecedents and consequences of such announcements by incorporating the context of Japan, which has experienced an enduring economic downturn since 1990 and is in the process of adopting a Western style of governance. Drawing on signaling theory and impression management theory, this exploratory study intended to contribute to the literature by incorporating the influence of the social context and by arguing for the possibility that announcements of M&A budgets may be used not only for strategic purposes but also for impression management and to reduce information asymmetry.

Unions representing 40 percent of union membership broke away from the AFL-CIO in 2005 to form a rival federation, Change to Win (CTW). CTW leaders argued that the AFL-CIO placed too much emphasis on politics and too little on organizing new workers. This study looks at the potential impact of the split on laborʼs political action in lobbying and electoral mobilization. It examines differences between Change to Win and AFL-CIO affiliates in their political action committee spending, their support of Democrats, and their overall political spending on lobbying and electoral mobilization and concludes that CTW unions are no less reliant on political action than AFL-CIO unions and are likely to continue their involvement in politics.

I. Introduction to the Study of the Economic Role of Government: Alternative Approaches to Law and Economics

Women and marketing have had a complicated relationship for a considerable time. They have often been involved with marketing‐type practices for longer than we have appreciated to date. Against considerable odds, some have carved out careers in academia and practice that have to be admired. The purpose of this paper is to explore the work of two pioneer contributors to marketing.

This paper engages in a close reading of the work of two female contributors. Their writing is placed in historical context which helps reveal the obstacles they had to overcome to succeed.

Female teachers, lecturers and practitioners had an important role to play in theorising consumer practice and helping people to successfully negotiate a complex marketplace replete with new challenges, difficulties and sometimes mendacious marketers seeking to profit from the limited knowledge consumers possessed.

This paper explores the writings of a practitioner and scholar respectively whose work has merited only limited attention previously. More than this, it links the arguments that are made to the papers that appear in the rest of the special issue.

The two sets of notes, taken only three years apart are substantially similar in organization and content. We document differences identified in a line-by-line comparison in Table 1. Generally, the 1996 course notes reproduced here more prominently feature the work of legal scholars, from Oliver Wendell Holmes to St. George Tucker. Curiously, many of these references were removed from the later version, as well as nearly all discussion on legal precedent established by Supreme Court cases. The overall effect of these changes is a marked shift away from a critical legal studies approach to the economic role of government and toward a more focused neoclassical lens.

A trend has been developing in the United States towards the use of vertical marketing systems. Of the many types of vertical marketing systems, franchising has become one of the most dominant. This is evidenced, in part, by the nearly one‐third of retail sales in 1973 that were through franchised retailers (US Department of Commerce, 1974). The success of the franchise form of distribution hinges upon franchisors and franchisees both contributing skills and resources, frequently however franchisees and franchisors become dissatisfied with the other's contributions and actions. This dis‐satisfaction in some cases leads to substantial friction. Although it is not clear that conflict (friction) will always decrease channel efficiency it is probably safe to assume that continued conflict would be dysfunctional in a franchise channel. It is therefore the purpose of this article to discuss and empirically test several propositions about the franchisee's satisfaction with his franchisor.

The first Wisconsin Ph.D.s who came to MSU with an institutional bent were agricultural economists and included Henry Larzalere (Ph.D. 1938) whose major professor was Asher Hobson. Larzalere recalls the influence of Commons who retired in 1933. Upon graduation, Larzalere worked a short time for Wisconsin Governor Phillip Fox LaFollette who won passage of the nation’s first unemployment compensation act. Commons had earlier helped LaFollette’s father, Robert, to a number of institutional innovations.⁴ Larzalere continued the Commons’ tradition of contributing to the development of new institutions rather than being content to provide an efficiency apologia for existing private governance structures. He helped Michigan farmers form cooperatives. He taught land economics prior to Barlowe’s arrival in 1948, but primarily taught agricultural marketing. One of his Master’s degree students was Glenn Johnson (see below). Larzalere retired in 1977.

“Where HAS that book been reviewed?” This question seemed to arise daily during my work as Adult Services Consultant for an upstate New York library system. Since I was responsible for the selection of new titles for the system pool collection as well as preparing buying lists for member libraries, I felt the need to have some way of “pulling together” all the reviews for new titles as they appeared in the book review media. It seemed to me that the book review indexes currently being published were inadequate in several ways, especially in the timely listing of current reviews and in the fact that you usually had to know the author's name in order to find citations to the reviews. How did I progress from perceiving a need for a more current listing of citations to book reviews and actually publishing my own index, Title Index of Current Reviews? Initially, several seemingly unrelated events led me in the direction I was eventually to take.

For several decades, marketing researchers have stressed that firms can achieve competitive advantage by creating superior value for customers through innovation. However the literature on entrepreneurship and innovation based competitive strategy is deficient in several important respects. First, entrepreneurship has been poorly measured in the past. Next, research on innovation is biased towards technological innovation and new product development. Finally, robust measures of sustained competitive advantage have yet to emerge in the literature. This paper examines the role of entrepreneurship in organizational innovation‐based competitive strategy. The study finds that entrepreneurial firms pursue both technological and non‐technological innovations, and all such innovations lead to sustained competitive advantage. The study contributes to the emerging marketing and entrepreneurship interface paradigm by examining the role of entrepreneurship in the innovation based competitive strategy and refining and testing measures of entrepreneurship, organizational innovation, and sustained competitive advantage.