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The purpose of this paper is to explore how the Empire Marketing Board used enhanced marketing tools and approaches to reduce British consumer bias against foreign products. The paper asks: “How have marketers historically increased foreign exports to domestic markets?”

The paper comprises an historical account of the Empire Marketing Board during the 1920s and 1930s. Applying a qualitative approach, it relies on archival materials gathered by the author in the United Kingdom – including official and personal papers; newspaper and poster advertisements of the Board; and existing scholarship for its information.

The Board used three strategies in its advertisements: collaboration, showing how domestic and overseas markets were linked in mutually beneficial ways; globalization, emphasizing the expansive “home” market and the benefits of removing borders; and producer profiles, narrating the producers of imperial products to create the desire to benefit producers.

The strategies of the Board are not dissimilar to fair trade campaigns used by the private sector today, notably in coffee. Looking forward, these approaches could be valid ways for companies today to reduce consumer bias against foreign goods, and this paper hopes to be a stepping-stone for future research.

Analyzing under-used archival sources, the paper illuminates the complex processes and ideologies embedded within the Board’s campaigns. The Empire Marketing Board played an important role in the interwar British consumer conceptualization of the relationship between Britain and her Empire, construction of a global British “home” market and the familiarization of imperial producers.

This study examines the impact of formal and informal institutional distances on the foreign ownership strategies of emerging market firms (EMFs).

This is an empirical study relying on two sets of data collected over two time periods, 2006–2008 and 2017–2019, for publicly-listed Chinese companies.

Greater formal institutional distances in the host and home countries make EMFs less likely to use joint ventures (JVs), while greater informal distances make EMFs more likely to use the JVs. When both formal and informal institutional distances are high, the use of JVs is more likely. These results are affected by the goal of the foreign direct investment (FDI) project, with strategic asset-seeking (SAS) FDI projects favoring the use of wholly owned subsidiaries (WOSs).

This study relies on cross-sectional data from publicly-listed Chinese companies, which may limit the generalizability of the findings.

EMFs investing in advanced countries should carefully assess the tradeoffs between transactional cost efficiency and legitimacy in making their foreign ownership decisions. If the goal is to access strategic assets, EMFs should consider WOSs to ensure the transfer of strategic assets and create value for the parent company.

The findings show that formal and informal distances between institutions have different impacts on foreign ownership strategies, providing empirical evidence for the need to balance conflicting cost-efficiency and legitimacy considerations when businesses make such strategic decisions. The authors show how this balance depends on the goal of the FDI project.

Although it has been implicit in previous articles (see Becky's Story in issue 3.4), supported employment as a model for enabling people to get and keep jobs has not been given as much coverage as other ways of creating job opportunities. The development of the supported employment model in the UK is mainly associated with people with developmental or learning disabilities. However, experience in the United States has shown that, with appropriate modifications, the supported employment model ‐ particularly the ‘place and train’ version ‐ can achieve outstanding results for mental health service users who want a proper job. We will return to the research evidence in a later issue, but first Huw Davies from the Bury EST (Employment, Support and Training) and Jonathan Allen from Enable in Shrewsbury have joined forces to describe the way they work and the difference it has made to their clients' lives.

Information systems (IS) are technology‐based innovations. Argues for the need to develop an approach to IS research based on studies of technological innovation in the social sciences. While research on the adoption and diffusion of innovations has become a popular approach to implementation and use issues in IS research, IS research projects should be aware of both the strengths and limitations of traditional approaches to technological innovation, and should consider building upon newer approaches that address these limitations. Identifies alternative assumptions about the innovation process that are developing across a range of technological innovation studies, and offers examples of how these ideas can be used in IS research.

This paper aims to present a theory of the perceived outcomes of open source software adoption for an organizational IT department.

The paper is an interpretive case study of three open source pilot projects in local government, based on interviews with IT management, IT staff, and users. Data analysis based on constructivist grounded theory is used to generate theory about the perceived organizational outcomes of open source adoption.

Open source adoption is perceived as an occasion for rapidly developing effective new business applications, even in the context of shrinking IT resources and a poor relationship between IT and the rest of the organization. IT management and staff see the potential to improve their strained relationship with users, and improve their image of themselves as product developers and explorers. Disruptive project strategies, that keep open source adoptions outside of normal resource allocation processes, are consistently associated with open source success.

While only exploratory, the case study shows that open source deployments can have a significant impact on the wider organization, up to and including the announcement of the first municipal government policy in the USA requiring that open source be considered for all future software acquisitions.

The case study offers a pathway for IT departments to achieve better perceived organizational outcomes, using fewer resources, under challenging circumstances.

The paper offers new conjectures on post‐adoption outcomes for open source researchers, and a new mechanism for IT department transformation in the information systems literature.

In this editorial introduction Allen Lee's definition of the information systems (IS) field is taken as the starting point: “Research in the information systems field examines more than just the technological system, or just the social system, or even the two systems side by side; in addition, it investigates the phenomena that emerge when the two interact” (Lee, A. “Editorial”, MISQ, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2001, p. iii). By emphasizing the last part of this, it is argued that actor‐network theory (ANT) can provide IS research with unique and very powerful tools to help us overcome the current poor understanding of the information technology (IT) artifact (Orlikowski, W. and Iacono, S., “Research commentary: desperately seeking the ‘IT’ in IT research – a call for theorizing the IT artifact”, Information Systems Research, Vol. 10 No. 2, 2001, pp. 121‐34). These tools include a broad range of concepts describing the interwoven relationships between the social.

Theories of sociotechnical change seek to understand technology as both material and social artifacts. Actor‐network theory (ANT) offers an approach to sociotechnical change that has been criticized for emphasizing a micro‐level analysis of political strategies at the expense of larger social and cultural processes. This paper presents an approach to sociotechnical change that links the enrollment process of ANT with broader social practices, through the concept of inclusion in multiple technological frames. Inclusion in different technological frames is used to explain the sources of enrollment strategies in the early personal digital assistant (PDA) industry. Two case studies of PDA evolution (Psion, led by David Potter, and Palm, led by Jeff Hawkins) are used to illustrate the link between enrollment strategies and inclusion.

To identify, classify, and propose a preliminary theory of the value conflicts and social choices that arise in enterprise system use.

Ethnographic case study of a medium‐sized manufacturing firm, using a participant‐observer approach.

Three areas of value conflict are identified between functional areas: conflicts over work priorities, conflicts over dependency on the commitments of others, and conflicts over evaluation fairness. When participants perceived that the value conflicts were accommodated in a balanced and legitimate way, they chose to use information resources within the enterprise system. When the conflicts were perceived as too great, participants chose to ignore the enterprise system, or develop their own competing information resources.

This paper reports on theory building from one intensive case study. It implies, however, that previous attempts to account for the difficulty of enterprise resource planning (ERP) use have not focused enough on the social relationships between the functional areas that are tightly integrated through enterprise systems.

The three value conflict questions (work priorities, dependency on commitments, and evaluation fairness) can be used to identify potential ERP problem areas, and to clarify the costs and benefits of different ERP choices for various functional areas.

For information systems researchers and practitioners, this paper offers another means for identifying value conflicts and social choices in computerization, hopefully bringing us closer to Rob Kling's dream that computerization choices be made in a more socially benign way.

To extend the work of Rob Kling, whose research interests, and advocacy were at the center of a movement in analytical inquiry and empirical research now known as “social informatics”.

Reviews the work of those who engage in social informatics research to strengthen and further the conceptual perspective, analytical approaches, and intellectual contributions of social informatics.

The vibrant and growing international community of active social informatics scholars has assembled a social informatics resource kit that includes: perspective lenses through which research data can be viewed critically; techniques for building theory and developing models from socially rich empirical data; and a common body of knowledge regarding the uses and effects of ICTs.

The paper identifies opportunities to engage new scholars in social informatics discussions, and suggests new venues for promoting and extending the work of scholars already enrolled in the social informatics movement.

To introduce the various private fund structuring options available in Singapore, an important fund management hub that has increasingly also come to be recognized as a popular fund domicile with its pro-business environment, transparent and robust regulatory regime and government support through tailored investment structures, tax incentives and extensive double taxation treaties.

This article provides an overview of the available private fund structures as well as the key legal issues and considerations that fund managers and investors should take into account when structuring a private fund. It also provides a brief summary of the available tax incentive schemes for funds in Singapore.

With growth in private market assets under management fueled by private equity funds over the last decade, the use of private investment funds established in Singapore has become a popular means to tap the large capital inflows into Asia. Singapore offers a wide range of fund structures to suit different fund strategies and considerations, including the variable capital company (“VCC”) structure, a legal structure tailored for use as investment funds that was introduced in January 2020.

There are a range of Singapore private fund structures available with different features, including the VCC, which is a corporate structure that allows for umbrella-sub-fund structures with segregated assets and liabilities, and the limited partnership, which is familiar to international investors and permits a large degree of contractual flexibility. Other structures such as unit trusts and private companies may also be suitable depending on the particular circumstances and objectives of the fund. Fund managers who are exploring setting up fund vehicles to tap Asian capital or to invest in Asia should be aware of the possible options, and their pros and cons.

Practical analysis and guidance and market commentary from experienced investment funds lawyers.