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The purpose of this paper is to explore drivers of alliance formation in a specialized supply chain from a manager’s perspective, focussing on firm-specific resources, resources embedded in inter-firm relationships and capabilities under the control of the focal firm.

This paper focusses on the resource-based view to obtain insights from the analysis of a manager survey conducted in Canada’s beef sector, applying a logistic regression approach to study alliance formation.

In identifying significant roles for resource richness and diversification of resource usage, the analysis highlights the importance of resource characteristics underlying factor market imperfections as drivers of alliance formation in a single primary input supply chain. The results suggest that resource heterogeneity is important for alliance formation and organizational success in specialized supply chains.

If previous alliance-related experience of managers, controlled for in the underlying cross-sectional survey, serves as an approximation for persistent unobservables impacting the alliance formation decision, we may face spurious state-dependence.

Managers interested in building compatible alliances in specialized single primary input supply chains may benefit from an improved understanding of the differential role of resource characteristics and resource heterogeneity for alliance formation, as these can function as a source of competitive advantage.

The analysis provides new insights from an individual manager’s perspective on alliance formation drivers in a specialized agri-food supply chain, thereby solidifying extant findings on alliance formation obtained in other sectors. The study contributes to the understanding of the role of resources in alliance formation with regard to prior relationship experience, resource heterogeneity and thus causal ambiguity, thereby also contributing to the debate of the role of relational capabilities vs firm-internal resources for sustained competitive advantage.

From time to time we report cases of food being sold under false and misleading descriptions, where the defence claims the consumer is really expecting too much for her money; like Pip, she has “great expectations.” The sale of food and drugs abounds with deceptive descriptions and devices; clever, subtle, attractive and far more extensively practised than in the old days when analysts and inspectors sought out the adulteration of food. Their annual reports contain the more lurid examples, which are but a fraction of the whole. The price of genuine products has risen out of all proportion in recent years and the introduction of artificial and synthetic materials in substitution is regrettably inevitable, but the importation of price into the offence of misdescription is likely to bring to confusion law that is probably more complete than ever before. It is the essence of all false descriptions that they should in fact mislead, but it is garnishing the point to suggest as many a defending counsel and not a few magistrates do, that the price paid must be taken into account in any alleged misdescription; that if it is low for such an expensive commodity as “cream,” then a purchaser should not be deceived into believing she was obtaining genuine cream, even if the name “cream” was being applied. As the County Magistrates at Leicester were recently asked to decide, “Who would expect real cream in a fourpenny cream bun ?” (p. 70). Still less so, if a fancy name such as “Kreem” is used; all this, Section 47, Food and Drugs Act, 1955, notwithstanding. In the case quoted, evidence was called to show that if a shopper requires a cream bun containing real cream, she will ask for a “dairy cream bun” and that the witnesses would only expect to receive the genuine article if they went to a dairy; that when buying cream confectionery from a confectioner's shop, they did not expect to receive anything but imitation cream.

The Extranet Infrastructure Project (EIP) described in this paper can enable a professional program to employ the latest technology advances toward improving the educational experience of students while lowering per unit academic costs. For presentation purposes an extranet for a school of business administration (SBA) is presented. The implementation of an extranet by an SBA will accommodate the informational needs of students, faculty and administration by utilizing an easy‐to‐use WWW‐based interface with instantly available and up‐datable information. Faculty will be able to publish course material online with little or no programming experience. Students will be able to communicate with faculty and other students and retrieve updated class notes, syllabi, research resources, tutorials and tests, all from their WWW browser at home or at school. In addition to the pedagogical advantages, students will become proficient in the use of technology that is widely used in the commercial world.

Since its origins during the Second World War, the computer industry has grown more rapidly than any other technology in history, and this growth has spawned a wealth of new terms and manners‐of‐speaking to describe computers and the uses to which they can be put. Such terms are often referred to collectively as computerese. The thesis of Barry's entertaining book is that the use of computerese is increasingly being extended to a wealth of other subjects that are often totally unrelated to computing. Barry refers to this use (or abuse) of language as technobabble: the subject matter and the pleasingly tongue‐in‐cheek style can be judged from the introduction, which starts as follows: ‘This paper‐based, productized bookware module is designed to support the robust implementation of a friendly, context‐driven interface between the developer and the end‐user. Did you understand this sentence? If so, you are fluent in technobabble’.

Devotes the entire journal issue to managing human behaviour in US industries, with examples drawn from the airline industry, trading industry, publishing industry, metal products industry, motor vehicle and parts industry, information technology industry, food industry, the airline industry in a turbulent environment, the automotive sales industry, and specialist retailing industry. Outlines the main features of each industry and the environment in which it is operating. Provides examples, insights and quotes from Chief Executive Officers, managers and employees on their organization’s recipe for success. Mentions the effect technology has had in some industries. Talks about skilled and semi‐skilled workers, worker empowerment and the formation of teams. Addresses also the issue of change and the training that is required to deal with it in different industry sectors. Discusses remuneration packages and incentives offered to motivate employees. Notes the importance of customers in the face of increased competition. Extracts from each industry sector the various human resource practices that companies employ to manage their employees effectively ‐ revealing that there is a wide diversity in approach and what is right for one industry sector would not work in another. Offers some advice for managers, but, overall, fails to summarize what constitutes effective means of managing human behaviour.

In a distributed computing environment, ownership of the security problem is avoided by management and users alike. Not only integrity and confidentiality, but also network (i.e. information, availability must be considered). Management has begun to realize that the security provided in the mainframe era has not been provided in the distributed environment. What must be considered now are the following issues: logical access controls access all platforms; improved network and platform reliability, and the ability to recover readily from disruption and disasters. Concludes that information security is absolutely vital to the survival of today′s enterprises and therefore should be given the emphasis it deserves at all enterprise levels.

Presents a special issue, enlisting the help of the author’s students and colleagues, focusing on age, sex, colour and disability discrimination in America. Breaks the evidence down into manageable chunks, covering: age discrimination in the workplace; discrimination against African‐Americans; sex discrimination in the workplace; same sex sexual harassment; how to investigate and prove disability discrimination; sexual harassment in the military; when the main US job‐discrimination law applies to small companies; how to investigate and prove racial discrimination; developments concerning race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; developments concerning discrimination against workers with HIV or AIDS; developments concerning discrimination based on refusal of family care leave; developments concerning discrimination against gay or lesbian employees; developments concerning discrimination based on colour; how to investigate and prove discrimination concerning based on colour; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; using statistics in employment discrimination cases; race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning gender discrimination in the workplace; discrimination in Japanese organizations in America; discrimination in the entertainment industry; discrimination in the utility industry; understanding and effectively managing national origin discrimination; how to investigate and prove hiring discrimination based on colour; and, finally, how to investigate sexual harassment in the workplace.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a system for computer generation of linked HTML documents to support information retrieval and hypertext applications on the World Wide Web. The approach is based on work by Salton and others, but extends the concept to be compatible with the World Wide Web browser environment by adding an interactive indexing technique that is well suited to the mouse‐based point‐and‐shoot input common to windowed browsers. The system does not require text query input, nor any client or host processing other than hypertext linkage. The goal of this work is to construct a fully automatic system in which original text documents are read and processed by a computer program that generates HTML files, which can be used immediately by Web browsers to search and retrieve the original documents. Thus, a user with a large collection of information — for instance, newspaper articles — can feed these documents to the program described here and produce directly, without further human intervention, the necessary files to establish World Wide Web home and related pages, to support interactive retrieval and distribution of the original documents.

The emergence of Open Systems Interconnection protocols, as specified within the U.S. Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile (GOSIP) Federal Information Processing Standard (FTPS), provides both an opportunity for, and a means of achieving, interoperability within multi‐vendor networks. The GOSIP can easily benefit inexperienced users, yet provides the flexibility to serve more sophisticated users. The standard mandates specifications that will be met by a multitude of vendor products, with initial offerings already available. While meeting a useful set of initial networking needs, the FTPS will evolve to include new applications, improvements to the initial applications, new network technologies, and major new functions. GOSIP will permit government agencies to gain better control over their computer network procurements, accruing greater and greater cost savings as the number of government computer networks increases.

Using a brief history of the development of WLAN standards and products this paper seeks to explain how unlicensed spectrum regulations by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have affected the industry.

The paper's approach is one of personal experience.

In general, the FCC's initiative to create an “unlicensed commons” for various forms of wireless communication applications has been the key enabler of today's multi‐billion dollar per year WLAN industry. In particular, certain regulatory decisions over the past 25 years regarding these bands have had profound, generally beneficial but sometimes unexpected influence on the WLAN industry.

The paper attempts to document these inflection points and their impacts on WLANs as well as to provide some insight as to how future evolutions of the unlicensed spectrum regulations can best enable optimal usage of this valuable spectrum.