Search results

As transnational capital continues to seek fair access to all international markets and increasingly, a global level playing field, so competition policy has emerged as a highly salient issue. This article sets out specifically to explore the international dimension of competition policy. Although it readily accepts the economic and trade rationale for some form of common international rules, and to this end briefly accounts for earlier attempts and current strategies of policy coordination within international bodies from the G7, the WTO and the European Union, it raises doubts as to its immediate attainability. Competition policy not only remains a complex issue, but any efforts to establish some form of global regime necessitates consideration of the process and likelihood of policy convergence, and crucially demands that issues of governance including accountability and transparency are openly discussed. As a regional entity it is argued that the EU represents the best model for an international accord on competition policy.

The Aakash tablet was developed as a social innovation (SI) to transform India’s higher education sector. This paper aims to explain the failure of the Aakash tablet beyond the typical explanations of deficiencies in the device’s technical capabilities. This paper argues that an SI lens provides a stronger explanation for its failure than the standard analyses built primarily on the technological viability of the device.

The Aakash project ran from 2010 to 2015. During this period, a number of government and policy reports as well as mainstream media articles were published on the device. Since 2015, a number of academic articles have been published on the Aakash emphasizing its failure as a technological solution. The authors draw on these sources to frame an understanding of the Aakash’s failure informed by SI theory.

Through a complexity-informed analysis, the authors show that the failure of the Aakash stemmed from flawed assumptions and a failure of the initiative to engage with both the particular and constantly changing features of the broader landscape of needs and opportunities.

This study draws attention to failure as a legitimate aspect of the study of SI. In presenting a “counter-case” to the usual success stories, it shows that the SI lens can also explain why an SI does not take off. It thereby adds to the literature on SI and complexity theory through an exploration of the complex interactions among public policy goals, technological advancements and entrepreneurship.

On 23 June 2016, 51.9% of those who voted in the UK referendum on membership of the European Union (EU) opted to leave. The impact of this result upon both British and European politics has been profoundly disruptive and divisive. It not only marks a ‘seismic moment in post-war British politics’ (McGowan, 2018, p. 4) but has also disrupted expectations for the European project; no Member State had previously left the Union. Political institutions have been thrown into disarray, many citizens remain in a situation of existential uncertainty, and the political realm is cleaving. What has come to be known as ‘Brexit’ seemingly marks a crisis; a tear or a wrench in the very fabric of European politics, or perhaps a knot in which different socio-political tendencies have become entangled. In this chapter, the authors are interested not so much in diagnosing the factors that led to Brexit as they are the different interpretations that the ‘Brexit crisis’ is now being given. The authors map out five readings of ‘the Brexit crisis’ and contend that any attempt to grasp the meaning of Brexit demands drawing on all of them.

While there is a large volume of entrepreneurial social capital research, the philosophical assumptions have received limited attention. The purpose of this paper is to review and classify entrepreneurial social capital studies according to the following approaches – objectivist (positivist-realist, structuralist) and subjectivist (social constructionist). There is a neglect of structure and agency, and the authors encourage a critical realist approach that permits an understanding of observable network structure, constraint-order and human agency as a dynamic system.

The ontological and epistemological assumptions, and associated strengths and weaknesses of objectivist (positivist-realist, structuralist) and subjectivist (social constructionist) entrepreneurial social capital studies are discussed. The case for a more progressive critical realist approach is developed.

The authors demonstrate that objectivist (positivist-realist, structuralist) research with findings bereft of situated meaning and agency dominates. The emergence of subjectivist research – narratively examining different network situations from the perspective of those embedded in networks – is an emerging and competing approach. This dualism is unlikely to comprehensively understand the complex system-level properties of social capital. Future research should adopt critical realism and fuse: objective data to demonstrate the material aspects of network structures and what structural social capital exists in particular settings; and subjective data that enhances an understanding of situated meaning, agency and intention in a network.

This paper contributes a review of entrepreneurial social capital research and philosophical foundations. The development of a critical realist approach to understanding social capital gestation permits a system-level analysis of network structure influencing conduct, and agency.

Provides an institutional insight into competition policy making in the European Union (EU). Focuses primarily on the core EU institution, namely the European Commission, and specifically the Directorate General for Competition (DGIV) which has assumed the stature of an autonomous agency and manages the first truly supranational EU policy. As its authority has grown the EU competition rules have impacted on the activities of all businesses operating within the single market. In short, the Commission operates as the world’s leading regional anti‐trust enforcement agency and as such it may serve as the ideal prototype for a larger international accord as pressure mounts for the establishment of some form of global competition rules. Accounts for the origins of policy and the evolution of DGIV, analyses the EU institutional setting, provides an assessment of policy and accentuates the inevitability of competition policy reform in the late 1990s.

When complex social-ecological systems collapse and transform, the possible outcomes of this transformation are not set in stone. This paper aims to explore the role of social imagination in determining possible futures for a reformed system. The authors use a historical study of the Luddite response to the Industrial Revolution centred in the UK in the early-19th century to explore the concepts of path dependency, agency and the distributional impacts of systems change.

In this historical study, the authors used the Luddites’ own words and those of their supporters, captured in archival sources (n = 43 unique Luddite statements), to develop hypotheses around the effects on political, social and judicial consequences of a significant systems transformation. The authors then scaffolded these statements using the heuristics of panarchy and basins of attraction to conceptualize this contentious moment of British history.

Rather than a strict cautionary tale, the Luddites’ story illustrates the importance of environmental fit and selection pressures as the skilled workers sought to push the English system to a different basin of attraction. It warns us about the difficulty of a just transition in contentious economic and political conditions.

The Luddites’ story is a cautionary tale for those interested in a just transition, or bottom-up systems transformation generally as the deep basins of attraction that prefer either the status quo or alternate, elite-favouring arrangements can be challenging to shift independent of shocks. While backward looking, the authors intend these discussions to contribute to current debates on the role(s) of social innovation in social and economic policy within increasingly charged or polarized political contexts.

Social innovation itself is often predicated on the need for just transitions of complex adaptive systems (Westley et al., 2013), and the Luddite movement offers us the opportunity to study the distribution effects of a transformative systems change – the Industrial Revolution – and explore two fundamental questions that underpin much social innovation scholarship: how do we build a just future in the face of complexity and what are likely forms those conversations could take, based on historical examples?

This paper seeks to explore an alternative direction to break the theoretical impasse in CSR.

The study employs ancient insights from the core of Buddhist teaching, featuring the Four Noble Truths and the concept of “me” and “mine”, for the modern application of CSR by investigating the crux of major related theories.

The Noble Truths emphasize that suffering should be eradicated at its root. The Buddhist model of CSR suggests that beyond doing good such as supporting philanthropy and avoiding evil as mitigating the impact of corporate malpractice, which are consistent with major CSR theories, it is also crucial to purify the hearts of stakeholders from the “self” and “what belongs to self”, the genesis of suffering. Detachment is the key.

The shift from an institutional to an individual level, more specifically the transformation from a mindset of over‐consumption to one of conscious consumption, is an alternative direction to the progress of theory and practice in CSR.

Defiled by greed and profitability, consumers and investors, who provide income and funding to an organization and define its business practice, are of the highest priority among all stakeholders to start the change according to the Buddhist model of CSR.

This paper takes Buddhism as timeless insight, rather than a religious belief, to propose an alternative model and direction to development of CSR in theory and practice.

The paper aims to propose a new conceptualisation of consumer anger directed against a company.

In this paper, an integrative review of the literature on anger in marketing has been conducted.

Anger at the firm is experienced in two forms: vengeful anger or problem-focused anger. The motivational goals associated with each differentiate between the two types and lead to different relational consequences: vengeful anger implies a desire to hurt the culprit, whereas problem-focused anger solely requires the attainment of a thwarted goal. The two types are associated with different patterns of appraisals, levels of intensity and emotion expression. These differences, documented in the literature, are not universal but shaped by contextual and personal variables. Although marketers conflate these two types of anger under the same label, only vengeful anger represents a threat to marketing relationships, whereas problem-focused anger has positive consequences if managed appropriately.

Studies that examine anger will benefit from a more nuanced understanding of this concept. This paper raises important implications for the measurement of this emotion, as existing scales are not able to measure the goals associated with the two types of anger.

The insights presented help managers form strategies to address consumer anger in contexts such as service failures and/or crisis communications.

The paper extends scholars’ understanding of consumer anger. It offers an improved conceptualisation of this emotion, opening new avenues for future research.