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Multi-level issues (Klein, Dansereau, & Hall (1994). Academy of Management Review, 195–229) are critical to both strategic management research and practice, and yet, we have few approaches for dealing with them both systemically and systematically. In this chapter, I take a resource-based approach to exploring multi-level linkages, suggesting that such an approach has wide applicability. A resource-based view (RBV) of competitive advantage and value creation illustrates the multi-level nature of these concepts and shows how the RBV is itself linked to the external market environment. The RBV also provides a way to link a variety of types of levels of analysis. These include different organizational levels of analysis, content and process linkages, and linkages across time.

Due to the emergence of global production networks, trade statistics have became less accurate in describing the dependence of emerging Asia on external demand. This chapter analyses, using an update of the Asian International Input–Output (AIO) table, the interdependence of emerging Asian economies, the United States, the EU15, and Japan via trade and production linkages. According to the results, we do not find evidence of the decoupling of emerging Asia from the rest of the world. On the contrary, we find evidence on increasing trade integration, both globally and regionally. Nonetheless, our analysis indicates that emerging Asia's dependence on exports is only about one-third of its GDP, that is, well below the 50% exposure suggested by trade data. This finding can be explained by the high import content of exports in these economies, which is a result of the increasing segmentation of production across the region.

This study focuses on the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on local firms in host economies. We examine both backward and forward linkages and their effects on domestic firms. Data collection was undertaken over a three-year period whereby qualitative in-depth interviews were carried out with senior managers in UK headquarters, subsidiaries and ‘linked’ local firms in order to facilitate a multi-perspective approach to examining this topic. Results indicate that linkages do exist, contrary to earlier belief. The main factors which facilitate linkage formation were found to be subsidiary-related variables, mainly the mode of entry into the local market, subsidiary autonomy, level of embeddedness and subsidiary role. It was also found that government regulation and policy had some impact on the formation of linkages. Over time the impact on local firms was found to be positive with increased employment, productivity and significant upgrading of skills and competencies. The key contribution of this chapter is to extend the literature on linkages to consider services while developing a conceptual framework in this area. Overall, our study confirms the importance of the subsidiary in linkage formation and also shows how the externalities occurring from linkage formation in the service sector may benefit local firms and subsequently aid local economic development as a whole.

Family health can be studied using the 1994–1995 National Health Interview Survey Disability Supplement by linking children to their mothers and other family members. However, the data item required to link is missing for 13% of children. We found that unlinked children and their probable mothers differed in many respects from their counterparts who could be linked, and exclusion of these mothers and their children from the analysis could bias results by introducing error due to incomplete coverage of the target population. We developed and validated a simple algorithm to match these children with their probable mother.

Business model innovation (BMI) constitutes a priority for managers across industries, but it represents a notoriously difficult innovation, with several challenges, many of which are cognitive in nature. The received literature has variously suggested that one way to overcome challenges to BMI, including cognitive ones, and support the cognitive tasks is using visual representations. Against this background, we aim at offering a contribution to the emerging line of inquiry at the nexus between business models (BMs), cognition and visual representations. Specifically, we develop a new method for visual representation of the BM in support of simplification of the cognitive effort and neutralisation of cognitive barriers. The resulting representation – a network-based representation, anchored on the activity-system perspective and offering complementarity and centrality/periphery measures – allows to visually represent an existing BM as a network (nodes and linkages) of interdependent activities and to express information related to the degree of centrality/periphery of single activities (nodes) with respect to the rest of a BM configuration. This information, we argue, is potentially very valuable in supporting the cognitive tasks involved in business model reconfiguration (BMR). We guide the reader to progressively appreciate how the development of the proposed method for visual representation is anchored to two main characteristics of BMR, namely the discovery-driven nature of BMR and the path-dependent nature of BMR. We offer initial insights on the cognitive value of such a type of representation in relationship to the simplification of the cognitive effort and the neutralisation of cognitive barriers in BMR.

Contributing to the literature on movement structure in authoritarian regimes, this analysis focuses on the structure of two Iranian movements. We use a multi-method approach to analyze the organization of the student and women’s movements in Iran between 1997 and 2008. From 1997 to 2004, a reform government opened political opportunities. The period between 2005 and 2008 was characterized by increased repression. The student movement was organized during the first period as a hybrid composed of several networks linked in a federal structure. As the political context changed, the movement became less centralized. Its strategy shifted from one based in alliance with governing reformers to coalition building outside of the regime. In contrast, the women’s movement was organized as a densely linked web of noncentralized campaigns. The women’s movement overcame divisions as political opportunities closed in the mid-2000s and built a grassroots strategy during the latter part of the decade.

This chapter proposes an optimized innovative information technology as a means for achieving operational functionalities of real-time portable electronic health records, system interoperability, longitudinal health-risks research cohort and surveillance of adverse events infrastructure, and clinical, genome regions – disease and interventional prevention infrastructure. In application to the Dod-VA (Department of Defense and Veteran's Administration) health information systems, the proposed modernization can be carried out as an “add-on” expansion (estimated at $288 million in constant dollars) or as a “stand-alone” innovative information technology system (estimated at $489.7 million), and either solution will prototype an infrastructure for nation-wide health information systems interoperability, portable real-time electronic health records (EHRs), adverse events surveillance, and interventional prevention based on targeted single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) discovery.

In this introductory chapter, we briefly outline the history of the political economy of raw materials, focusing particularly on the relationship between raw materials and economic development. We then introduce the chapters of this volume, and we conclude by discussing future directions for research in this area.

Such rural development programs are quite demanding in their organizational requirements. First, the implementing agency must have a special commitment to the delivery of program services to the rural poor. In social systems it is unnatural for benefits to be dispensed equally, much less redistributed toward the disadvantaged. Some inner or outer dynamic force must motivate the organization to overcome the momentum of inequality.