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Business, government, and society are being rocked by disruptive global change. The challenges facing international marketers as boundary spanners – and more generally, all managers and leaders – are getting more complex, ambiguous, and unprecedented. The world that they must navigate is increasingly filled with “wicked problems” (Rittel & Weber, 1973) that defy the closed, analytical approaches that characterize typical management education. Addressing the problem requires a new paradigm that augments – and perhaps in some areas, supplants – the traditional business education.

In the year 1900 Koch expressed the view that human and bovine tuberculosis were distinct diseases, that the bacillus of bovine tuberculosis could not produce this disease in the human subject, and that the bacillus of human tuberculosis could not set it up in the bovine species. As is now well known. these conclusions have not received the slightest confirmation from other workers in the same field, and it may be said that the consensus of scientific opinion is now to the effect that the bacilli of human and bovine tuberculosis are identical—at any rate, so far as the effects attributed to them are concerned. The Royal Commission appointed in 1901, and consisting of the late Sir MICHAEL FOSTER, Drs. SIMS WOODHEAD, SIDNEY MARTIN, MACFADYEAN, and BOYCE, have issued a further interim report on their investigations. The first interim report was published in 1904, the conclusions stated in it being to the effect that the human and animal diseases were identical, and that no characteristics by which the one could be distinguished from the other had been discovered. The report now issued shows that these conclusions are confirmed by the results of a very large number of fresh experiments. The main conclusions set forth in the present report are as understated :—

Paid and unpaid care in the home are closely intertwined, but a lack of outside supervision and support often forces paid and unpaid caregivers to negotiate care tasks, responsibilities, and boundaries alone, leading to role conflict and role ambiguity. This analysis draws on two existing qualitative studies of home health aides (S1 n = 27, S2 n = 26) to better understand aides’ perceptions of their relationships with family caregivers by exploring (1) aides’ perceptions of their caretaking role; (2) aides’ perceptions of co-producing care with family members; and (3) factors affecting these perceptions. Data were analyzed through grounded theory and thematic analysis. We found that aides viewed themselves and their clients as the core care “team” and identified three relationship dynamics with family caregivers: independent, where aides and families provided care separately; competitive, where aides and families struggled over control of care tasks; and carative, where aides considered family part of the unit of care. The authors propose strategies, suggested by our participants, for employer agencies to better support paid and unpaid caregivers in negotiating boundaries and co-producing care in the home care setting.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the retailing industry in Japan, in order that marketing managers employed by overseas companies contemplating entering the Japanese market are able to devise successful market entry strategies.

A literature review, and an analysis and interpretation of several interlinked bodies of knowledge was conducted.

The retailing sector in Japan is both complex and well established. Managers in Japanese companies understand the necessity to market innovatory products, relate to customer expectations, and establish sustainable business relationships based on trust. The multi‐layered distribution system in Japan dictates the role of each member of the marketing channel and in order to succeed, an overseas company will need to exhibit a high degree of specialization. New market opportunities are evolving and those that enter the market will need to work closely with all their channel partner members and various government representatives.

Managers based in overseas companies will need to undertake research into how Japanese companies produce innovatory products; how they research specific industry sectors; how they organize their marketing intelligence activities; and how they engage in information sharing and exchange.

Managers based in overseas companies will need to develop long‐term mutually oriented, sustainable business relationships with their counterparts in Japanese companies, and this may require a change in organizational culture and the adoption of new business practices.

The paper provides a number of insights into retailing practices in Japan and an overview of the electronics industry.

Technology is defined by Krajewski and Ritzman (2000, p. 17) as ‘the know-how, physical things, and procedures used to produce products and services’. Over the past two decades, the development of high-technology-based firms has been actively encouraged by governments and development agencies (Westhead & Storey, 1994) as a source of competitive advantage. In many cases, small high-technology-based firms have effectively exploited market opportunities. This has been helped by the emergence of generic technologies, most notably information technology that is knowledge intensive rather than capital and labour intensive (Rothwell, 1994, p. 12). Such technologies have been effectively used to open up new market niches for small- and medium-sized firms (SMEs). Accordingly, high-technology firms have become well established as sources of both competitiveness and employment creation (Oakey, 1991).

Effective decision making is a crucial activity for manufacturing firms of all sizes. To this end, statistical techniques, such as variance theory, cognitive maps, heuristics and process theory, are widely used. However, such techniques rarely help chief executives to understand the dynamics of competitive behaviour, and often fail to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Indeed, from a small‐ and medium‐sized (SME) firm perspective, such techniques are rarely used owing to inadequate resources and/or skills. The paper seeks to address these issues.

This paper proposes and tests a new approach to multivariate analysis based on the conditional formatting of spreadsheets. The analysis was confirmed using conventional statistical methods in order to validate the proposed methodology.

The results are depicted as a visual picture of the attribute(s) under consideration and can be visually analysed.

Such an approach can be used to complement and enhance current research techniques as well as facilitating data analysis.

To date there is a dearth of research on strategic decision‐making in manufacturing small and medium sized firms. This research paper focuses on the key drivers of decision‐making and organisational performance: ownership, decision‐making (type and level) and employee deployment. These drivers are defined and operationalised.

The validity of the constructs used and their relevance was tested through the qualitative phase of the research – in‐depth interviews with chief executives and employer representative bodies. The survey instrument was also pilot tested.

The findings indicate that the sample can be divided into performance leaders and laggards. Over 75 per cent of the leaders are independently owned and over 66 per cent of the laggards are subsidiary firms. Accordingly, ownership is a key factor in overall performance. This is confirmed by the degree of profitability of both classifications.

The practical implications of the study are outlined in the paper. Chief executives are encouraged to focus on the aspects of ownership, decision making, and employee deployment that are associated with enhanced performance.

This study focuses on decision making and employee deployment according to ownership and overall performance – factors hitherto under researched in SMEs.

One would not commonly associate democracy with Singapore, instead scholars have often described Singapore as an illiberal democracy and an authoritarian state. At the same time, all Singaporean school students recite the national pledge of allegiance in school every morning, in which they pledge “to build a democratic society based on justice and equality”. What do students know about democracy? Are they able to distinguish the characteristics of democratic systems from non-democratic ones? The purpose of this paper is to report on Singapore students’ understandings of democracy.

Using a qualitative instrumental case study design, 64 students from three secondary schools were interviewed and the social studies curriculum was analysed.

Overall, students had poor knowledge of democracy. Consistent with a lack of knowledge of democracy, most students also showed a relatively uncritical acceptance of hierarchy and deference to authority, and held a superficial understanding of citizenship. Civics lessons through social studies, and the school environment did little to promote students’ engagement with democracy.

The authors argue that it is important that students be given the opportunities to develop a basic conceptual knowledge of democracy, as they are not capable of discriminating democratic characteristics from non-democratic ones without it. At the very least, students should know the relevance of what they pledge relative to their nation’s model of democracy, or in the absence of a clear model, be encouraged to struggle with the various existing models of democracies so that, as the future of Singapore, they might determine and adapt the ideals that they deem best for the nation.

This paper is an original study of Singapore students’ understandings of democracy.

Although considerable attention in the extant literature has been devoted to knowledge acquisition and transfer within firms, there is a dearth of research on the effectiveness of outside sources of knowledge for technology‐based small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). Furthermore, the majority of empirical studies in this area focus on large firms while research on smaller firms is underdeveloped. The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of the sources of knowledge on the performance of technology manufacturing firms and the implications for higher education institutions (HEIs) providing advice to this sector.

Following interviews with managing directors of manufacturing firms, a number of sources of technical advice were identified. A survey of small and medium‐sized UK electronic and engineering firms was then carried out to investigate the relationship between sources of knowledge and performance and also to establish whether there is a relationship between performance and the extent of the advice network.

Significant correlations were found between company age, knowledge source remoteness and company performance. The more remote the source the less effective it is. The stronger the firm's network the more profitable it is likely to be.

This has particular implications for universities involved in knowledge transfer, as these institutions are often relatively remote compared with other sources of advice within SME networks.

The research adds to our understanding of the role of HEIs and other members of knowledge networks in relation to the achievement of competitive advantage by SMEs.

This paper aims to assess the link between strategic‐planning, aspects of the external environment and overall corporate performance in manufacturing SMEs.

A self‐reported postal survey was used to collect data from an initial sample of 1,000 randomly selected small and medium sized UK electronics and engineering firms. Prior to its deployment a number a staged approach was used to validate the questionnaire with a number of adjustments made following the pilot stage. A T‐test was used to examine the difference between early and late informants' response to key questions. Based on this test and telephone contact with non‐respondents, the authors conclude that non‐response is not a significant issue and should not affect their conclusions. Data reliability was confirmed using Cronbach's α – a commonly used statistical tool to consider data reliability when perceptual measures are used.

The findings indicate that the degree of awareness of external environment threats is associated with the degree of overall emphasis on the strategic‐planning process. Strategic‐planning in manufacturing SMEs is positively linked to overall corporate performance. The findings suggest the need to align the degree of emphasis on strategic‐planning and environmental awareness.

External operating environment threats are often ignored or at best marginalized by SMEs. The findings of this study emphasize the need to focus on strategic‐planning and to ensure alignment with the external operating environment.