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This paper explores how two understudied characteristics of a firm's product portfolio, namely, aging of products and (non)innovativeness of products, affect firm survival. The influence of these product portfolio characteristics on organizational mortality can be observed both at the firm and at the industry levels. Paradoxically, the portfolio's influence at the firm and at the industry levels may go in opposite directions. Specifically, I predict that portfolios with aging products make their firms weaker competitors and survivors. However by weakening these firms, “aging” portfolios reduce competitive pressures at the industry level and, therefore, improve firm survival indirectly by changing industry vital rates. In contrast, firms with innovative product portfolios should be stronger survivors. At the same time, they are likely to intensify competition in the industry and, as a result, diminish survival chances of all firms, including those with innovative products. The analyses of all firms’ product portfolios in the worldwide optical disk drive industry, 1983–1999, support these predictions.

Collaboration and acquisition have traditionally been observed as two alternative strategies when accessing external technologies. However, real option scholars have recently argued that firms can also engage in transitional technology sourcing trajectories where collaboration and acquisition are used as complementary strategies. While these real option scholars have identified factors that influence when partners are likely to shift from collaboration to acquisition, they remain silent on how such a transition can be effectively managed. Based on a multiple case study of four transitional technology sourcing trajectories between one new entrepreneurial and one established firm, this study therefore explores how the pre-acquisition collaboration stage and the post-acquisition integration are related to each other. Findings suggest that entrepreneurial companies may use the pre-acquisition collaboration stage as a period to evaluate the goodwill of the established partner. In addition, we point to the presence of pre-acquisition integration efforts and the extent of strategic convergence during the pre-acquisition collaboration stage as factors that substantially influence the success of the post-acquisition integration process in transitional governance trajectories.

The burnt-out Grenfell tower is a symbol of trauma and sacrificed lives. The brutalist block as a technology of trauma, viewed through its mediated depictions, reveals its condemned predicament between slippages in bureaucracy and governance. Through the formal enquiry into the disaster, the Grenfell victims' trauma is revived, replayed and contained within an archive in which victimhood is captured in a number of stages. The charred remains of the tower as a chronotrope of trauma and of lives cut short yields readings into the politics of social housing, gentrification and social displacement. The testimonials from Grenfell are temporally elongated both through the public review but also in the traces of victims' narratives left on social media in real time through flesh witnessing and as an online repository of death narratives. As a tower of trauma and as the forensic evidence of a disaster, Grenfell is part of the iconography of the ‘blackened’ and their necroaesthetics.

To determine gendered patterns of preventive medical care (physical and dental/optical) use among pan-ethnic U.S. Asian and Latino adults.

Using National Latino and Asian American Study (2004) data, we apply Andersen’s (1995) Behavioral Model of Health Services Use to assess how preventive care use among Asian and Latino men and women varies as a function of predisposing, enabling, and need-based characteristics. We explore whether adjustment for these factors mediates gender disparities in both physical and dental/optical check-ups, and test whether certain factors operate differently among men versus women.

A higher proportion of women reported a routine care visit last year, especially among Latinos. Adjusting for predisposing, enabling, and need-based factors explained the gender difference in reporting a dental/optician check-up, but not a physical check-up, among both Asian and Latino adults.

Our findings illustrate how gender patterns in routine care use differ by race/ethnicity, and highlight the fundamental importance of enabling characteristics (especially health insurance and having a regular doctor) for shaping routine care use between men and women, both Asian and Latino. Limitations of this chapter are that the data are cross-sectional and were collected before the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, and measures are self-reported.

This chapter focuses on Asian and Latinos because they represent the fastest growing minority populations in the United States, yet few studies have evaluated gender differences in preventative health care use among these groups.

This chapter details a practice-based investigation of a 19th-century astronomical device known as ‘Janssen’s apparatus’. It questions traditional narratives of linear technological advancement and ‘sole inventor’ to reframe the historical artefact as a site which makes visible a network of technological knowledge interconnecting astronomy and visual culture. Approached from this perspective, the Janssen artefact is reframed as an ‘intersite of knowledge’, exploring how the various know-how contained within the device is located across disciplines rather than within a single field. Originally developed to calculate the Astronomical Unit during the 1874 Transit of Venus, Janssen’s apparatus failed in its endeavour as a measuring instrument, but its motion mechanism was successfully adapted into early cinema technologies. This chapter applies praxis through the development of a prototype artwork and the concept of ‘techne’ as speculative means of understanding how this mechanism was transferred from astronomy to the Western cultural realm. It proposes that the development of the apparatus was partially gleaned from moving image techniques already in use within 19th-century visual culture. The development of the prototype artwork is discussed in relation to the specific timing mechanism of the Janssen apparatus and how it establishes its own ‘intersite of knowledge’ relevant to its contemporary context. Finally, this chapter elaborates on how witnessing the Janssen mechanism in motion provided unique insight and how creating a dialogue between historical and contemporary apparatus facilitates a reconsideration of how galleries, libraries, archives, and museums [GLAM] and other host institutions that contain artefacts might share their hidden stories.

Whereas incumbents often struggle to respond to disruptive innovations, start-up companies frequently face difficulties in establishing them within existing ecosystems. Phased acquisitions, that is, trajectories where an incumbent initially takes an equity stake in a start-up and subsequently acquires it, have been suggested as viable strategy to address these challenges. Whereas prior research has focused on the macro-level governance of such phased acquisitions, the authors explore the micro-level governance, examining how the existence of and changes in particular coordination and control mechanisms can shape the phased acquisition and its performance implications. Based on a longitudinal process study of a phased acquisition in which one start-up and one incumbent jointly developed and commercialized a disruptive technology, the authors develop a process model that (1) illuminates the existence of micro-level governance shifts and their impact on the decision to transition from equity alliance to acquisition, (2) identifies specific triggers of micro-level governance shifts, and (3) emphasizes the existence of counterintuitive micro-level governance spillovers across alliance and acquisition.