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Some capital‐intensive manufacturing businesses pose particular problems to market planners because the profit margins are often highly cyclical as seller capacity utilisation changes through the four‐year business cycle and may also be heavily affected by new entrants on the seller side or the emergence of strong buyers. This article examines how margins are related to market structure for Strategic Business Units in the PIMS database. Having identified that margins are related to some descriptions of market structure, it explores how the margin behaviour of capital‐intensive businesses can be modelled as changes in the relative power of buyers and sellers as the capacity utilisation of the sellers changes.

This chapter reviews the new inspectorate, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services, and the new Inspection Framework for Fire and Rescue Services in England. It will look at the antecedents of the inspectorate and the history of inspections in both the police and in the fire and rescue services. Prior to the Policing and Crime Act 2017, Fire and Rescue Services in England were without a dedicated independent inspectorate for almost 10 years and the government promised a new independent and a rigorous inspection regime. This chapter critically evaluates the government's response and the early development of the new regime.

A large and robust empirical literature demonstrates that there is a strong relationship between the performance of a multinational enterprise (MNE) and its degree of multinationality. We develop a new metric to capture the return on foreign assets (ROFA), which we use as an alternative metric to return on total assets (ROTA) as a dependent variable representing performance. We find a significant S‐shaped relation between ROFA and the degree of multinationality across a large set of UK firms.

This study investigates the relationship between the strength of innovative entrepreneurial ecosystems and subjective well-being in 43 European smart cities. Subjective well-being is operationalized by a Quality of Life (QOL) survey that references the level of multidimensional satisfaction or happiness expressed by residents at the city level. The entrepreneurial ecosystem concept depicted here highlights actor interdependence that creates new value in a specific community by undertaking innovative entrepreneurial activities. The research uses objective and subjective variables to analyze the relationships between the entrepreneurial ecosystem and subjective well-being.

The authors conducted a cluster analysis with a nonaggregative quantitative approach based on the theory of the partially ordered set (poset); the objective was to find significant smart city level relationships between the entrepreneurial ecosystem and subjective well-being.

The strength of the entrepreneurial ecosystem is positively related to subjective well-being only in large cities. This result confirms a strong interdependency between the creation of innovative entrepreneurial activities and subjective well-being in large cities. The smart cities QOL dimensions showing higher correlations with the entrepreneurial ecosystem include urban welfare, economic well-being and environmental quality, such as information and communications technology (ICT) and mobility.

Despite the main implications being properly referred to large cities, the governments of smart cities should encourage and promote programs to improve citizens' subjective well-being and to create a conducive entrepreneurship environment.

This study is one of the few contributions focused on the relationship between the entrepreneurial smart city ecosystem and subjective well-being in the urban environment.

In June 2016, a clear majority of English voters chose to unilaterally take the United Kingdom out of the European Union (EU). According to many of the post-Brexit vote analyses, the single strongest motivating factor driving this vote was “immigration” in Britain, an issue which had long been the central mobilizing force of the United Kingdom Independence Party. The chapter focuses on how – following the bitter demise of multiculturalism – these Brexit related developments may now signal the end of Britain's postcolonial settlement on migration and race, the other parts of a progressive philosophy which had long been marked out as a proud British distinction from its neighbors. In successfully racializing, lumping together, and relabeling as “immigrants” three anomalous non-“immigrant” groups – asylum seekers, EU nationals, and British Muslims – UKIP leader Nigel Farage made explicit an insidious recasting of ideas of “immigration” and “integration,” emergent since the year 2000, which exhumed the ideas of Enoch Powell and threatened the status of even the most settled British minority ethnic populations – as has been seen in the Windrush scandal. Central to this has been the rejection of the postnational principle of non-discrimination by nationality, which had seen its fullest European expression in Britain during the 1990s and 2000s. The referendum on Brexit enabled an extraordinary democratic vote on the notion of “national” population and membership, in which “the People” might openly roll back the various diasporic, multinational, cosmopolitan, or human rights–based conceptions of global society which had taken root during those decades. This chapter unpacks the toxic cocktail that lays behind the forces propelling Boris Johnson to power. It also raises the question of whether Britain will provide a negative examplar to the rest of Europe on issues concerning the future of multiethnic societies.

An important wave of anti-austerity protests has swept across Western Europe in recent years. We can thus distinguish between three different types of protest occurring in Western Europe recently: “old” issue protests, relating to the trade union and labor movement; “new” issue protests, relating to culture and identity issues; anti-austerity protests, emerging directly in reaction to austerity measures and cuts enacted in the current period. Following previous literature, we hypothesize that anti-austerity protests have attracted a new constituency to the streets and that they will be different from both “old” and “new” protests in terms of their social composition, value orientations, and action repertoires. We expect anti-austerity protesters to be on the whole younger, and in more precarious working conditions, to be more concerned with economic over social issues, but also to be considerably less institutionalized and embedded in organizational networks, and to have fewer experiences of previous extra-institutional participation. We test these hypotheses by analyzing a unique and novel dataset containing data from over 10,000 protestors from 72 demonstrations (2009–2013). Our results lend broad support to our hypotheses with the exception of the idea that “precarity” forms a new social base for anti-austerity protests.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the buyer–supplier exchange dynamic in terms of the influence of product and market contingencies on the interfirm connectivity, governance and exchange performance of interconnected dyads in multitier supply chains (MSCs).

Using an inductive approach, the authors analyzed the supply network of a high-end motorcycle manufacturer (OEM). Four sets of “interconnected dyads” constituting four embedded units of analysis were considered, each involving the OEM, its tier 1 and corresponding tier 2 suppliers. These interconnected dyads representing four strategic components and their sub-components offer contrasts in terms of product and market contingencies.

This analysis reveals that product and market contingencies influence patterns of dependence among firms. These in turn impact interfirm connectivity (i.e. structural characteristic), and the degree of contract formalization, collaboration and concentration of decision-making power (i.e. governance characteristics) in the interconnected dyads. The authors also found that structural and governance aspects can have mutual influence, leading to satisfactory or unsatisfactory outcomes. Propositions synthesizing the relationships among the constructs are developed.

The constructs and their underlying relationships need to be further refined if we are to devise hypotheses and validate them at a large-scale empirical level.

This is one of the first studies to explore the influence of business contingencies on the complex buyer–supplier exchange dynamic in MSCs having a “beyond the dyad” perspective. The authors address why and how various types of interconnectivity are developed, and how the interplay among interfirm dependence, connectivity and governance influences the suppliers’ performance in the MSCs.

Different models have been adopted in England over time to organise public service delivery. The purpose of this paper is to explore contracting-out, a prevalent model of public service delivery in England, in relation to parks and roads maintenance delivery by examining private contractors’ performance according to local authority stakeholders.

Since the Conservative Government was in power during the 1980s, local authorities have been an arena for experimentation of contracting-out to private and other sectors. This paper provides a review of the academic and grey literature, and findings are presented from a large-scale online questionnaire survey (n=103) which was distributed to the relevant public realm managers in English local authorities.

The paper shows that contracting-out of parks and roads maintenance happens across the country in different ways. By and large, local authorities are satisfied with the performance of contractors, particularly as a response to economic constraints. Responsibilities, particularly for parks, are increasingly shared with non-governmental organisations, including community groups, although this is not reflected in budget distribution.

Despite the efforts, the response rate was relatively low (32 per cent), potentially due to the e-mail communication and online nature of the questionnaire.

The research provides empirical evidence about how contracting-out is currently delivering public services and how it has changed in recent years. The findings suggest that responsibilities (and to a lesser extent, budgets) are increasingly shared in England between different combinations of public, private, third and community sector stakeholders. This marks a shift away from in-house public sector delivery of parks and roads services.

As multinational enterprises (MNEs) expand internationally (for example, as the ratio of foreign (F) to total (T) sales increases), there is a positive effect on firm performance (usually measured by return on total assets (ROTA). We advance this literature in three ways: (i) we focus on the recent performance of UK MNEs, in terms of ROTA, but also in terms of their return on foreign assets (ROFA); (ii) to supplement (F/T), we examine the ratio of European (E) to total (T) sales of these UK MNEs; and (iii) we test the relationship between (E/T) and both ROFA and ROTA, and find a significant non-linear fit.