Search results

This paper seeks to answer two questions: (1) where do a country's entrepreneurship policies come from? (2) How do they evolve and shape entrepreneurial activities?

Drawing upon the comparative political economy literature and the institutional perspective, this paper proposes a theoretical model of the origin and evolution of entrepreneurship policies. We use China as a case study to apply the theoretical model and demonstrate the evolution of entrepreneurship policies in three stages during the period 1978 to 2012.

The case analysis of China provides evidence and support for our theoretical model and unpacks the process by which entrepreneurship policies originate and evolve as the result of the interplay among constantly changing policymaking, production, and knowledge regimes.

Because of the research context, findings may lack generalisability. Additional studies on policymaking and production regimes of different kinds and their respective roles in shaping entrepreneurship policies are encouraged to further advance this line of research.

This paper offers important implications concerning entrepreneurship policy and activities for policymakers, practitioners and other stakeholders in emerging economies.

Our study fills a gap in the entrepreneurship literature by expanding scholarly understanding of the origin and evolution of entrepreneurship policies.

The ex-post literature, which evaluates the real impact of renewable generation, is scarce. Most studies are simulations and therefore are not based on real data. This study aims to further this goal using a unique database of the Portuguese spot market, where there are powerful incentives for renewable electricity.

This paper analyses ex-post the impact of energy produced in special regime on the wholesale hourly spot market prices of Portuguese electricity during the period 2009–2016. This paper uses standard, two stage least squares and generalized method of moments multivariate regressions and other energy econometrics techniques.

It is found that special regime generation has a negative impact on the wholesale price. This impact is higher than that found in other markets. This paper also concludes that using special regime generation to supply the future growth of demand will decrease wholesale electricity spot prices more intensively than using other technologies.

This paper uses a unique database based on ex-post for the Portuguese spot market. The Portuguese case is particularly interesting, not only because of its strong incentives policy on renewable energy but also because its spot market is interconnected with the Spanish market. This paper contributes to the debate about the sustainability of current renewable electricity support schemes. The decreasing trend in electricity prices, with the introduction of new renewable capacity, can be incompatible with the required payments for non-renewable producers. This paper also shows that even if the price reduction on spot markets is transferred to final consumers, given that it is relatively small (8% spot price which represents 45% of the final price), compared with the cost of incentives (35% of the final price), consumers probably will not be able to support a new investment pipeline with a similar framework.

The question of power, long indispensable to organizational analysis, remains the elusive but essential key to understanding the employment relation within the contemporary capitalist context. Taking up this question, this chapter critically examines two of the more prevalent approaches toward work organizations – neo-institutionalist theory and labor process analysis – and engages a third, less widely utilized approach: Foucault's theory of governmentality. By weighing the strengths and weaknesses of familiar analytical traditions and providing insight into an emergent theoretical approach, we offer some observations and suggestions that might enrich the study of work, power, and organizations in the coming years.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an insight into the fundamental changes taking place in Port wine production value chains. Specifically, the authors examine two distinct production regimes: when Port is aged and sold in the Greater Oporto and, alternatively, when it is produced, aged and sold in Douro.

The authors apply a tri-regional input–output model (Douro, Greater Oporto and rest of the country) for Portugal’s economy. This framework comprises a significant level of detail, with 431 products and 136 industries, the corresponding supply and demand for the products, by industry (for intermediate consumption) and final demand.

This study shows that the two regimes generate noteworthy, but quite heterogeneous, regional impacts. In both cases, the distribution of value added generates international and interregional trade flows. Moreover, the study reveals a greater capacity to capture national value added by getting the supply chain more intensive in localised services and by using state-of-the-art production techniques.

Using detailed regional data, the authors use disaggregated information, both for industries as well for territories, overcoming a common limitation in similar works that are grounded in international databases. Additionally, the approach integrates the trade interactions among industries and regions, which proves essential to uncovering spillovers resulting from the (direct and indirect) use of inputs from other regions and other countries.

Networks are many things¹, but certainly an important feature in contemporary government. In an era of collaboration, as Agranoff and McGuire (2003) ² label it, governments are increasingly networked, using and engaging in all sorts of networks to achieve policy goals. Often, working in and through networks is regarded as the best or even only way to solve wicked problems (Goldsmith & Eggers, 2004). However, at the same time, criticism towards networks as a problem-solving strategy seems to increase in the field: they cost money, are time-consuming, cause transparency and accountability problems and so on (Huxham & Vangen, 2005; Kenis & Provan, 2009; Sørensen & Torfing, 2007). In the region of Flanders (Belgium), for instance, one of the main political issues is to regain grip on the hollowed out state, where much policy making and policy-making capacity is said to be ‘lost’ in a nebula of networks of which neither politicians nor public managers can make sense anymore.

In this paper, we present and apply a new framework – the Poles of Production for Producers/Poles of Production for Users (PFP/PFU) model – to empirically study how one particular group of academic scientists has responded to neoliberal changes in science policy and funding in Canada. The data we use are from a qualitative case study of 20 basic health scientists affiliated with a research-intensive university in a large Canadian city. We use the PFP/PFU model to explore the symbolic strategies (the vision of scientific quality) and practical strategies (the acquisition of funding and production of knowledge outputs) scientists adopt to maintain or advance their own position of power in the scientific field. We also compare similarities and differences among scientists trained before and after the rise of neoliberal policy. The PFP/PFU model allows us to see how these individual strategies cumulatively contribute to the construction of dominant and alternate modes of knowledge production. We argue that the alignments and misalignments between quality vision and practice that scientists in this study experienced reflect the symbolic struggles that are occurring among scientists, and between the scientific and political field, over two competing logics and reward systems (PFP/PFU).

This article traces the history of a continuous tradition of Marxian stage theory from the beginning of the twentieth century until the present day. The resolution of the first crisis of Marxism was found in the work of Hilferding on finance capital, Bukharin on the world economy and Lenin on imperialism as a new stage of capitalism. Hilferding's, Bukarin's and Lenin's analysis was carried into the post–World War II era through the work of Sweezy and Mandel. A second wave of Marxian stage theorizing emerged with the end of the post–World War II expansion. Mandel's long wave theory (LWT), the Social Structure of Accumulation Framework (SSAF), and the Regulation Approach (RA) analyzed the stagflationary crises as the end of a long wave of growth. This long wave was underpinned by the emergence of a postwar stage of capitalism, which was analogous to the reorganization brought about by monopoly capital at the turn of the century. These new schools were reluctant to predict the non-resolution of the current crisis, thus opening up the possibility of further stages of capitalism in the future. This elevated Lenin's theory of the highest stage to a general theory of capitalist stages. The last decade has seen a substantial convergence in the three perspectives. In general, this convergence has reaffirmed the importance of Hilferding's, Bukarin's and Lenin's (HBL's) initial contributions to the stage theoretic tradition. The article concludes with some thoughts on the necessity of stage theory for understanding of the current period of globalization.

Global trading of oil and gas means international markets are more open than at any previous time. As a result, the oil industry oligopoly is being deconstructed and vertically integrated MNCs are being reconstituted to address this fact. In parallel, emergent MNCs in the form of National Oil Companies are now entering the competitive arena. Traditionally dominant MNCs are adopting new operating models focused on technological and financial strength. We examine changes in the once-dominant industry paradigm of vertical integration using several theoretical lenses. These include transaction-cost economics, the resource-based view and institution theory. The giant MNCs operated globally for decades and are an important variant of the MNCs studied in strategic management literature. We suggest the current theoretical models do not explain sufficiently how these MNCs respond to current changes and by using industry observation we contribute to modernization of this literature.

In this article, we draw together aspects of contemporary theories of knowledge (particularly organisational knowledge) and complexity theory to demonstrate how appropriate conceptual rigor enables both the role of government and the directions of policy development in knowledge‐based economies to be identified. Specifically we ask, what is the role of government in helping shape the knowledge society of the future? We argue that knowledge policy regimes must go beyond the modes of policy analysis currently used in innovation, information and technology policy because they are based in an industrial rather than post‐industrial analytical framework. We also argue that if we are to develop knowledge‐based economies, more encompassing images of the future than currently obtain in policy discourse are required. We therefore seek to stimulate and provoke an array of lines of thought about government and policy for such economies. Our objective is to focus on ideas more than argument and persuasion.