Search results

William Baumol is best-known as an academic. He was a prodigious researcher and publisher of texts on microeconomic theory, and a highly regarded educator with roles as head of the Department of Economics at Princeton University, director of the C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics and director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at New York University. Less well-known were his engagements as a corporate consultant, notably for the telecommunications monopoly AT&T. Baumol’s work as an advisor, expert witness and theorist for AT&T spanned three decades from 1966. His relationship with AT&T arguably forms the context within which we can better understand his work on contestability theory, which he developed with a team of economists working for AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1970s. Contestability theory was later deployed as a policy tool to justify industry deregulation and even advocate for monopolies and oligopolies on the ground that they were optimally efficient industry structures if potential competitors faced low barriers of entry. Baumol’s intellectual contribution to contestability theory was arguably influenced by the Chicago school and by AT&T’s drive toward the technological integration of telecommunications. Contestability was a rebellion against economic orthodoxies concerning competition and government regulation, and the status quo within AT&T which opposed market competition on the ground that it threatened the technological integration of the Bell system. The outcome was a revolution in industrial organization that would pave the way for the emergence of platform business models incorporating multi-sided and two-sided markets as exemplified by Amazon and Uber.

The failure to understand the mistakes of the past is causing many US retailers, with their “narrow areas of expertise”, not to commit sufficient resources to monitoring how changes in the demographic, technological, political, and economic environments have affected and will continue to affect their businesses. Seeks to address some of these changing trends in the retailing, consumer, and regulatory sectors and their impact on retailing in the USA today ‐ a reduction in the number of retailers, continued emphasis on expense reduction in order to achieve margin reduction, and the demise of the mid‐sized retail chain. In addition, examines how these current trends will affect US retailing in the future.

Futures research and long‐range planning in an urban school district involve the use of a methodology having no direct answers or precise rules in terms of experimental and design alternatives. While some design options can be found in operations research and management science, futures research projects in education are more likely to follow the directions for policy analysis initially suggested by Yehezkel Dror and re‐examined in Aaron Wildavsky. They note in policy analysis, 1. Much attention would be paid to the political aspects of public decision‐making and public policy‐making (instead of ignoring or condescendingly regarding political aspects) … 2. A broad conception of decision‐making and policy‐making would be involved (instead of viewing all decision‐making as mainly a resources allocation) … 3. A main emphasis would be on creativity and search for new policy alternatives, with explicit attention to encouragement of innovative thinking … 4. There would be extensive reliance on … qualitative methods … 5. There would be much more emphasis on futuristic thinking … 6. The approach would be looser and less rigid, but nevertheless systematic, one which would recognise the complexity of means‐ends interdependence, the multiplicity of relevant criteria of decision, and the partial and tentative nature of every analysis … (Wildavsky, Aaron, “Rescuing Policy Analysis from PPBS” Public Administration Review 29. 1969. pp. 189–202. Wildavsky's reference is to Dror's “Policy Analysts : A New Professional Role in Government Service” Public Administration Review. 27. 1967. pp.200–201). The intent is to describe a single futures research project conducted in a large urban school district staff development program. It is reported here as a means to outline a general approach to policy planning that might be used or adapted by other administrators who share an interest in futures research.

This chapter assesses how gender and disability status intersect to shape employment and earnings outcomes for working-age adults in the United States.

The research pools five years of data from the 2010–2015 Current Population Survey to compare employment and earnings outcomes for men and women with different types of physical and cognitive disabilities to those who specifically report work-limiting disabilities.

The findings show that people with different types of limitations, including those not specific to work, experienced large disparities in employment and earnings and these outcomes also varied for men and women. The multiplicative effects of gender and disability on labor market outcomes led to a hierarchy of disadvantage where women with cognitive or multiple disabilities experienced the lowest employment rates and earnings levels. However, within groups, disability presented the strongest negative effects for men, which created a smaller gender wage gap among people with disabilities.

This chapter provides quantitative evidence for the multiplicative effects of gender and disability status on employment and earnings. It further extends an intersectional framework by highlighting the gendered aspects of the ways in which different disabilities shape labor market inequalities. Considering multiple intersecting statuses demonstrates how the interaction between disability type and gender produce distinct labor market outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the emerging challenges of cybersecurity governance by analyzing the internet’s early history.

Tracing the design and management of early internet and network security technologies in the USA in the 1970s and 1980s.

The US Department of Defense separated the research and management regimes for networks and network security, with the latter restricted to military networks. As such, the absence of cybersecurity technologies on the early internet was not an oversight, but a necessary compromise. This ordering of networks and security had enduring technological, political and even cultural consequences, which are breaking down today.

Political, technological and metaphoric distinctions between networks and security should be challenged; cybersecurity will transform internet governance.

New historical sources and analysis provide a novel perspective on contemporary challenges of cybersecurity governance.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to clarify what specific behaviors are involved in consumers' partial switching in mobile application (app) usage, and, second, to explore the common and differential motivations of these behaviors.

This paper specified two behaviors in consumers' partial switching in mobile app usage, trialing and combining behaviors, and conceptualized them as different types of variety seeking behaviors. A theoretical model contrasting intrinsic motivations and extrinsic motivations on the two behaviors was developed and tested with a sample of 561 mobile app users in China.

The findings showed that both trialing and combining behaviors could be motivated by intrinsic individual-related and extrinsic technology-related factors. Besides, intrinsic individual-related factors were more effective in motivating trialing behavior, whereas extrinsic technology-related factors were more effective in motivating combining behavior. All these findings are applicable and consistent in both hedonic and utilitarian apps.

This study extends and advances the literature on information technology switching by investigating consumer use behaviors from a new perspective of partial switching and multiple competing apps usage. This study also contributes to variety seeking literature by extending the understanding of variety seeking to the context of mobile app usage. Finally, by investigating the associations and distinctions of trialing and combining behavior, this study not only helps to fully understand the partial switching but also enriches the understanding of different types of variety seeking behaviors.

From 1953 to 1961, the South Korean economy grew slowly; the average per capita GNP growth was a mere percent, amounting to less than $100 in 1961. Few people, therefore, look for the sources of later dynamism in this period. As Kyung Cho Chung (1956:225) wrote in the mid‐1950s: “[South Korea] faces grave economic difficulties. The limitations imposed by the Japanese have been succeeded by the division of the country, the general destruction incurred by the Korean War, and the attendant dislocation of the population, which has further disorganized the economy” (see also McCune 1956:191–192). T.R. Fehrenbach (1963:37), in his widely read book on the Korean War, prognosticated: “By themselves, the two halves [of Korea] might possibly build a viable economy by the year 2000, certainly not sooner.”

This paper aims to highlight the historical roots of employee engagement and empirically examine the influence of self-efficacy on the three dimensions of employee engagement (vigor, dedication and absorption).

A sample of 426 male and female respondents in the service industry from Lebanon was surveyed using a multi-scale measure composed of 25 items. Regression analysis was used to test the data for the hypothesized relationships between the variables.

History of management continues to be the backbone of the so-called modern concepts. Although the term employee engagement was not used in scientific management or in the human relations movement, the characteristics were incorporated in these early schools. The three factors of employee engagement explained 78 per cent of the total variance of employee engagement construct and were significantly influenced by self-efficacy.

The first limitation of this study is the self-reported data, and the second limitation is the source from one industry (service), although different organizations were incorporated. Caution is advised against generalizations of the findings.

The results of this study provide insights for both researchers and managers to better understand the relationship between three dimensions of employee engagement and self-efficacy from a non-Western context. The belief in one’s own capabilities helps promote employee engagement.

Lebanon offers an interesting context; it is considered as the only Arab country that provides an interaction between the Western and Middle Eastern countries.

This study aimed to trace the historical roots of employee engagement to the early management schools. Moreover, studies similar to the present investigation exist; however, this is the first time that a non-Western Arab sample was used to examine the influence of self-efficacy on the three dimensions of employee engagement.

Much of the current U.S. academic literature on participatory budgeting is preoccupied with direct citizen involvement in budget formulation, reflecting a particular normative theory of democracy. In this essay we suggest that U.S. academics can learn from a contemporary international community of practice concerned with “civil-society budget work”-a quasi-grassroots, quasi-pluralist movement with member organizations throughout the developing world-as well as from the budget exhibits mounted by the New York Bureau of Municipal Research at the turn of the last century. The budget-work movement employs third-party intermediation and advocacy, through all phases of the budget cycle. U.S. academics and budget-work practitioners can learn from each other, and this represents an unexploited opportunity for all concerned. We propose a program of locally based action research and trans-local evaluative synthesis.