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We study research designs where a binary treatment changes discontinuously at the border between administrative units such as states, counties, or municipalities, creating a treated and a control area. This type of geographically discontinuous treatment assignment can be analyzed in a standard regression discontinuity (RD) framework if the exact geographic location of each unit in the dataset is known. Such data, however, is often unavailable due to privacy considerations or measurement limitations. In the absence of geo-referenced individual-level data, two scenarios can arise depending on what kind of geographic information is available. If researchers have information about each observation’s location within aggregate but small geographic units, a modified RD framework can be applied, where the running variable is treated as discrete instead of continuous. If researchers lack this type of information and instead only have access to the location of units within coarse aggregate geographic units that are too large to be considered in an RD framework, the available coarse geographic information can be used to create a band or buffer around the border, only including in the analysis observations that fall within this band. We characterize each scenario, and also discuss several methodological challenges that are common to all research designs based on geographically discontinuous treatment assignments. We illustrate these issues with an original geographic application that studies the effect of introducing copayments for the use of the Children’s Health Insurance Program in the United States, focusing on the border between Illinois and Wisconsin.

Identifies the effects associated with the entry of a large format (“big box”) retailer into a new market, especially a smaller one. A large format retailer can be a discount department store, category specialist, warehouse club, superstore, supercenter or hypermarket. In order to identify these effects, a review was made of published and unpublished studies. In addition, interviews were conducted among key informants including developers, urban planners and professionals, economic development officers, retail executives and store managers. The result of this research includes a documentation, analysis and discussion of numerous effects, including benefits to the consumer, differences in the demographics of large format store shoppers, rapid growth in the sales and market share of the new entrant, growth in the community economy, growth and decline in various commercial sectors, decline in the economy of nearby markets, creation and losses of jobs, and increases and decreases in market efficiency. Given these effects, suggests implications for each community stakeholder. Listed are a large number of questions for future research.

A TRACE of acrimony has tinctured some recent letters published in these pages. The head and front of the offence seemed to be that the author of the first serious British book on work study failed to recognise the existence of the Institute of Industrial Technicians. Let us preserve a sense of proportion. At the worst it was probably no more than an oversight understandable enough in an author writing a technical work while immersed in the daily duties of his calling. Per se, the fact does not affect the Institute in the slightest degree.

THE IFLA Conference—or to be more precise—the 34th Session of the General Council of IFLA—met at Frankfurt am Main from the 18th to the 24th of August, 1968. Note the dates, for they include the 21st of August, the day when the delegates heard, as did the rest of the world, of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Until then the Conference had been proceeding happily, and with the smoothness inborn of German organisation. During and after that date, a blight was cast over the proceedings, and although the Conference carried out its formal and informal programmes as planned, concentrations were disturbed as delegates sometimes gathered round transistor radios, their thoughts on Eastern Europe.

The paper reports an investigation into the marketing and performance consequences of organisations operating in regulated, deregulated and open market environments in Zimbabwe’s developing economy. The findings suggest that organisations do not respond to environmental changes by adapting their marketing effort, hence the environment is a poor predictor of marketing effort. Organisational strategy has a far greater impact on marketing effort than the environment. However, the environment is an important predictor of organisational performance and has significant interaction with business strategy in influencing organisational performance hence it is a quasi‐moderator. Our result suggests that in regulated environments there may be “ideal‐type” strategies for effectiveness and across all environments the concept of equifinality is not supported. There is evidence to suggest that more adaptable strategy types outperform their less adaptive competitors. These results extend a popular typology to developing economies and allow some findings to be generalisable across countries at different stages of economic development.

Explores the relationships between organizational communication and organization theory. Focuses on interorganizational communication and assesses several models of interorganizational relations. Proposes and discusses a method for studying interorganizational communication.

There is ample anecdotal evidence, as well as an emergent body of literature, which examines the role of entrepreneurial teams in the success and growth of businesses. Earlier research by the authors has demonstrated that the core competence required by founding entrepreneurs is the ability to build and manage relationships. Their more recent work suggests that this core competence must be based around a clear vision for the business. In other words, the founding entrepreneur must be able to build a team to deliver the business vision. A review of literature is provided in this paper, offering a definition of the concept and some of the core issues that have to be addressed by entrepreneurs and small firm policies if businesses are to continue growing. This is supported by some preliminary findings from empirical research into how entrepreneurial teams are formed. The paper continues with propositions that can lead to further research in this relatively unexplored field.

Companies in challenged industries such as fashion often struggle to communicate credibly with their stakeholders about their social and environmental achievements. Credible corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication, however, has been described theoretically as a predictor of legitimacy for organizations in society, but never proven empirically. The purpose of this paper is to test perceived credibility of a CSR website as a main predictor of input and output (pragmatic, cognitive and moral) legitimacy.

A 2 × 2 between-subjects online experiment with participants recruited from the SoSci Panel (n=321) is conducted on an anonymized website of a fashion company.

Credible CSR websites result in output (cognitive and pragmatic) legitimacy. However, participation in the CSR decision-making process (input or moral legitimacy) did not matter. Instead, the more subjects accepted the outcome of the CSR communication process, the more they found a company to be legitimate.

The CSR communication process on a website is just one specific example. In other settings, such as social media, the role of participation in the CSR communication process will be different.

Communicating credibly is a key, particularly in challenged industries, such as fashion. Thus, designing credible communication material matters for legitimacy.

The findings for the first time confirm the credibility–legitimacy link in corporate communication empirically. Participation in CSR-related decision-making processes is overrated: the outcome of the CSR communication process is important for stakeholders and their acceptance of a company in society, the participation in the process less. This confirms the idea of CSR as stakeholder expectations management.