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Continuing our series on addiction without substance, Simon Milton explores the misunderstood world of gambling addiction. Using his years of experience as a gambling therapist, Simon discusses the most likely theories for this often problematic behaviour and argues for the best treatment options.

Herbert Simon's major contribution to decision‐making theory is the concept of “satisficing”. This was first posited in Administrative Behavior, published in 1947, and the book, concerned as it was with establishing a scientific approach to administrative theory, puts forward an adjustment of then‐current economic theory, which viewed administrative choice as a process of maximising. While, over the ensuing decades, Simon adjusted his definitions of both “economic man” and of “satisficing” in several subsequent publications, the original exposition of these was a major contribution to the area of administrative theory. An attempt has been made here to explore what circumstances might have led Simon into putting forward the concept of “satisficing”.

The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast a customer‐focused service process diagram tool (blueprinting) with an organizational‐focused process diagram tool (business process modeling notation, or BPMN).

Using a hotel stay as an example, the paper presents both a service blueprint and a BPMN diagram. The authors then explicitly discuss the similarities, differences resulting from an ontological comparison of service blueprints and BPMN, and show where the two tools can be complementary.

The authors have found that one similarity is that service blueprinting segments processes into parts that are similar to BPMN's idea of swimlanes. However, the swimlanes in service blueprinting separate customer actions, customer‐facing employees’ actions and functions, and back‐stage functions, actors, and information systems, thereby effectively mandating certain swimlanes for the purpose of analyzing points of contact between the firm and a customer. Another similarity is that service blueprinting deliberately differentiates between different functional areas and roles within each area to highlight, and IT systems. But it does this to make clear where actions move across organizational boundaries to avoid damaging service support, and also to explain to back‐office staff their role in supporting on‐stage customer interactions. Unlike BPMN, service blueprinting has physical evidence as front‐stage indicators to customers of service quality and to constrain customer actions by carefully designing the servicescape.

A limitation is that the paper only uses one example (a hotel stay).

The comparison provides service managers with guidance as to how to use the two tools interactively.

Firms, to represent business processes, are using BPMN in increasing numbers. Knowing how BPMN supports and undermines service blueprinting is important, because service to customers is the ultimate goal for all firms. Therefore, representing service processes requires the parts of service blueprints to be supported in BPMN. Business process outsourcing adds further urgency for the need to adequately represent the parts of service processes in BPMN.

In this paper the aim is to present Debate Dashboard, an online collaborative platform designed to support distributed knowledge management and decision making. The platform integrates an argument mapping tool with visual widgets with the objective of enhancing collective sense‐making and mutual understanding as well as to compensate for the costs of mediated communication in virtual collaborative environments.

The design of Debate Dashboard is based on the theory of common ground according to which participants involved in a conversation build mutual understanding thanks to the exchange of different types of feedback. Using the concept of grounding cost, the authors identified several features of the Dashboard supposed to favour mutual understanding and knowledge sharing. Such features have been implemented through six visual widgets selected through a benchmarking of currently available visualization tools.

The paper discusses the limitations and advantages of online argumentation to support online discussions and presents a review of current visualization tools. The design of a new platform able to integrate online argumentation and visualization technologies is described and it is argued that Debate Dashboard will improve online collaboration in many respects especially in terms of supporting the construction of shared knowledge representations for geographically distributed collaborative teams.

First, the work adds to the debate on the development of online argumentation platforms by offering an alternative theoretical perspective based on language and conversational studies. Second, it proposes for the first time to integrate argumentation and visualization technologies in the same tool to create an augmented collaborative platform able to overcome the limitations of both traditional online collaboration technologies, such as forums and wikis, as well as the criticalities associated with the use of argumentation technologies.

This paper aims to examine the differences in epistemological underpinnings of conventional information systems analysis and design (ISAD) approaches (such as structured system and analysis design methodologies) and a recently developed situated ISAD approach.

This empirical investigation involved constructing a simulated field situation to allow a conventionally trained IS analyst to analyse the same case as had been previously analysed by applying the situated ISAD methodology.

While the conventional approach focuses on articulated knowledge and observes the system under study with a detached stance, the situated approach includes tacit knowledge and recognises the importance of the environment. The situated analyst is immersed in the system, attempting to take the subject position of an actor in the system, while also maintaining some analytical distance.

The research method and framework presented is a novel way to compare the epistemological underpinnings of other systems analysis and design methodologies. Validity issues are explicitly addressed in the paper; although it is based on a single case, the fact that it is a real‐world problem gives it high external validity.

The investigation is based on an actual system design case and shows that, in analysis and design, the different epistemological underpinnings affect what is identified as a problem and hence the type of solution proposed.

There has been little previous work comparing epistemological commitments of alternative ISAD methodologies as they are played out in actual application. This paper makes a significant contribution to the theoretical foundations of IS.

The purpose of this paper is to report on research that identifies the relationships that senior managers believe exist between capabilities and business success. In doing so, it addresses the need for more empirical research about the role of strategic and dynamic capabilities in organisational performance. It also highlights the critical strategic and dynamic capabilities that are most valuable for practising managers.

A multi-method study was conducted. Eight types of strategic capability and ten types of dynamic capability commonly found in organisations were identified through consecutive literature review, web site content analysis and interviews with senior executives. A questionnaire survey was then used to ask senior officers of publicly listed Australian firms about the importance of each capability and financial and non-financial performance indicators. The relationship between capabilities and performance was measured by regression modelling.

Good leadership with an innovative vision and selection and retention of good staff and developing their skills and capabilities were the stand out strategic capabilities. Strategic thinking about the big picture and the long-term and flexible leaders who can lead and manage adaptation to change were considered to be the most important dynamic capabilities. Strategic capabilities were more often associated with indicators of financial success, and dynamic capabilities were more often associated with non-financial measures of organisational performance.

This is the first study to make a distinction between strategic and dynamic capabilities in examining the relationship between capabilities and business success. The results demonstrate that the distinction has both theoretical and practical value.

The authors aim to look at the conditions under which central bank easing – and specifically the purchase of private sector securities – can/should contribute to growth, rather than fiscal policy and also ask when can the central bank’s purchase of private sector securities help supplant traditional monetary policy.

After surveying the existing literature, the authors use simple correlation of central bank private asset (stocks, bonds, etc.), interest rates, gross domestic product (GDP) growth, inflation and the extent of the functioning of domestic banking sectors (among others) to classify countries in which these purchases promote pro-growth investment.

Under the typical conditions for unconventional monetary policy, central bank purchases of private companies’ securities can promote growth in some places (like Bulgaria, the Ukraine, Georgia and Greece at the time of our writing) while hurting it in others (like in parts of Latin America and Africa in the mid-2010s). The authors find how such purchases effectively “bypass” dysfunctional banking systems and central/government local bodies fiscal spending, making the central bank the “funder of last resort” in many middle and lower income countries.

This paper tells specific central banks to ramp up – or reduce – their purchases of private sector securities. The authors identify exact jurisdictions where such “helicopter money” has led to investment in the past economic growth.

All previous work on conventional and unconventional monetary policy has looked at the way monetary policy affects investment and growth through the banking system and holding companies’ reactions constant. The authors do the opposite – looking at how companies respond, holding banking system responses constant. No one has ever looked at these private purchases (taken from a special IMF database), much less tried to argue that central banks can sometimes target investment growth much better than fiscal policy. No one has ever considered them as a funder (rather than lender) of last resort.