Search results

This study analyzes Chinese‐American negotiations by examining the predispositions of negotiations from both countries. Specifically, a mail questionnaire was sent to experienced American and Chinese negotiators to assess how successful their negotiations had been and to determine what the major obstacles were to successful negotiations. Both Chinese and Americans felt that they had been reasonably successful in getting the terms of agreement they desired. Both sides also agreed that there were obstacles. Interestingly, these obstacles seemed to be rooted in differences in economic systems and negotiating assumptions rather than being based on language and cultural differences.

Most universities have MBA programs designed to train functionally specialized managers for large Fortune 1000 type firms. The graduate management education needs of small and mid‐size firms have been largely ignored. Many innovative MBA programs have themes that emphasize entrepreneurship, management of technology, or international business, but none have integrated all three themes in a redesigned MBA program that meets the needs of small and mid‐size firms.This paper describes a successful business‐driven approach to re‐engineering the form and content of an MBA program to create a higher value‐added program for smaller and rapidly growing enterprises. This curriculum development process was funded by a grant from the Cleveland Foundation’s Statewide Program for Businessand Management Education. Guided by a business‐driven process, The University of Toledo successfully initiated a new Executive MBA for Small and Mid‐size firms in the fall of 1995.

Presents an initial inquiry into the role of competitive environmental scanning in the internationalization process. Explores specifically the relationship between dimensions of competitive environmental scanning and measures of export market involvement and success. Finds that the results provide strong support for the contention that scanning capabilities must be developed for firms to pursue strategies that will result in a higher degree of export involvement and export success.

This study seeks to evaluate the importance of new product development cycle time for firms that have a strategy of pursuing exporting as a means of achieving and sustaining competitive advantage.

A mail survey utilizing the key informant approach for selecting senior executives of US manufacturing firms was chosen because of the importance of executive involvement in international marketing strategy decisions.

This study supports the argument that faster new product development capability must be augmented for firms striving for a higher degree of export involvement. Additionally, the importance of integrating the marketing, R&D, and engineering functions to develop competitive advantage is highlighted.

Results must be interpreted as explorative since the sample was based on US manufacturing firms. Additional research is needed to test differential effects of innovative product and modification/extension cycle time on export involvement and other indicators of performance.

This study demonstrates the importance of the resource‐based theory of competitive advantage, new product development cycle time as a determinant of export involvement, and competitive advantage for firms which pursue international opportunities. It suggests that product development capabilities are not a critical determining factor of the level of export involvement. The findings show that the ability to develop competitive products faster than competitors is a prerequisite for export involvement.

This study suggests that the speed of new product development is a precondition for export involvement and that the new product development cycle time measures were significantly related to the perception of a firm's overall competitive position in global markets.

Hypercompetition has long been recognized as a significant problem in almost all manufacturing industries. Service industries are also experiencing the problems of hypercompetition. Now, it seems to be spreading to higher education with significant consequences. This paper aims to describe the movement toward hypercompetition and the implications specifically for the MBA program.

This paper directly compares the experiences of industrial hypercompetition with what is developing within universities. Since businesses are typically farther along in the process of responding to hypercompetitive markets, they provide insight into what educational institutions might expect to occur and how they could respond to this threat despite the differences between these two types of organizations.

The paper finds that technological change, globalization, and increased competition are the most important environmental challenges facing MBA programs today. Technology, in particular, seems to be acting as the principle disruptor of the traditional MBA model. Additionally, corporate MBA programs and international competition have become important considerations. The important question is will Peter F. Drucker be correct that traditional universities will be severely challenged by technology‐based competition?

This paper provides useful information on hypercompetition and the implications specifically for the MBA program.

The purpose of this paper is to identify relationships among buyer‐supplier trust, joint operational activities, and the degree of mass customization as well as the interactions between cultural factors (i.e. long‐term strategic alignment and autonomy) and trust in the context of supply chain management.

The model of trust is based on joint operational activities and mass customization using theories of social capital and the resource‐based view of the firm. Also, culture‐related antecedents of trust are identified. Based on 208 responses from suppliers in the USA and China, this study uses structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses.

This study empirically supports the notion that trust positively drives manufacturer‐supplier activities in operations. It also supports the claim that joint operational activities contribute to mass customization capabilities in a significant way. Moreover, two culture‐related antecedents are found to be significantly related to trust.

The sample is limited to the auto industry in North America and China. As in other supply chain studies, individual respondents may have somewhat limited information about different aspects of their company's supply chain.

In general, it appears that trust is important in determining mass customization capabilities regardless of culture. For practitioners, long‐term strategic alignment is more important for firms to increase trust than autonomy although both can significantly increase the level of trust between buyer and supplier.

Long‐term strategic alignment and autonomy are identified as antecedents of trust and empirically supported.

The purpose of this research is to review the perceptions of 359 front‐line management personnel as to why their organizations fail to achieve desired results and to draw lessons for organizational practice on how to prevent failure and improve organizational performance. Managers from 30 organizations were asked to rate the impact that 25 different performance factors have on their ability to get desired results. The results of the study identified a variety of people and leadership factors as the primary causes of poor performance, while factors such as technology, finances, and government regulations ranked significantly lower in the rankings.

Recent research develops theory and evidence to understand how organizations come to be seen as “actors” with specified features and properties, a core concern for phenomenological institutionalism. The authors use evidence from changes in research designs in the organizational study of institutional logics as an empirical strategy to add fresh evidence to the debates about the institutional construction of organizations as actors. The case is the research literature on the institutional logics perspective, a literature in which organizational and institutional theorists grapple with long-time social theory questions about nature and context of action and more contemporary debates about the dynamics of social orders. With rapid growth since the early 1990s, this research program has elaborated and proliferated in ways meant to advance the study of societal orders, frames, and practices in diverse inter- and intra-organizational contexts. The study identifies two substantive trends over the observation period: A shift in research design from field-level studies to organization-specific contexts, where conflicts are prominent in the organization, and a shift in the conception of logic transitions, originally from one dominant logic to another, then more attention to co-existence or blending of logics. Based on this evidence, the authors identify a typology of four available research genres that mark a changed conception of organizations as actors. The case of institutional logics makes visible the link between research designs and research outcomes, and it provides new evidence for the institutional processes that construct organizational actorhood.

The popularity of research into categories has grown in recent decades and shows no sign of abating. This introductory article takes stock of the research into two facets of categorization, addressing it both as a cognitive and a social process. We advocate a rebalance toward the social process of categorization, paying more heed to the entity to be categorized, the actors involved, their acts, and the context and timing, which informs these activities. We summarize the contributions to the volume in relation to these dimensions and briefly discuss avenues for future research.