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This study investigates the effects of organizational factors on firms' adoption and use of internal staffing strategies. In particular, we examine the different effects of firm- and branch-level factors on the adoption of internal development programs and the selection of entry-level employees. We find that firm-level factors, such as firm size and organizational prestige, are positively associated with the adoption of development programs. Branch-level factors, such as branch size and leverage ratio, are positively associated with entry-level hiring. This study offers new insight into the dynamics between different levels of organizational factors and their relationship with human resource management practices.

This chapter examines the transition in the US banking industry from a community to a national logic, developing a general model to explain how and when shifts in institutional logics occur. Based on qualitative historical evidence and discrete-time event history analysis predicting the introduction of legislation favoring the national logic, this chapter proposes that dramatic exogenous events such as the Great Depression or more gradual processes such as modernization favored the industry's transition to the national logic, but that such exogenous events had a greater influence in areas where strategic actors could capitalize on them. The qualitative evidence presented here suggests that struggles involving organizational identity and “legitimacy politics” played an important role in the shift in logics. Our theorizing focuses on how, when the environment changes in an incremental fashion, actors are primed with new possibilities, which may shift their collective identities, but when environmental changes are discontinuous, they provide actors strategic opportunities to alter the balance of logics in the environment.

Employee evaluation and monitoring have been common in America since colonial times. With industrialization, employers have implemented increasingly creative ways to monitor employees. For example, in the early part of this century, Ford Motor Company employed investigators to enter employees' homes to verify that employees were not overly drinking and that their homes were clean

We distinguish between two forms of local banks that build and maintain legitimacy in different ways: branches and unit banks. Branches gain legitimacy through the parent organization. Unit banks gain legitimacy through the personal reputation and social connections of the founders. Given the different ways in which legitimacy is built by these organizational forms, we think that the rural or urban nature of the community is likely to affect the founding rates of these two forms differently. Rural communities, in which personal and family relationships play an important role in both social and economic life, provide advantages to well-connected founders of unit banks. In these communities social networks serve as a demand buffer for unit banks, making the founding rate of this organizational form less sensitive to fluctuations in the demand for banking services in rural versus urban communities. In contrast, the founding rate of branches may not be greatly affected by the community context because branches gain legitimacy through a sponsoring organization whose legitimating characteristics are not local. Empirical analyses of foundings of local banks between 1976 and 1988 support these predictions. Supplemental empirical analyses also show no evidence of such buffering effect for unit retail establishments, which are expected to be less central in the social networks of rural communities than unit banks. Our results suggest that community organization channels resources to some kinds of organizations at the expense of others and that organizational research in general and organizational ecology in particular will benefit by paying more attention to community context.

This study identifies key variables that contribute most to the discrimination between firms with high export performance levels and those with low export performance levels. Data were collected through a structured multi-item questionnaire involving a randomly selected sample of 105 exporting firms. Discriminant analysis was used to identify the key discriminating variables. Exporters with high-performance levels differed significantly from those with low levels. Strategy implementation, experience in international business and training, economic factors, size of the firm, cultural factors, strategic orientation, education, and political/legal factors, listed in order of importance, were identified as key discriminators between the two types of firms.

In September 1994 the Association Française des Banques published a standard master agreement for derivatives and foreign exchange over‐the‐counter transactions. The introduction of this new multi‐product documentation has been rendered possible by the enactment of a specific netting statute which provides for a legal framework allowing inter alia contractual close‐out netting procedure. This standard documentation is strongly inspired by the 1992 ISDA Multicurrency Cross‐Border Master Agreement.

The results of a study on the cost efficiency of expanding and marketing bank services through branching rather than through the formation of new banks are given. Using detailed cost and bank service output data from a large sample of bank branches across Canada, several issues of interest to bank management and marketing officials are addressed. The evidence presented indicates that some Canadian banks may not be benefiting fully from their ability to rationalise their activities. Retail and commercial banking branches operate according to different technologies for producing financial products and services. Small commercial branches show less potential for economies of scale than retail branches. However, this potential does not appear to shrink as rapidly as it does for retail branches. Finally, both retail and commercial branches show benefits from specialisation. As a result of these technological characteristics, banks may be well advised to maintain their marketing strategy of segregating their retail business from commercial business.

This paper aims to investigate “corporate governance” of the English East India Company (EIC) in the late 17th century through a case study of the Tonkin factory (1672–1697).

The paper draws upon British primary materials relating to the Tonkin factory to examine and analyze the EIC’s style of management in Tonkin (Vietnam) and Bantam (Java). Qualitative and comparative methods are applied to the analysis of reports, records and letters written by EIC staff.

The paper finds that the EIC faced principal-agent problems as it had difficulties administering its distant agents and subsidiaries in the 17th century. London was strategically weakened, both by the limiting power of regional headquarters and by its use of experienced factors. Before 1682, London failed to temper the Bantam Council’s influence, and there were serious internal conflicts and power struggles between English Tonkin employees seeking to improve their positions. After 1686, London successfully forced Madras to adopt a noninterventionist stance in Tonkin’s business, but it faced the problem of “adverse selection.”

This paper provides evidence from the Tonkin factory (1672–1697) to show the EIC’s governance in the perspective of the agency theory.

Flows of transnational popular culture into Egypt are not so much cases of foreign imperialism imposing itself on helpless Egyptians as they are processes managed by Cairene entrepreneurs whose accomplishments present them as successful agents of modernization, locating the cosmopolitan balance between global brands and goods and local markets and infrastructures. This chapter explores the links between these entrepreneurs, the state's “culture of development,” and class reproduction. Egyptian transnational entrepreneurialism – speculative, profit-oriented enterprises engaged with transnational flows of brands, commodities, and capital – has become yoked to the state's goal of national development through economic liberalization. Upper-class cosmopolitan entrepreneurs are increasingly positioned as agents of hybridity, culture brokers who can creatively forge links between supposedly rational and universal economic practices of market capital, and local cultural beliefs and values. Successful entrepreneurs are construed as possessing an “entrepreneurial imagination” by means of which they can overcome structural and cultural obstacles and contribute to the development of an Egyptian “enterprise culture.”

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which customer experience and relationship marketing (RM), as two widely used service management approaches, can effectively determine satisfaction and commitment as two relational quality constructs, and their impact on loyalty and word-of-mouth (WoM) as relational outcomes for retail bank services in Kuwait. This country is chosen as an exemplar of an Arabian Peninsula culture with a predominantly Islamic heritage and a capital-surplus economy.

The relational benefits scale and customer experience quality were used as independent measures to collect data using multiple methods (interview, paper and pencil, online) from 1,013 customers of local and international banks. Standard translation procedures, CFA procedures and parallel analysis were employed to examine the dimensionality of all scales. SEM procedures were applied for each approach to assess its impact on the four indigenous dependent constructs using a multitude of fit indices, examination of validity and reliability measures for all constructs as well as structural paths.

Results show the factor structure of both scales differed from their original conceptualization, with fewer items forming each latent factor when applied in Kuwait. The explanatory and predictive power of the EXQ model performed slightly better than RBS, although both explained substantial variance on dependent measures, confirming their relevance despite the lack of noticeable correlation between most factors contained in both scales.

This study underscores the importance of establishing the validity of measures prior to their cross-cultural application, with particular focus on the content validity of scale items to measure the intended construct properly. It also shows how two approaches can complement each other rather than compete to effectively manage bank services. As is the case with all cross-sectional research paradigms, longitudinal analysis linking expressed loyalty/WoM with actual behavior can better assess tested relationships than the current research.

Retail banks’ marketing strategy should simultaneously address customer relationships and customer experience to reduce attrition and enhance customer life-time value.

Effects of service experience and RM are examined in a Middle-Eastern market, where internationalization of banks has created strong competition, leading customers to view bank services as less differentiated. Caution and examination of service quality measures are needed before using them as metrics in annual reports and performance reviews.