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We examine the role of financial and nonfinancial performance measures in managing revenues derived from life cycles of a type of intellectual property products − motion pictures.

Our study focuses on the first two markets in which audiences can watch a motion picture – the upstream theatrical market and the downstream home video market. We combine data collected from numerous public and proprietary sources and form a final sample of 654 motion pictures. Then we perform regression analysis on the data.

First, three measures of a movie’s performance in the theatrical market, opening box office revenue, peak rank, and weeks at the peak rank, have positive effects on subsequent revenues in the home video market. Second, the same set of performance measures also predicts the motion picture’s life span in the theatrical market. Third, when the actual life span of a motion picture in the theatrical market deviates from its predicted value, the total return on investment in the motion picture decreases.

We do not have data on other downstream markets related to motion pictures, such as pay-per-view and online video streaming.

This study suggests that the public and proprietary data can be used to inform managerial decisions regarding intellectual property product life cycles.

This is the first accounting study that directly examines life cycle revenues of intellectual property products. We also extend literature on revenue driver and revenue management research to the product level.

This study examines the variety of cooperative strategies used to organize the international co-production of motion pictures. Motion picture production is a high-goal singularity, project-based industry in which the structure of relationships between companies involved in cooperative strategies is highly visible. Working from existing theories of co-production and drawing on the strategic joint ventures literature, I examine archival data, first for evidence of the strategies predicted by theory, and then for project participation strategies that theory does not account for. I identify four strategies on the basis of the ways that firms participate in international co-productions. A large number of relatively short-lived firms enact strategies of supplying resources and skills to the persistent firms dominate the industry. Two types of persistent firms cooperate with both direct competitors and complementors but pursue different markets, whereas a third type avoids cooperation with peers. The observed strategies constitute a hierarchy of strategic roles, and thus demonstrate the complexity of strategic behavior involved in project-based production.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which project preferences and social capital constrain mobility in project‐based careers.

The paper analyzes the careers of 352 individuals who entered the motion picture industry between 1988 and 1990. It uses motion picture credit histories to generate role sequence paths. The paper quantifies differences between paths using optimal matching techniques and cluster analysis to classify paths into clusters. It validates the classification by testing hypotheses about differences between path clusters.

In addition to a large group of individuals who exit the industry after the initial credit, the paper identifies three distinct clusters of career paths that exhibit differences in the sex of individuals on them, in the persistence of relationships with employers, in employer characteristics, and in the nature of subsequent projects.

Because the paper is exploratory, general hypotheses are tested. Motion picture production may be an extreme example of project‐based production, which would limit generalizability.

Managers, individuals and career experts should recognize that mobility can be constrained and channeled by preferences in project type and by social capital. Employer celebrity appears to play no role in the careers of assistants, but control over many projects plays a significant role.

The paper demonstrates non‐organizational constraints on mobility in project‐based, apparently boundaryless, self‐managed careers.

THE bulk of our hospitals, etc., were built about a century ago and when examined in the light of present‐day needs and future requirements they are found to be far from satisfactory. Millions of hours are wasted annually due to the inadequacies of the buildings, equipment and management. Most of these institutions are trying to give a more comprehensive service to a volume of patients twice as large as they were originally designed to accommodate.

This paper surveys theoretical and practical issues associated with a particular type of information retrieval problem, namely that where the information need is pictorial. The paper is contextualised by the notion of a visually stimulated society, in which the ease of record creation and transmission in the visual medium is contrasted with the difficulty of gaining effective subject access to the world's stores of such records. The technological developments which, in casting the visual image in electronic form, have contributed so significantly to its availability are reviewed briefly, as a prelude to the main thrust of the paper. Concentrating on still and moving pictorial forms of the visual image, the paper dwells on issues related to the subject indexing of pictorial material and discusses four models of pictorial information retrieval corresponding with permutations of the verbal and visual modes for the representation of picture content and of information need.

THE accountant is the latest competitor for management power. The Institute of Cost & Works Accountants—the value of whose Associate qualification we acknowledge—has re‐cast its requirements for the grade of Fellowship. Cost Accountants' or for that matter many other kinds of accountant, are now invited to sit for the Fellowship examination, the syllabus for which has just been published. This comprises the now familiar: Management—Factory and Distribution, Statistical Method, Advanced Cost Accountancy, Company Law, Management Accountancy and the Economic Aspects of Industry and Commerce. (The Management Section includes Motion & Time Study). Assuming that they are successful in this and that they satisfy a Reviewing Board of the adequacy of their experience, they may then call themselves “Management Accountants”.

THIS month there will be assembling at Margate the Conference on Automation organised by the Institution of Production Engineers.

The purpose of this paper is to bridge the glaring gap in the sales literature due to the deficiency of historical research on the adoption of technology in personal selling and the resultant impacts on sales roles.

This paper traces the early adoption of technology by the sales force through information obtained from an extensive review of published works covering a nearly 130‐year timeframe. Where possible, efforts are made to chronicle the early use of these technologies by citing examples from historical publications of applications in selling situations.

In the exciting internet era, it is often unrecognized that adopting the latest technology in selling is a long, ongoing process which can be traced back at least to the beginning of professional personal selling in the mid‐1800s when the industrial revolution enabled dramatic increases in manufactured products. A review of the literature suggests that sales forces were often early adopters of new technologies that laid the groundwork for taking on new or expanded sales roles. With each new invention and its creative adoption and adaption to selling, new sales roles have been created or ongoing ones expanded or significantly modified. Many of the roles still entrusted to today's sales force are arguably linked to a succession of technological adoptions that occurred between the 1850s and 1980s.

From a historical perspective, this paper examines sales force technology development from the 1850s through the 1980s and the resultant impacts on sales force roles. To date, this historic technology‐sales force role relationship has not been adequately recognized or addressed in the sale literature. The analyses presented in the present study should prove useful for academics, students, and practitioners in the sales and marketing fields as well as researchers examining business history.

ONE area of business to which Work Study could profitably devote some attention is that of planned printing. Even in the second half of the twentieth‐century it is a subject of which many people seem quite unaware, although efficiency‐conscious companies could well find it to be a source of productivity and profit.

The aim of this paper is to focus on the history of cost accounting, costing, and time and motion studies, which were initially developed for industry and private sector organisations, in libraries. At the same time, the article attempts to deal with the question of when and why the need for the evaluation of costs and the standardisation of different library work processes emerged.

The data used in this paper are based on reviewing and summarising relevant studies, which have been conducted in libraries, and was inspired by the ideas of scientific management and cost accounting.

The implementation of cost accounting systems and scientific management ideas in libraries has historically been treated as a technical innovation rather than an organisational or management innovation. The most important consideration is that librarians are not machines, which can be set at a given speed and expected to produce a uniform product. Fortunately, there is no indication that production standards for libraries are going to be set up.

This article raises a perspective in library management that has not been dealt with before. Namely, it explores how the profession of a librarian as an erudite scholar changed into a profession requiring routine work and considers the impact that the ideas of scientific management and cost accounting research had on library employees when they reached libraries.