Search results

The emphasis of this survey is on motion picture reference material that has been published since 1982. This update does not, for the most part, include titles covered in a prior RSR article (1:4; 1983), written by myself, or in an even earlier article by Leslie Kane (7:1; 1979). In those few instances where titles that have appeared in the earlier RSR film surveys are discussed, it is because they now have a new subject emphasis.

With more corporations using the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award as a benchmark, any change in the award's criteria is significant. New for 1995: Money talks. This year's version of the Baldrige standards incorporates a new segment on financial results and more assessments of future‐oriented activities.

What can big business learn from small business? Plenty. But beware—the same mistakes can kill any company, any size.

Tomorrow's corporation will have to be like a butterfly, says Beverly Goldberg, vice president of the Twentieth Century Fund and Siberg Associates, both in New York. “The organization of the future is going to be a constantly evolving entity,” she notes drawing the comparison to the diurnal insects in the order of Lepidoptera.

Our second annual listing is nearly 50% larger than last year's. The reason: a growing interest in software‐aided strategic planning.

Describes the work undertaken by Oxford University’s robotics group, founded in 1985 by Professor Mike Brady. States that these university scientists have their feet firmly on the ground and illustrates this by giving details of a number of industrially‐sponsored projects with which they are involved; in the medical, automotive and defence sectors. Shows how the group fits in to Oxford’s engineering department as a whole.

Project alliancing – a project delivery model used in delivering complex projects – demands new organizational capabilities for successful project implementation. The purpose of this paper is to define the concept of project alliance (PA) capability and to identify the elements that constitute an organization’s PA capability.

This study provides empirical evidence of PA capability based on an investigation of participants’ experiences of Finnish construction and infrastructure alliance projects. The adopted research approach is qualitative and inductive.

The paper conceptualizes PA capability and defines the elements that constitute an organization’s PA capability, including important activities in the pre-formation, development and post-formation phases of PAs and the contractual, behavioral, relational, and operational skills that organizations need for successful alliance project initiation and implementation.

The identified alliance project activities are targets for routinization and best practices that organizations can deploy from one project to another. The identified skills indicate areas in which organizations should build and develop expertise.

There is limited empirical research on the elements defining an organization’s capability to bid, manage and operate in alliance projects. This study presents some preliminary thoughts to augment knowledge of the successful initiation and management of alliance projects and to suggest why some organizations may be more successful than others in alliance projects.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: to validate the consumer ethnocentrism tendencies (CET) scale in Mozambique and to describe the profile of CET in that country; to describe the effects of consumer ethnocentrism through the moderator of product type; and to discuss implications of Mozambican consumer ethnocentrism and its effects and make recommendations for practitioners.

A questionnaire‐based survey was carried out to collect data from 448 consumers in Southern Mozambique. The data were analyzed by using exploratory factor analyses, confirmatory factor analyses and structural equation modelling.

The CET scale has satisfactory psychometric qualities and can be used as a two‐dimensional construct in Mozambique. Mozambican consumers were found to be moderately ethnocentric. Their ethnocentric tendencies underpinned negative attitudes toward South African consumables. The study demonstrates the moderating role of product type and concludes that importers of South African agricultural consumables into Mozambique are more susceptible to the effects of consumer ethnocentrism than are importers of processed goods.

The results cannot be generalized to countries and products which were not included into this study. The conclusions about the CET effects are valid only for the southern part of the country where the survey took place.

The authors suggest that South African marketing managers should pay closer attention to the competitiveness of agricultural consumables in Mozambique. By contrast, processed consumables from South Africa represent a lower risk. As the employment issue plays a central role in Mozambican consumer ethnocentric tendencies, the national policy makers might incorporate it into the messages of buy‐local campaigns. In addition, the buy local campaigns should position growing national industry as a future large employer in the country. The national suppliers of agricultural consumables are at less risk. On the contrary, national producers of processed consumables are at a disadvantage because ethnocentricity does not result in strong support of these products. Advertising messages with patriotic appeals may be ineffective. Thus, instead of country of origin, other extrinsic cues (e.g. brand, package and price) may be used to enhance competitiveness on the national market.

Mozambican consumers are moderately ethnocentric. Consumer ethnocentricity and its effects in Mozambique are shaped by pragmatic motives originating from socio‐economic pressures such as the under‐development of the national production sector and high unemployment in the country.

The paper will be of interest to practitioners, e.g. foreign companies, exporters and Mozambican policy makers and producers. The findings suggest that foreign companies should not be overly cautious about selling their products in Mozambique because, being moderately ethnocentric, Mozambican consumers are open to purchasing foreign imports where there is good reason, for example, when locally made products are unavailable.

The purpose of this paper is to identify integrated solutions business as the first generation of servitized offerings and modular solution offerings as the second development phase in servitization of original equipment manufacturers. This study examines how the servitized manufacturer, Kone, moves from integrated solutions to modular solutions business and develops the requisite capabilities to design, produce and implement modular solution offerings.

The paper reports a longitudinal case study of a provider of integrated solutions installed in buildings. During the ten years studied, the manufacturer implemented a strategic initiative to modularize its integrated solutions offering.

The firm’s transition to modular solutions progressed through three major capability development phases: solutions based on ad hoc integration, smart solutions based on modular design and through-chain modularity. The modular structure aims at fostering the efficiency of the solution offering and the associated production system.

Leveraging the benefits of modularity calls for an aligned combination of strategic, operational and technical capabilities contributing to the integration of resources in a modular production system for the solution providers’ competitive performance.

The study reports how a solution provider can develop the operational capabilities to integrate the core and peripheral components into the solution, and orchestrate the modular production system.

This study is a rare longitudinal analysis of how a manufacturer builds a modular offering, the solution platform and the required competitive capabilities to provide the solution.

This study examines the strategy–performance relationship within publicly traded German firms. Strategic management literature provides several strategic frameworks that offer guidance on promising strategies. However, given major changes, such as globalization, managers wonder whether strategic frameworks are still applicable.

The authors employ principal component analysis (PCA) to measure competitive strategy and analyze a sample of 6,037 firm-years among 651 firms between 2000 and 2019.

While the authors find evidence for the existence of efficiency-based strategies, differentiation-based strategies and mixed strategies, only differentiation-based strategies are positively related to performance.

The study’s results contribute to the discourse on the strategy–performance relationship, as they provide insights into promising strategies that are of interest to researchers and practitioners. Further, the authors introduce a new measure of competitive strategy based on PCA.