Power and dependence perspectives on outsourcing decisions

Since the 1980s outsourcing has been a major topic in both economic and management literature. Economic literature tends to focus on the transaction cost perspective. In management literature the core competence approach prevails. An emerging alternative view on outsourcing is the power and dependence perspective. Aspects of power and dependence become visible in four case studies involving the maintenance of capital assets. In each instance both the buyer and supplier sides of the dyad are examined. The paper concludes with managerial implications and research opportunities.     

The implications of the Lima target: Explorations with a world industrialization model

The Second General Conference of the UNIDO held in Lima in 1975 declared that the share of developing countries in total world industrial production should reach 25% by the year 2000. The model presented in this article has been constructed in order to investigate whether this target is consistent with other more generally accepted goals of development and is feasible within the area of production and trade possibilities.The model is a dynamic, multisectoral, multiregional input-output model. It focuses on the impacts and mutual consistency of targets of growth, regional income distribution, industrialization, consumption levels, and trade. In the empirical application three periods, three regions, and nine sectors have been distinguished to produce intersectorally, interregionally, and intertemporally consistent accounts for the main variables. Since the study is concerned with the maximum possible growth of industrial output of the developing countries, a linear programming approach has been used.The report is organized as follows. After an introduction, the second section describes the mathematical model. The third section contains a detailed explanation of the data basis and of the assumptions made to stimulate the model. The numerical results of the model are discussed in the fourth section, and the main conclusions are given in the fifth.     

Afrikaans,Inc.: the Afrikaans culture industry after apartheid

Following apartheid’s demise, the Afrikaans language was forced to part with the privileged position it once held under the National Party’s guardianship and has, subsequently, contracted in a number of its functions. Despite growing concerns about the language’s “endangered” status, Afrikaans has proven its vitality in multiple market-driven domains. In this paper, I trace the expansion of the Afrikaans culture industry after apartheid. I argue that this process was fomented, at least in part, by paranoia about Afrikaans’s “fading position.” Because Afrikaners still command a vast material and cultural capital, they have been the prime producers, sellers and buyers of Afrikaans language media and cultural commodities. Thus, together with the growth of the Afrikaans culture industry, an array of physical, digital and psychological spaces has opened up where white Afrikaans speakers can be a majority. I argue that the expansion of these spaces has laid the foundation for the formation of new Afrikaner subjectivities and enclaved identities, and contributed to the production and strengthening of separatist tendencies amongst certain Afrikaners. Instead of being an emancipatory force, facilitating Afrikaans speakers’ forceful integration into a new South Africa and “rainbow nation,” it has succeeded in reaffirming and naturalising the imagined boundaries of Afrikanerdom.     

Home care for the elderly: the role of relatives,friends and neighbors

We use data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to examine the hours of home care received by the elderly. The existing empirical literature has mostly examined informal home care from children and formal home care. We identify two additional informal home care providers, namely, relatives (other than children) and friends (including neighbors) who provide about 30 % of the hours of informal home care. Our main new empirical finding is that single elderly persons who can rely less on children—and in particular daughters—for their home care receive not only more formal care but also more care from friends and neighbors. These findings suggest that policymakers need to take into account not only home care provision from children but also home care provision from friends and neighbors to obtain accurate projections concerning the increasing costs of formal care programs due to an aging population.     

Views on inter-enterprise relationships

The paper gives an overview of major scientific approaches to inter-enterprise relationships. A distinction is made between approaches that focus on business process integration (Supply Chain Management, Costing approaches), approaches that focus on organizational collaboration (Transaction Cost Theory, Agency Theory), and approaches that focus on the business environment (Strategic Management, Network Theory, Resource Dependency Theory). Although these approaches are different with regard to their perspectives on collaboration, variables and methods, the paper shows that they are complementary tools in the analysis and design of inter-enterprise relationships.     

The effects of female employment status on the presence and number of children

The main concern of this paper is to analyze the effects of female employment status on the presence and number of children in households in the Netherlands. For this purpose a hurdle count data model is formulated and estimated by the generalized method of moments. The hurdle takes explicitly into account the interrelationship between female employment status and timing of first birth. The number of children, once children are present in the household, is modeled conditional on female employment status. The empirical results show that female employment status is a major determinant of the presence and number of children in households: employed women schedule children later in life and have fewer children compared to nonemployed women, holding educational attainment constant. After controlling for female employment status, the educational attainment of both the woman and the man in the households are found to have relatively small effects on the presence and number of children. Received: 3 November 1998/Accepted: 22 September 1999     

Adat in Indonesian Land Law: A Promise for the Future or a Dead End?

At present the contestation of the Indonesian state’s dispossessory policies regarding land and other natural resources is dominated by a discourse based on adat. This situation is reminiscent of the colonial period, when invoking adat was a relatively effective means of protecting Indonesians from losing their land to plantation companies supported by the Netherlands–Indies government. However, adat lost its traction when Indonesia became independent and the new state started to vigorously pursue nation building and economic expansion. Only after the end of the New Order in 1998 did civil society groups revive the adat defence against dispossession. This article analyses current debates and developments concerning the place of adat in national land law and its potential for protecting communities against dispossession of their land by the Indonesian state. We argue that the promotion of adat has produced few concrete results and that it is unlikely to be more successful for this purpose in the future. Given Indonesia’s current social and political realities, any land rights strategy for protecting people against dispossession that is based on indigeneity is problematic, and alternative approaches are needed.     

The Association Between Individual Income and Remaining Life Expectancy at the Age of 65 in the Netherlands

This article quantifies the association between individual income and remaining life expectancy at the statutory retirement age (65) in the Netherlands. For this purpose, we estimate a mortality risk model using a large administrative data set that covers the 1996–2007 period. Besides age and marital status, the model includes as covariates individual and spouse’s income as well as a random individual specific effect. It thus allows for dynamic selection based on both observed and unobserved characteristics. We find that conditional on marital status, individual income is about equally strong and negatively associated with mortality risk for men and women and that spouse’s income is only weakly associated with mortality risk for women. For both men and women, we quantify remaining life expectancy at age 65 for low-income individuals as approximately 2.5 years less than that for high-income individuals.