A review of the evolutionary approach to the study of entrepreneurship

A number of more contextual and process‐oriented approaches have been followed recently in entrepreneurial research, including the cognitive approach, the learning approach and the evolutionary approach. This paper reviews the evolutionary approach to the study of entrepreneurship. This includes an overview of evolutionary theory and the arguments behind its relevance to the study of socio‐economics systems, as well as a review of the application of evolutionary theory to the study of entrepreneurship at both the population level (population ecology) and the organizational level (strategic choice). The reconciliation of these two perspectives is discussed, and comparisons are made with the cognition‐based and learning‐based approaches. It is argued in this paper that an evolutionary approach to the study of entrepreneurship leads to more theory‐driven research with a strong focus on process and context. In addition, it offers more than both the cognition‐based and learning‐based approaches because it allows for multi‐level analyses of the new venture creation process, encompassing both the population ecology (population level) and strategic choice (organizational level) perspective, and the resultant interactions between both hierarchies, giving valuable insight into the same overall evolutionary process.     

The multilevel approach to organizational issues of the firm—A critical review

This paper critically reviews the progress and state of multilevel decomposition models for the firm and its management. The presentation introduces and summarizes the fundamental ideas and also gives concise statements concerning advanced developments. The pricing approach, and the budgeting approaches are the two approaches considered. For managerial planning, initial starting solutions, iteration processes, and stopping rules are important algorithmic and organizational considerations. Further, in decentralized organizations, the motivations for cheating in planning, incentives for innovation, and reactions to uncertainty require attention. For these approaches one concludes that further theoretical work designed especially for managerial relevance needs to be developed. Despite these deficiencies, the practitioner need not wait for all the answers as the currently employed methods of pricing and budgeting for planning suffer the same deficiencies, and yet lack the power to choose better plans as the multilevel decomposition approach offers.     

The past,present and future of health care quality. Urgent need for innovative,external review processes to protect patients

There are three paths to quality health care standards: the regulatory route, the "learning science" route, and the futuristic "management science" route. The regulatory path leads to punishment and blame. The learning science path splits, with one road leading back to harsh regulations and the other to the halls of academic medicine. And the management science path, while short, will be the road to success as American health care struggles to improve quality and overcome well-publicized and deadly medical errors.     

Investigating Collaborative Interdisciplinary Practice to Develop a New Planning Undergraduate Course

Whilst there is widespread recognition of the importance of university education preparing planners for working in interdisciplinary environments, there is limited research available on interdisciplinary working in practice. As detailed knowledge of practice and continuing engagement with practitioners is important to ensuring the employability of graduates, a study of interdisciplinary collaborative practice was undertaken to help develop a new undergraduate planning course. This paper presents the findings of this research and discusses how they will inform the development of the course.     

Theorizing Managerial Work: a Pragmatic Pluralist Approach to Interdisciplinary Research

Management research is especially open to the benefits of using insights from a variety of social science disciplines but it should not use these indiscriminately. A strategy of pragmatic pluralism is proposed as a way of ensuring that concepts taken from different social science paradigms or disciplines are drawn together into a single coherent perspective to shape the particular study to which they relate. This is illustrated with reference to an ethnographic study of managerial work carried out by the author.     

The Organization of Interdisciplinary Research: Modes,Drivers and Barriers

Although the role and management of interdisciplinary research in knowledge development has received plenty of attention in recent years ambiguity remains, often hindering management efforts. To address this issue, this paper provides an integrated review of extant literature on interdisciplinary research. It focuses on integration processes and the main drivers and barriers to different modes of collaborative interdisciplinary research. The authors propose a different approach to considering interdisciplinary integration, based on two factors: the type of knowledge integration; and the durability of the context of that integration. As a result, four modes of interdisciplinary integration are characterized. The authors then consider how different groups of drivers of, and barriers to, interdisciplinary research affect those types of integration. Overall, the paper provides an integrated perspective for researchers, managers and policy‐makers concerned with understanding the organization of interdisciplinary research.     

Service quality in the legal profession: a review

Research into the management of professional service quality, other than in health care, has been very limited, despite being particularly problematical. This paper focuses on the interactive, highly customized and labour-intensive service offered by solicitors to their commercial and corporate clients. The intangible nature of legal services, the natures of the professionals themselves and the firms within which they operate, and the perceptions of risk brought to the service by the client create additional difficulties in managing the service and measuring client perceptions of it. Yet solicitors must understand the requirements of the group of clients they seek to serve in order to design their service to match those needs. Clients have to assume the technical competence of their solicitor. Moreover, they seek confidence when buying legal services. Our research, therefore, sought to gain an understanding of the process used by commercial and corporate clients when evaluating legal service, and of the factors that are key drivers in the creation of confidence.     

Integrated approach for optimizing quality control in international manufacturing networks

Abstract

This article aims at providing an integrated approach for optimizing quality control in International Manufacturing Networks (IMN) which can be characterized by consisting of numerous plants acting autonomously according to an individual target system. A key challenge is to ensure the overall process quality despite distributed value creation processes and differing target systems in dynamic environments. Hence, the developed approach allows for identifying potentials in the quality control strategy using a value stream-based method to visualize quality characteristics and procedures in the production process chain. Furthermore, the approach contains a framework for identifying possible improvement measures and a simulation-based evaluation concept to evaluate the effects of different measures with respect to individual target systems. The simulation combines elements of a discrete-event simulation in order to depict the value stream with agent-based modelling for realizing different target systems by considering distinctive plant roles. The article concludes with a case study of a globally operating automotive supplier to apply the approach. A forward research agenda is proposed that evaluates the approach in multiple cases, deriving patters across companies or industries.     

From quality assurance to continuous quality improvement

To change from punitive and legalistic QA to positive and productive CQI, both attitudes and methods must change. This is a difficult challenge, but potential rewards for both the organization and its individual members suggest that the effort is worthwhile and deserves high priority. Members of the executive/management team will likely turn to physician executives for guidance on how to proceed.     

Moving from quality assurance to continuous quality improvement

Though numerous proponents of the change from quality assurance (QA) to continuous quality improvement (CQI) have emphasized the drawbacks of the former and the advantages of the latter, there has been relatively little systematic consideration and comparison of the costs and benefits of each. A proper comparison is probably not possible, because the data seem to be lacking. Instead, much of the discourse has been based upon anecdotes, analogies from other industries, and unsupported assertions. This article grows out of a concern that, in making the switch from QA to CQI, we will discard or inadvertently lose much of value in QA and may not achieve many of the things that proponents expect CQI will accomplish. QA has served the health care field well. Its achievements ought to be preserved and built upon, not discarded.     

How customer satisfaction with respect to price and quality affects customer retention: an integrated approach considering nonlinear effects

There is consensus in the marketing literature that satisfaction of customers concerning the perceived quality and pricing of products or services is critical for customer retention. In contrast, there is lack of empirical evidence about the exact functional relationship. Using parametric and nonparametric regression, this contribution empirically investigates whether and to what extent nonlinear effects of and interaction effects between both satisfaction dimensions affect customer retention. The empirical results do not only reveal complex nonlinear effects for those satisfaction-retention relationships, respectively, but also indicate strong interaction effects of both satisfaction dimensions on customer retention. Furthermore, nonparametric approaches prove to be more flexible than parametric approaches to model complex interactions.     

Nomenclature and harmonised criteria for the self-employment categorisation. An approach pursuant to a systematic review of the literature

This paper presents the review and discussion of terminology and criteria describing the self-employment phenomenon. We attempt to give a conceptually and empirically grounded categorisation of self-employment forms for this heterogeneous and constantly changing group. An abundance of definitions and conceptualisations of self-employment exists and makes data collection and statistical comparisons for this group unreliable, if at all meaningful. In order to produce sound, reliable comparative studies on the self-employed population, researchers will eventually be required to agree on a universal and internationally consistent definitions and a structured categorisation. Such determinations are also essential for practical purposes such as establishing or enforcing the taxation regulations.In our study, the systematic analysis of selected data from 253 various publications was performed. We gave an overview of different approaches to the problem of identification and differentiation of self-employed. An ordered list of criteria used for these purposes has been compiled. We concluded that the set of five categories with most salient characteristics reflects well the composition of the self-employed population: freelancers (ipros), innovators, traditional small business owners (including farmers), dependent self-employed and hybrid self-employed. We discuss the perspective on further studies and need for integration of research approaches in view of increasing role of the new forms of self-employment in global economy.     

The marketing approach to purchasing

The determination of supply and demand is a complex problem to which both sides of the equation must contribute. Although marketing departments have organized themselves to provide such a contribution to data, purchasing has done little to promote its contribution to demand forecasting. Until it does the equation will remain not merely complex but insoluble.A continuous inter-change between marketing and purchasing, supplier and customer, is essential for improving the accuracy of longer range forecasting and for logistical co-ordination of investment planning. The corporate plans of manufacturing organizations, at least, should reflect these considerations.     

Decision approach to workload distribution

Abstract. This paper deals with decisions of workload temporal distribution in scheduling discrete and diversified productions. A new way of formulating the scheduling problem is proposed, from which some concepts and tools are presented. The notion of time resource interval objects, TRIs, allows the management of technical (time and resource) aspects at the different levels of a hierarchical structuring of the set of decisions taken in the workshop, from ‘load distribution’ types, to ‘effective realization of the operations’ types. Constraint-based reasoning handles different TRIs corresponding to given kinds of decisions. It helps to highlight the bounds or limits to be respected while deciding, to remain consistent with an initial set of constraints, issued for example from an upper level of decisions. Decisions of load temporal distribution consist in readjustments of some time constraints on a set of planned operations, by taking into account the (or some more detailed) constraints on the resource(s) on which they have been planned, such as finite capacity and/or minimal profitability. The analysis on temporal proximities of the planned operations involves some particular structuring of the time axis into successive time intervals: these structures are associated with sets of temporal bounds, and are called adjacent decompositions of the time axis. Such a decomposition introduces some specific TRIs, associated with load constraints (coming from the planned operations), and resource constraints (coming from limited quantities of resource, or profitability concerns). By respecting the given time and resource constraints, they can ‘exchange’ some quantities of load according to communicating vessels processes. These phenomena have been modelled as bounded flows in a temporal network, and offer new flexible curves of load with finite capacities, to help the decision.     

The role, function, and contribution of attribution theory to leadership: A review

The purpose of this article is to review literature that has focused on the role of attributions in leadership processes and to explore and explain how the study of attributions does, and can, contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of leadership. The historical roots of attribution research are discussed, along with early attributional research in the leadership area. Two streams of attributional criticisms are addressed and recent attributional research relevant to leadership is reviewed. We argue and demonstrate that attributions account for significant proportions of the variance in leadership behaviors. We conclude with suggestions for including attributional perspectives in comprehensive models of leader behavior.