Design and competition in engineering

This article considers the influence of good design as a factor in engineering innovation, and its effect on two sectors of industry in particular—agricultural implements and automobiles. In each case the authors point out how different aspects of design, or largely differing design philosophies, have had a marked influence on product performance and on competitive success.     

Pitfalls in using portfolio techniques—Assessing risk and potential

Since share/growth portfolio techniques are often the main tool for strategy formulation in multiproduct corporations, reflection on the possibilities and the limitations in applying such techniques merits attention. It is demonstrated that these techniques cannot distinguish between sometimes subtle but nevertheless strategically important situational characteristics, and therefore they can lead to recommendations that will exacerbate the real problems. Thus, share/growth techniques are at best incomplete for planning, since they are too limited. They should be placed in a broader context using a financial-strategic method. In this article such a method for developing proper directional guidance is dealt with.     

Japanese Retailing Through the 1990s: Retailer Performance in a Decade of Slow Growth

The development of Japanese retailing through the 1990s is used to illustrate the applicability of a Europe-based growth model in a recessionary market. Through the 1990s the Japanese economy suffered low growth and periods of recession, after strong growth through the 1980s. Retail sales in the 1990s increased only slightly whilst floor-space developments begun in the 1980s and the result of retailer expansion strategies generated increased retail capacity. Large retailers pursued strategies of opening more stores in order to generate sales, but this proved disastrous and resulted in lower productivity, high levels of debt, low levels of innovation and consequential need to restructure. General merchandise and department-store retailers were slow to see the need to restructure and innovate. In contrast, three groups of retailers obtained competitive advantages from the recession, namely retailers who responded quickly to emergent market segments, foreign retailers and e-retailers. The strategic responses to recession and the reasons behind these responses are illustrated and suggestions made on how the experiences of the 1990s will affect development in the early 2000s. Implications of the retailers' behaviour are indicated for retailer strategies, the restructuring of the sector and for research on strategy and structural change.     

分物流市场一杯羹

帕拉里亚很清楚，科尔根先生是因朋友的再三推荐才同意会面的。然而，在巧克力薯条的诱人香气里，不到半小时，科尔根先生就放松了警惕，态度也缓和了不少。不到一个小时，帕拉里亚开始谈起与优兹食品公司（Utz）的货运协议。     

Reflections on the assessment of outcomes in child care

Measuring the outcomes of social work interventions with children raises complex issues. The instability of intermediate outcomes emphasises the need to undertake regular and carefully timed assessments. Differences in approach and perspective can obscure relationships between evaluations of organisational performance and assessments of outcome for individual children; user perspectives introduce another point of view. Assessing outcomes of family support services raises questions of accountability. Aggregate information about children looked after, collected through the Looking After Children project, should help to establish the chances of certain outcomes being realised, although the influence of some factors may not be easy to explain.     

Testing a block exchangeable covariance matrix

Testing hypotheses about the structure of a covariance matrix for doubly multivariate data is often considered in the literature. In this paper the Rao's score test (RST) is derived to test the block exchangeable covariance matrix or block compound symmetry (BCS) covariance structure under the assumption of multivariate normality. It is shown that the empirical distribution of the RST statistic under the null hypothesis is independent of the true values of the mean and the matrix components of a BCS structure. A significant advantage of the RST is that it can be performed for small samples, even smaller than the dimension of the data, where the likelihood ratio test (LRT) cannot be used, and it outperforms the standard LRT in a number of contexts. Simulation studies are performed for the sample size consideration, and for the estimation of the empirical quantiles of the null distribution of the test statistic. The RST procedure is illustrated on a real data set from the medical studies.     

Exploring Neighborhood Effects on Health and Life Satisfaction: Disentangling Neighborhood Racial Density and Neighborhood Income

This study examines the independent and synergistic influences of neighborhood racial density and neighborhood income on several indicators of health status and life satisfaction in a sample of 311 adult African Americans living in New York City. This is made possible by the two-stage sampling procedure that was used in the collection of the data, ensuring that respondents?? neighborhoods vary on both racial density and income. Findings from a series of OLS regression models that adjust standard errors to account for the non-independence of observations demonstrate that neighborhood income moderates the relationship between racial density and health and life satisfaction. When neighborhood income is low, high neighborhood racial density is detrimental for health and life satisfaction. However, when neighborhood income is high, neighborhood racial density is protective for health and life satisfaction. These results indicate that the role of neighborhood income needs to be considered when examining the relationship between neighborhood racial density, health, and life satisfaction. Moreover, these findings may provide insight for understanding the past conflicting results.