Mining the Periphery for New Products

Revolutionary products often come from upstart players or companies outside the industry, while mainstream operators follow a risk-averse path of concentrating on their current business. This article urges companies to channel resources into looking at the periphery for ideas that could be profit-drivers of the future. It suggests three strategies for finding new products: frame the landscape; develop game-changing hypotheses; and use targeted hunting. It concludes by saying that these approaches will encourage managers to combine broad searching and thinking with focused evaluation and execution.     

Why People Like Where They Live: Individual- and Community-Level Contributors to Community Satisfaction

Using multi-level modeling in 26 communities, this study examines contributors to three domains of community satisfaction—overall satisfaction, social life satisfaction, and infrastructure satisfaction. Human capital/demographic and social capital/network contributors emerge at both the individual and community levels in accounting for variation in community satisfaction. Some effects remain the same across levels and domains, but some effects differ. For example, living near family members increases satisfaction in all domains at the individual level, but at the community level, it decreases satisfaction in all domains. Residing in communities high in urbanicity reduces overall satisfaction, but has no effect on infrastructure satisfaction. Moreover, both individual and community level factors matter and impact community satisfaction.     

Designing out vulnerability, building in respect: violence, safety and sex work policy

One recent finding about the prostitution market is the differences in the extent and nature of violence experienced between women who work on the street and those who work from indoor sex work venues. This paper brings together extensive qualitative fieldwork from two cities in the UK to unpack the intricacies in relation to violence and safety for indoor workers. Firstly, we document the types of violence women experience in indoor venues noting how the vulnerabilities surrounding work-based hazards are dependent on the environment in which sex is sold. Secondly, we highlight the protection strategies that indoor workers and management develop to maintain safety and order in the establishment. Thirdly, we use these empirical findings to suggest that violence should be a high priority on the policy agenda. Here we contend that the organizational and cultural conditions that seem to offer some protection from violence in indoor settings could be useful for informing the management of street sex work. Finally, drawing on the crime prevention literature, we argue that it is possible to go a considerable way to designing out vulnerability in sex work, but not only through physical and organizational change but building in respect for sex workers rights by developing policies that promote the employment/human rights and citizenship for sex workers. This argument is made in light of the Coordinated Prostitution Strategy.     

Labor Utilization Effects of Labor Scheduling Flexibility Alternatives in a Tour Scheduling Environment

This study used a factorial experimental design and a new modeling methodology to investigate the impact of a number of labor scheduling flexibility alternatives and labor requirements characteristics on labor utilization within a tour scheduling environment. Break-placement flexibility and shift-length flexibility were found to be extremely effective in improving labor utilization for all labor requirement distributions used. Flexibility with respect to the number of days included in a tour schedule resulted in substantial improvement in labor utilization for all labor requirements distributions exhibiting daily and/or weekly variation. Surprisingly, virtually no improvement in labor utilization was achieved for any labor requirement distribution by the removal of requirements for consecutive days off. In addition, almost no improvement was found by allowing the shift start time to vary across the working days included in tours. High labor requirement amplitude was found to have a strong adverse effect on labor utilization while longer operational days were associated with improved labor utilization for all labor requirement distributions. We discuss the implications of these results for service operations management and provide suggestions for future research.     

Parent Psychological Distress: A Moderator of Behavioral Health Intervention Outcomes among Justice‐Involved Adolescents

We examined whether pre‐existing parent psychological distress moderated juvenile offenders’ substance use, sexual risk, and mental health outcomes in a randomized trial. Forty‐seven parent–adolescent dyads received either Family‐based Affect Management Intervention (FAMI) for adolescent substance use and HIV prevention or adolescent‐only Health Promotion Intervention (HPI). Parents’ self‐reported distress at baseline significantly moderated adolescents’ self‐reported marijuana use and alcohol use but not other outcomes at 3 months postintervention, producing crossover interactions. FAMI outperformed HPI when parents reported high‐level distress, whereas HPI outperformed FAMI when parents reported low‐level distress. This finding that the relative efficacy of interventions depends on the severity of parent psychological distress could inform efforts to match substance‐using, justice‐involved adolescents with the intervention most likely to benefit them.     

Resource Flexibility Issues in Multistage Manufacturing

We test the situational impact of two types of resource flexibility, machine flexibility and labor flexibility, in a material requirements planning (MRP)-driven production system. Machine flexibility has not been treated in prior multistage research, only labor flexibility. Machine flexibility is closely related to a plant's positioning strategy. A process-focused plant opts for considerable machine flexibility by choosing general-purpose equipment. Resource flexibility, if effective, can be an attractive alternative to two other types of buffers, inflated inventories and costly capacity cushions. Our simulation results, using factor settings established earlier by a panel of managers, show that resource flexibility is indeed an effective buffer against uncertainties such as end-item demand variability, capacity bottlenecks, equipment failures, and yield losses. Machine flexibility is especially helpful in environments characterized by high uncertainties, tight capacities, and large lot sizes. Worker flexibility has a similar, but less dramatic, impact. Benefits are most striking with customer service, rather than with inventory or labor productivity. Finally, we show that simultaneous introduction of both machine and labor flexibility yields only marginal improvements over either kind of flexibility alone.     

Risking safety and rights: online sex work,crimes and ‘blended safety repertoires’

It has been well established that those working in the sex industry are at various risks of violence and crime depending on where they sell sex and the environments in which they work. What sociological research has failed to address is how crime and safety have been affected by the dynamic changing nature of sex work given the dominance of the internet and digital technologies, including the development of new markets such as webcamming. This paper reports the most comprehensive findings on the internet‐based sex market in the UK demonstrating types of crimes experienced by internet‐based sex workers and the strategies of risk management that sex workers adopt, building on our article in the British Journal of Sociology in 2007. We present the concept of ‘blended safety repertoires’ to explain how sex workers, particularly independent escorts, are using a range of traditional techniques alongside digitally enabled strategies to keep themselves safe. We contribute a deeper understanding of why sex workers who work indoors rarely report crimes to the police, reflecting the dilemmas experienced. Our findings highlight how legal and policy changes which seek to ban online adult services advertising and sex work related content within online spaces would have direct impact on the safety strategies online sex workers employ and would further undermine their safety. These findings occur in a context where aspects of sex work are quasi‐criminalized through the brothel keeping legislation. We conclude that the legal and policy failure to recognize sex work as a form of employment, contributes to the stigmatization of sex work and prevents individuals working together. Current UK policy disallows a framework for employment laws and health and safety standards to regulate sex work, leaving sex workers in the shadow economy, their safety at risk in a quasi‐legal system. In light of the strong evidence that the internet makes sex work safer, we argue that decriminalisation as a rights based model of regulation is most appropriate.