Rural Telephone Company Adoption of Service Innovations: A Community Field Theory Approach*

Abstract Recent telecommunications innovations have the potential to improve the economic vitality of rural communities, but many rural telephone companies have not adopted them to provide needed advanced services. To explain the differences in adoption by rural telephone companies we distinguish between service innovations, adopted primarily to improve direct services to clients, and operations innovations, adopted primarily to improve the operation of the business. Using community interaction field theory we develop and test a conceptual framework for the adoption of innovative service telecommunications technologies by Iowa rural telephone companies. As field theory predicts, involvement in local economic development activities has a strong, direct effect on innovativeness. Results suggest that the service and operations innovations distinction has theoretical utility in explaining organizational innovativeness.     

Combining registration-system and survey data to estimate birth probabilities

With the widespread availability of event-history data, demographers have increasingly eschewed registration-system data in favor of survey data. We propose instead using survey and registration-system data in combination, via a constrained maximum-likelihood framework for demographic hazard modeling. As an application, we combine panel survey data and birth registration data to estimate annual birth probabilities by parity. The general fertility rate obtained from registration-system data constrains the weighted sum of parity-specific birth probabilities. The variances about the parity-specific birth probabilities are halved when registration-system data are used to constrain the estimates. Other demographic applications are discussed.     

Linking Entrepreneurial Orientation to Environmental Collaboration: A Stakeholder Theory and Evidence from Multinational Companies in an Emerging Market

Revisiting stakeholder theory as a potential theory of the firm giving rise to expectations about organizing, we analyze when and under what circumstances entrepreneurially oriented firms increase their environmental collaboration with suppliers. Specifically, we investigate the association between entrepreneurial orientation and environmental collaboration with suppliers by accounting for the degree of employees’ work engagement and market environment complexity as stakeholder-oriented moderators of this relationship. We test our hypotheses using multi-level analyses on 249 managers nested in 66 multinational companies (MNCs) in Turkey. We find that entrepreneurial orientation positively impacts environmental collaboration with suppliers. A high level of work engagement (as an organizing principle favouring a stakeholder focus) and a low level of market environment complexity (as an organizing principle favouring the customer as an instrumental stakeholder) moderate this linkage. We enrich the debate on entrepreneurial orientation, strategy, and environmental sustainability by providing logic rooted in stakeholder theory of the conditions under which MNCs’ entrepreneurial orientation in emerging markets prioritizes and privileges environmental collaboration with suppliers.     

The management of international manufacturing networks: a missing link towards total management of global networks

Abstract

The purposes of this article are to provide a brief overview of the research on international manufacturing networks (IMNs), identify corresponding gaps and provide background for the papers published in this special issue. First, this article shows the importance of addressing the management of IMNs, especially in times of global turbulence as a result of new economic, political and technological trends. Second, it highlights research into the management of IMNs as a missing link in the Operations Management (OM) discipline, as most of the current OM research neglects the fact that the internal structures and relationships of multi-plant organizations inside firms play a critical role in how a supply chain/network operates and relies mostly on scholars in other fields for insights into high-level and strategic issues in the management of global operations. Finally, this article argues there is still a lot to do in order to develop new theories towards the total management of global networks that can holistically analyze different global (intra- and inter-firm multi-functional) networks and address the complex interdependencies between them.     

Incentive Schemes for Semiconductor Capacity Allocation: A Game Theoretic Analysis

We study incentive issues that arise in semiconductor capacity planning and allocation. Motivated by our experience at a major U. S. semiconductor manufacturer, we model the capacity‐allocation problem in a game‐theoretic setting as follows: each product manager (PM) is responsible for a certain product line, while privately owning demand information through regular interaction with the customers. Capacity‐allocation is carried out by the corporate headquarters (HQ), which allocates manufacturing capacity to product lines based on demand information reported by the PMs. We show that PMs have an incentive to manipulate demand information to increase their expected allocation, and that a carefully designed coordination mechanism is essential for HQ to implement the optimal allocation. To this end, we design an incentive scheme through bonus payments and participation charges that elicits private demand information from the PMs. We show that the mechanism achieves budget‐balance and voluntary‐participation requirements simultaneously. The results provide important insights into the treatment of misaligned incentives in the context of semiconductor capacity‐allocation.     

Financial Development,Institutional Quality and Poverty Reduction: Worldwide Evidence

Social Indicators Research - There is a burgeoning literature on wealth in the rich world. It mainly focuses on the top. This paper shows that assets can also matter for the analysis of poverty and...     

Expanding uses of building information modeling in life-cycle construction projects

BIM is targeted at providing information about the entire building and a complete set of design documents and data stored in an integrated database. In this paper, we study the use of BIM in two life-cycle construction projects in Kuopio, Finland during 2011. The analysis of uses of BIM and their main problems will constitute a foundation for an intervention. We will focus on the following questions: (1) How different partners use the composite BIM model? (2) What are the major contradictions or problems in the BIM use? The preliminary findings reported in this study show that BIM has been adopted quite generally to design use but the old ways of collaboration seem to prevail, especially between designers and between designers and building sites. BIM has provided new means and demands for collaboration but expansive uses of BIM for providing new interactive processes across professional fields have not much come true.     

The labor market costs of conflict: closures, foreign workers, and Palestinian employment and earnings

In this paper, we provide a lower bound estimate of the labor market costs of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The conflict is quantified by the number of overseas foreign workers in the Israeli labor market and the frequency of temporary closures of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. IV estimates, which exploit a source of exogenous variation in the number of overseas foreign workers, yield significant negative effects of the conflict on Palestinian employment rates in Israel and monthly earnings. Our cost-of-conflict estimates are also relevant for the literature on the economics of immigration.     

The role of trust and contracts in the internationalization of technology-intensive Born Globals

The purpose of this paper is to study the roles of trust and contracts in technology-intensive Born-Global firms (BGs). By definition these firms compete in the area of knowledge and cutting-edge innovation, use external resources, and internationalize at inception or soon thereafter. For entering global markets successfully, these firms typically need partners. However, attracting them requires disclosing critical knowledge, and thus BGs encounter the risk of losing their potential competitive advantage. Their global business environment is very competitive and dynamic, therefore traditional ways of operating may be too time-consuming to manage these risks. Consequently, we argue that for technology-based BGs, the role of trust and contracts are closely intertwined. The paper puts forward three propositions that highlight the roles of trust and contracting for technology-intensive BGs.