Supplier Strategies and Routines for Capability Development: Implications for Upgrading

This paper examines the strategies and routines adopted by small and medium-sized suppliers to develop capabilities that enable them to engage in upgrading, despite a precarious relational and institutional context. To this end, we investigate the strategic behaviour of two Bangladeshi garment manufacturers. Both started out as small suppliers for multinational enterprises (MNEs) and have eventually grown into micro-multinationals. The firms are involved in ‘tacit promissory contracting’ with their buyers, a specific form of international outsourcing relationship. The study adopts a multiple case study design that involves interviews with managers/owners of the firms. The analysis yields two key findings. Both firms have devised strategies and taken coherent routines involving actions to develop skills and motivation needed to perform appropriate functional activities (i.e. pre-production, production and post-production) as they embarked on different stages of upgrading. Furthermore, firms have designed routines to internalise the challenges originating from their relationships with their buyers and the institutional environment at the time that had the potential to affect their upgrading goals. The paper contributes to IB studies by highlighting how suppliers, even in a precarious context, can control their own strategies and routines, so as to develop capabilities that allow them to gradually redress the power imbalance between themselves and their buyers.     

Job Quality and Employment of Older People in Europe

We study the relationship between job quality and retirement using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, a longitudinal survey covering individuals aged 50+ in several European countries. Although most previous studies looked at the impact of bad working conditions on retirement intentions, we can use the panel dimension to study actual retirement as well as other pathways out of a job. As indicators for job quality we use three different approaches: overall job satisfaction, over‐ and undereducation for a particular job as well as effort–reward imbalance, which measures the imbalance between a worker's effort and the rewards he or she receives in turn. The analysis gives some evidence that poor job quality decreases retirement age, in particular for women.     

Elements of private welfare production in Hungary (from time budget data)

Recently it has become recognized more and more widely in Hungary that in spite of the socialization of the means of production and the extension of the service institutions, the activities of households and individuals not taking place within the framework of large organizations contribute to an important degree to the welfare of society. On the basis of the results of the national time budget survey of 1976/77, four of these types of private activity are investigated: small-scale agricultural production, dwelling construction with personal resources, repairing of consumer durables and house-hold chores.     

Do-It-Yourself Social Policy: Searching for a New Paradigm?

One of the most significant trends of recent decades has been the growing importance of do-it-yourself social policy: i.e. individuals constructing their own welfare mix both within the public sector and in private markets. This paper argues that this challenges the traditional top-down bias of social policy studies and requires a shift of focus within the discipline. The implications for normative theory, research strategy and policy analysis are explored. Some of the arguments for and against choice as a guiding principle are sketched out; some existing research on benefit take-up and choice in education and health is reviewed and the case for moving away from the economist's simple model of rationality is put forward. Finally, we argue, there should be more emphasis in social policy on developing a better understanding of the way in which individuals take their decisions, the context of public policy within which they act and the interaction between the two.     

Data reconciliation of nonnormal observations with nonlinear constraints

This paper presents a new method for the reconciliation of data described by arbitrary continuous probability distributions, with the focus on nonlinear constraints. The main idea, already applied to linear constraints in a previous paper, is to restrict the joint prior probability distribution of the observed variables with model constraints to get a joint posterior probability distribution. Because in general the posterior probability density function cannot be calculated analytically, it is shown that it has decisive advantages to sample from the posterior distribution by a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method. From the resulting sample of observed and unobserved variables various characteristics of the posterior distribution can be estimated, such as the mean, the full covariance matrix, marginal posterior densities, as well as marginal moments, quantiles, and HPD intervals. The procedure is illustrated by examples from material flow analysis and chemical engineering.     

The Eternal Triangle: Sixty Years of the Centre–Periphery Relationship in the National Health Service

The history of the National Health Service in England is marked by a paradox. Even while successive governments used the rhetoric of power to the periphery, the exhort‐and‐hope system of 1948 was transformed into a command‐and‐control system over the next 60 years. The contrast between rhetorical aspirations and policy trajectory can be traced back, this article argues, to a debate in the 1945 Cabinet about the design of the NHS: a debate which set out the tension between three policy goals – equity, efficiency and democracy. The pursuit of equity and efficiency (variously defined) has provided the rationale for centralization, at the expense of democracy seen as control by elected local bodies. The major change over time has been less in central government's policy ambitions than in its administrative capacity. New organizational structures and managerial techniques made it possible to exploit opportunities created by information technology.     

The influence of probabilities on the response mode bias in utility elicitation

The response mode bias, in which subjects exhibit different risk attitudes when assessing certainty equivalents versus indifference probabilities, is a well-known phenomenon in the assessment of utility functions. In this empirical study, we develop and apply a cardinal measure of risk attitudes to analyze not only the existence, but also the strength of this phenomenon. Since probability levels involved in decision problems are already known to have a strong impact on behavior, we use this approach to study the impact of probabilities on the extent of the response mode bias. We find that the direction in which probabilities influence measured risk aversion is the opposite in the certainty equivalence (CE) method versus in the probability equivalence (PE) method. Utilizing the CE elicitation approach leads to an increase of risk seeking for gambles involving high probabilities. For the PE method, subjects tend to behave risk averse with gambles of high probabilities. This behavior is reversed in the gain domain. This “tailwhip” effect is consistently replicated in several experiments, involving both loss and gain domains of lotteries.     

An Alternative Exact Solution of the Two-Stage Clonal Growth Model of Cancer

The approximate solution of the two-stage clonal expansion model of cancer may substantially deviate from the exact solution, and may therefore lead to erroneous conclusions in particular applications. However, for time-varying parameters the exact solution (method of characteristics) is not easy to implement, hampering the accessibility of the model to nonmathematicians. Based on intuitive reasoning, Clewell et al. (1995) proposed an improved approximate solution that is easy to implement whatever time-varying behavior the parameters may have. Here we provide the mathematical foundation for the approximation suggested by Clewell et al. (1995) and show that, after a slight modification, it is in fact an exact solution for the case of time-constant parameters. We were not able to prove that it is an exact solution for time-varying parameters as well. However, several computer simulations showed that the numerical results do not differ from the exact solution as proposed by Moolgavkar and Luebeck (1990). The advantage of this alternative solution is that the hazard rate of the first malignant cell can be evaluated by numerically integrating a single differential equation.