Incumbent capability enhancement in response to radical innovations

Schumpeterian market disequilibrium marked by entrepreneurial entry and incumbent exit has long held an important place in management literature. The extant literature has overwhelmingly championed the newcomer, despite incumbents' obvious advantages in resources, experience and market knowledge. The current research provides evidence for the effectiveness of the incumbent's strategy of capability enhancement (along an established technological trajectory) while responding to radical technological innovations. We develop a cognitive process model that integrates managerial cognition with capability development and deployment views, depicting the dynamics of the incumbent's capability enhancement process. We analyze the cognitive drivers of organizational actions in all stages (rigidity, triggering event, and capability renewal) and elucidate the role of top management cognition in the processes of detecting and correcting errors in a strategic course of action. We ground our model in the case of a cork-stopper industry veteran's decline as corks ceded ground to screw tops and other stoppers in the wine industry. How a major company fought back in response to the emergence of these, in the industry context, radical technological innovations, provides the basis for our narrative. The proposed theoretical model contributes to literature on technology management (with regard to incumbent strategies in response to radical innovation threats) as well as the role of cognition in strategy (providing an explanation of the cognitive underpinnings of capability development).     

Cohabitation and commitment: partnership plans of young men and women

Popular commentators on marriage and the family often interpret the increase in heterosexual couples living together without marrying as reduced willingness to create and honour life‐long partnerships. Survey and in‐depth interviews with samples of 20–29 year olds living in an urban area of Scotland finds little support for the postulated link between growing cohabitation and a weakened sense of commitment to long‐term arrangements. Most of the cohabiting couples strongly stressed their ‘commitment’. Socially acceptable vocabularies of motive undoubtedly influenced answers but interviews helped to explore deeper meanings. Many respondents’ views were consistent with previous research predictions of a weakening sense of any added value of marriage. At the same time, some respondents continued to stress the social significance of the distinction between marriage and cohabitation, consistent with research interpreting cohabitation as a ‘try and see’ strategy part‐way to the perceived full commitment of marriage. The notion that ‘marriage is better for children’ continued to have support among respondents. While, on average, cohabiting couples had lower incomes and poorer employment situations than married couples, only very extreme adverse circumstances were presented as making marriage ‘too risky’. Pregnancy‐provoked cohabitation was not always in this category. Cohabitation was maintained because marriage would ‘make no difference’ or because they ‘had not yet got round to’ marriage. Most respondents were more wary of attempting to schedule or plan in their personal life than in other domains and cohabitees’ attitudes to partnership, including their generally ‘committed’ approach, do not explain the known greater vulnerability of this group to dissolution.     

WOMEN'S WORK:

We use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine women's involvement in the Gulf War Illness movement. We find that women's cumulative grievances of health concerns, financial hardships, and emotional problems opened them to movement recruitment as they surfed the Internet for information and support. The movement's division of labor was influenced not by gender but by health status. Women used the Internet to provide medical information and emotional support to geographically dispersed veterans. Activism transformed women activists by endowing them with a sense of empowerment and a somewhat broadened concern for social justice. Although their transformations disposed the women to become active on related issues, it did not extend to concerns about gender discrimination. We suggest that the next research step is to investigate gender differences in movement processes by surveying activists across a variety of movements to test propositions and to identify the characteristics of other social contexts that structurally instigate a departure from traditional gender roles.     

Learning at the edge

This article describes the metaphors persons used to describe their experiences within a three year training project in family therapy. Questions were posed of trainees that had asked them to describe their experiences of training as if they represented the title of a book, movie or journal article. Responses reveal how they construct or ‘story’ their experiences from both a first and second-order cybernetic perspective.     

Measuring Substance Abuse Treatment Need Among Adults in Florida: A Social Indicators Approach

Determining the size and demographiccharacteristics of substance abuse populationsis extremely important for implementing publicpolicies aimed at the control of substanceabuse. Such information not only assists in theallocation of limited treatment resources bythe state, but also in the monitoring ofsubstance abuse trends over time and in theevaluation of innovative policy initiatives. Inthis study, we develop three composite measuresof treatment need. We then use these measuresto estimate treatment need for alcohol abuseand for controlled substance abuse within eachof Florida's 67 counties. This study providesan important empirical component of communityplanning, quantifying and, to a limited degree,specifying the level of need for the substanceabuse treatment of community residents. Anadditional benefit is the development of a costeffective and unobtrusive methodology fordetermining empirically when levels of need arechanging so that treatment levels can beadjusted accordingly. With proper use,policymakers can readily employ the methodologydeveloped in this study in Florida andelsewhere to make better-informed decisions inthe allocation of finite substance abusetreatment resources.     

The Effects of ROTC Program Participation on Socioeconomic Status and Life Satisfaction*

Using mail survey data based on a stratified systematic sample [N = 686] of 1983–1988 graduates of a medium-sized state university, this research evaluates whether ROTC program participation constitutes an independent source of human capital in civilian labor markets by comparing postgraduate earnings (annual income), prestige and authority, and life satisfaction of ROTC program participants with those of nonparticipants. The results revealed no statistically significant ROTC program participation effects, independent of subsequent military status. ROTC program participation paid off in terms of occupational prestige and authority for those on active duty, but not for those in national guard or reserve units. Neither ROTC participation nor current military status affected income or life satisfaction levels.     

THE WELFARE IMPLICATIONS OF MORAL HAZARD AND ADVERSE SELECTION IN COMPETITIVE INSURANCE MARKETS

I model a competitive insurance market with both moral hazard and adverse selection, and analyze the effect on welfare when both problems are present simultaneously. An examination of the interaction between these two problems leads to two hypotheses. First, the nature of the equilibrium contracts is such that each problem partially offsets the welfare loss associated with the other. And second, the degree to which this occurs increases as agents become more heterogeneous. Simulation results overwhelmingly support both hypotheses.     

Racial differences in urban neighboring

Despite mixed expectations generated by existing theories and evidence, this analysis documents clear racial differences in urban neighboring behavior. Using data from a survey of Nashville, Tennessee, residents, we show that blacks interact with their neighbors more often than whites do, and in a greater variety of ways. The only noteworthy similarity between the two groups is the positive impact of neighboring on feelings of community affect. Overall, our results support the view that neighbor relations — like other kinds of informal participation — have helped blacks cope with constrained social opportunities and provided them with access to resources unavailable through formal institutional channels.Revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August 1989.     

What Do Grandmothers Think about Self‐esteem? American and Taiwanese Folk Theories Revisited

The study investigates European American and Taiwanese grandmothers’ folk theories of childrearing and self‐esteem, building on an earlier comparison of mothers from the same families. Adopting methods that privilege local meanings, we bring grandmothers’ voices into the conversation about childrearing, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of intergenerational nuances in folk theories. In each cultural case, 16 grandmothers of 3‐year‐olds participated in in‐depth interviews that were customized according to local communicative norms. Although self‐esteem emerged as a central organizing concept in the folk theories of European American mothers, grandmothers spoke in two voices, either echoing their daughters or invoking a counter‐discourse of wariness towards self‐esteem. By contrast, Taiwanese mothers and grandmothers resembled one another—but differed from their American counterparts—in treating self‐esteem as peripheral in childrearing. Results contribute to the growing consensus that self‐esteem is a culture‐specific childrearing goal and suggest that the European American tendency to valorize self‐esteem varies by generation.