Strategic Alliance Outcomes: a Transaction‐Cost Economics Perspective

Empirical research on strategic alliances has been limited because previous studies examined alliance outcomes, and the factors associated with them, from a single partner in a manufacturing alliance. Furthermore, many of these studies have been done from a transaction cost perspective and researchers have inferred opportunistic behavior, rather than directly measuring it and observing its actual relationship with alliance performance. Building on previous transaction cost theory and research, this study seeks to address these gaps by analyzing factors associated with both opportunistic behavior and alliance performance within a major service sector, namely the US healthcare industry. After controlling for asset specificity and alliance age, we found that partner trustworthiness and contractual safeguards were negatively related to opportunistic behavior. Furthermore, opportunistic behavior was negatively related to alliance performance, as hypothesized. Interestingly, mutual equity investments were found to be unrelated to opportunistic behavior, counter to transaction‐cost logic. These findings refine and extend the transaction‐cost economics perspective regarding our understanding of strategic alliance behavior and outcomes, and offer executives in service‐based industries some practical ideas for assuring favorable strategic alliance outcomes.     

The end of the asylum (town): community responses to the depopulation and closure of the Saskatchewan Hospital, Weyburn

Never is the fraught relationship between the state-run custodial mental hospital and its host community clearer than during the period of rapid deinstitutionalization, when communities, facing the closure of their mental health facilities, inserted themselves into debates about the proper configuration of the mental health care system. Using the case of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, site in the 1960s of one of Canada's earliest and most radical experiments in rapid institutional depopulation, this article explores the government of Saskatchewan's management of the conflict between the latent functions of the old-line mental hospital as a community institution, an employer, and a generator of economic activity with its manifest function as a site of care made obsolete by the shift to community models of care.     

Recent Research on the Psychological Effects of Unemployment

Economic turbulence in the early 1980s stimulated not only popular and governmental concern about the effects of unemployment, but also extensive research on the topic. This journal issue presents 10 representative reports of such recent research from the United States and Europe. Of the two principal methodologies used in this field, aggregate time-series analysis and individual-level surveys, this issue is limited to the individual-level literature. Two papers provide a social psychological and human developmental orientation to the topic. Then, six papers address the psychological costs of unemployment, four based on population surveys and two dealing with plant closings. Finally, two papers describe policy responses being considered or implemented in North America and Europe.     

Systems innovation manager

Each year organizations spend a significant amount of money developing new products and processes in an effort to satisfy customer demands and manufacture high-quality products efficiently. Both development processes - product and process, are complex, resource intensive and thrive on innovation. They demand a variety of skills and resources, but in particular, participation among all staff in generating ideas, managing projects and implementing change. There are currently a number of software tools and methods that facilitate change in a systems environment. These range from complex modelling tools to information management tools. The tools have been developed around paradigms, e.g. world class manufacturing, total quality management and business process reengineering. They are often complex, requiring the efforts of skilled designers and managers. Current thinking within a systems environment reflects a more participative and less specialist approach to managing innovation and change. There is a need to create compromise between detailed project engineering and good management practice. This paper introduces a new paradigm centred on good management practice, and identifies the critical issues in systems innovation and change. The paradigm is articulated through a series of change levers and a methodology that guides managers and designers. It is supported by a series of software tools that together bring innovation management to life within the industrial organization.     

The increasing proportion of men with low earnings in the United States

This study has provided an examination of recent changes in the lower tail of the male earnings distribution. Data from the CPS for 1967 through 1978 were used to analyze the increasing proportion of male workers with annual and weekly earnings below a fixed low earnings threshold. Our central purpose was to assess the extent to which the growth in the probability of low earnings could be explained by the more salient changes in the structure of the male labor force over this period. To this end, logit analysis was used to examine the roles of education, experience, cyclical conditions, and cohort size in explaining variations in the probability of subthreshold earnings, conditional on experience and education. The estimates generally yielded the expected effects. However, the most important findings from our analysis concern the trends estimated net of education, experience, unemployment, and cohort size. These variables appear to explain satisfactorily the recent growth in the proportion of men with low earnings among those with at least sixteen years of education. For all other educational categories, our independent variables were unable to account for a major portion of the growth in the probability of low earnings. Our results supplement previous findings of positive trends for mean annual and weekly earnings net of a similar set of independent variables. Hence, we have provided substantial evidence of stagnation in the lower tail of the male earnings distribution--a stagnation not shared by the average worker nor fully explicable by education, experience, aggregate unemployment, or the entrance of the baby boom cohort into the labor market. Investigation of alternative explanations for this phenomenon, such as changes in female labor supply or the structure of labor demand, is clearly warranted.     

Negotiating Stigma: Lessons From the Life Stories of Gay Men

Gay men, like lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender persons, must negotiate their sexual orientation due to the socially constructed negative view of homosexuality in our culture. Stigma is experienced in various ways according to the meaning that the individual applies to it. This study gleans lessons from the life stories of 15 gay men who recognized the stigma of homosexuality and devised strategies to cope with it. An important finding was that mentors, acting as “cultural brokers,” played a significant role in helping to cope with stigma. The intent of this study is to add to the literature regarding mechanisms that social workers can employ to help gay men cope with stigmatization.     

‘DWELLING IN DISPLACEMENT’

This paper is a successor to an earlier one (Malone, Community, Work & Family, 4(2), 195–213, 2001) which described the development of a ‘community saved’ among first-generation Irish immigrants in North-West London, UK. A distinct and health-enhancing ‘sense’ of community founded on mutual helping networks, a belief in family ties, the importance of paid work and the Roman Catholic Church was identified within this Irish immigrant group. For the second generation or London Irish, upon whom this paper focuses, ‘community’ and ‘sense’ of community have meanings which differ significantly from those of their first-generation forebears. The London Irish describe the anonymity they experience within their contemporary urban ‘home’ and yearn, instead, for an idyllic but mythical ‘homeland’ — the rural Ireland of long ago. Disparities between the two groups yield insights into those elements which truly shape experience of ‘community’ and ‘sense’ of community and which can only be understood within the conceptual, geographical and intellectual boundaries of what has been called the ‘diasporic space’.

Ce papier suit à un précédent (Malone, Community, Work & Family, 4(2), 195–213, 2001) qui a dépeint le développement d'une ‘communauté sauvé’ parmi les immigrants irlandais de la première génération au nord-ouest de Londres. Un ‘sentiment de communauté’, à la fois marqué et assanisant, et fondé sur des résaux d'assistance réciproque, le croyance dans les liens familiaux, l'importance du travail salarié, et l'Eglise Catholique, a été identifié parmi ce groupe immigrant irlandais. Pour les immigrants de la deuzième génération, ainsi nommé les ‘London Irish’, et sujet de ce papier-ci, ‘la communauté’ et ‘le sentiment de communauté’ ont des significations très différentes de la première génération. Les London Irish parle de l'anonyme de leur expérience dans le domicile urbain, ils brûlent de revoir le ‘terre patrie’, idylle mythique d'un Irlande rural du bon vieux temps. Ces différences fournissent des aperçus des éléments qui forment l'expérience de ‘la communauté’ et du ‘sentiment de communauté’, éléments qui ne sont compris que dans les bornes de la conception, de la géographie et de l'intellect, bornes de ce qui a été désigné ‘l'espace diasporique’.