Adrian Slywotzky and Charlie Hoban
Vigorous competition among companies for customers, talent, and capital serves everyone well, for the most part. But competition can be harmful as well, when companies fight over…
Abstract
Purpose
Vigorous competition among companies for customers, talent, and capital serves everyone well, for the most part. But competition can be harmful as well, when companies fight over things that hold little value to customers or that offer little potential for differentiation.
Design/methodology/approach
The article discusses how thinking and changing the compete/collaborate ratio offers a way out that benefits all players. By joining forces to carry out common and largely undifferentiated functions or processes, companies can avoid redundant expenditures and capitalize on economies of scale and shared expertise. Strategic collaboration can take place at any stage of an industry's value chain. It can take many other forms, consistent with antitrust laws, including the sharing of back‐office functions, factory production, R&D efforts, marketing and distribution, and repair or return facilities.
Findings
Even bitter rivals have sometimes joined forces to achieve common goals and solve common problems. Notable examples are the Airbus consortium of European aircraft manufacturers, the Sematech consortium of US semiconductor manufacturers, banks working together to launch Visa and Mastercard, and small hardware stores using the TruValue organization for cooperative marketing, purchasing, and loyalty programs.
Originality/value
Collaborating on well‐defined activities offers an immediate payoff in reduced costs. And it tends to promote, rather than hamper, constructive competition in the areas most valued by customers.
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The management of children′s literature is a search for value andsuitability. Effective policies in library and educational work arebased firmly on knowledge of materials, and on…
Abstract
The management of children′s literature is a search for value and suitability. Effective policies in library and educational work are based firmly on knowledge of materials, and on the bibliographical and critical frame within which the materials appear and might best be selected. Boundaries, like those between quality and popular books, and between children′s and adult materials, present important challenges for selection, and implicit in this process are professional acumen and judgement. Yet also there are attitudes and systems of values, which can powerfully influence selection on grounds of morality and good taste. To guard against undue subjectivity, the knowledge frame should acknowledge the relevance of social and experiential context for all reading materials, how readers think as well as how they read, and what explicit and implicit agendas the authors have. The good professional takes all these factors on board.
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David Norman Smith and Eric Allen Hanley
Controversy has long swirled over the claim that Donald Trump's base has deeply rooted authoritarian tendencies, but Trump himself seems to have few doubts. Asked whether his…
Abstract
Controversy has long swirled over the claim that Donald Trump's base has deeply rooted authoritarian tendencies, but Trump himself seems to have few doubts. Asked whether his stated wish to be dictator “on day one” of second term in office would repel voters, Trump said “I think a lot of people like it.” It is one of his invariable talking points that 74 million voters supported him in 2020, and he remains the unrivaled leader of the Republican Party, even as his rhetoric escalates to levels that cautious observers now routinely call fascistic.
Is Trump right that many people “like” his talk of dictatorship? If so, what does that mean empirically? Part of the answer to these questions was apparent early, in the results of the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES), which included survey questions that we had proposed which we drew from the aptly-named “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” scale. Posed to voters in 2012–2013 and again in 2016, those questions elicited striking responses.
In this chapter, we revisit those responses. We begin by exploring Trump's escalating anti-democratic rhetoric in the light of themes drawn from Max Weber and Theodor W. Adorno. We follow this with the text of the 2017 conference paper in which we first reported that 75% of Trump's voters supported him enthusiastically, mainly because they shared his prejudices, not because they were hurting economically. They hoped to “get rid” of troublemakers and “crush evil.” That wish, as we show in our conclusion, remains central to Trump's appeal.