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This paper aims to look at how organisational partnerships balance knowledge exploration and exploitation in contexts that are rife with paradoxes. It draws on paradox theory to examine the partnership’s response to the explore-exploit relationship.

A multiple interpretive case study was used to examine international partnerships in three African countries. These partnerships were between international (Northern-based) non-governmental organisations and local African non-governmental organisations.

The research finds that within the partnership, knowledge exploration and exploitation exist as a duality rather than a dualism. This is supported by the acceptance and confrontation of paradoxes of performing and belonging. However, macro-level paradoxes of organising linked to power, culture and epistemologies inhibit further effective confrontation of the explore-exploit paradox.

The findings can help managers working in international development organisations to understand how learning is enabled and constrained in partnership-based programmes.

The study provides a novel contribution to knowledge management by applying the paradox perspective to the explore-exploit relationship. This paper extends previous work by drawing on the levels and repertoires present in the paradox perspective to understand how knowledge exploration and exploitation can be mutually reinforcing and can exist as a duality.

Knowledge reuse using electronic repositories, while increasingly important, requires more thorough analysis. Service modularity has been recently applied in services research but has not been integrated into knowledge reuse studies. The purpose of this paper is to draw on both service modularity and knowledge reuse to develop and validate a framework that categorises forms of packaged knowledge in an electronic repository.

Drawing on knowledge reuse and service modularity research, a model is proposed. The model is empirically tested using a case study research design.

This research highlighted the value of including both context and process as key dimensions when packaging service knowledge for reuse. This study identifies knowledge types present in modular solutions and how they were configured and reconfigured in the knowledge repository. This research identified five ways modularised services were leveraged. In addition to the traditional scale and stretch approaches, already present, but conflated, in the service literature, three other configurations were identified; shrink, separate and segment.

The findings are based on a single empirical case study which may limit the generalisability of the findings. There is a need for additional research to further validate the model in additional contexts.

This study provides managers with empirical examples of how a modular repository was used in practice and outlines five ways of recombining contextual and processual elements to enable service codification and reuse. It has implications for how knowledge is decomposed and recombined in repositories, suggesting an explicit separation of context and process knowledge while developing modular elements within both.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that explicitly uses context and process as dimensions and draws on service modularity to understand types of knowledge reuse in electronic repositories. In doing so, it adds value by developing and validating a model that identifies five types of reuse.

Entrepreneurship.

Undergraduate level courses on entrepreneurialism and possibly on business ethics; MBA classes at the beginning of their course of study. The case is intended to provide a way to encourage students to consider what the life of an entrepreneur is like, what qualities are needed to survive and what sacrifices are possible.

This case follows the evolution of an entrepreneurial venture run by a young woman in Thailand. She reinvents herself as a social entrepreneur but faces ongoing revenue generation problems according to her business model. The case explores the interaction between commercial and social entrepreneurialism in the context of a rapidly changing business environment in a developing, middle-income country.

Students will have the opportunity to consider the extent to which they are personally cut out for the entrepreneurial life. As a secondary objective, students will be encouraged to think about their attitudes towards lifelong learning and the need to adapt to changing circumstances through their working careers.

Teaching notes are available; please consult your librarian for access.

While service scholars see modularisation as balancing the efficiency of standardisation with the value added through customisation the relationships between these concepts are under-theorised. In addition, although information and communication technologies can facilitate all three service strategies, the degree to which they codify service knowledge is not explicitly considered in the extant literature. The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a model that examines service strategy trajectories by specifically considering the ICTs used and the degree of knowledge codification employed.

This study draws on three qualitative case studies of service departments of firms involved in cardiovascular applications, orthopaedic, spinal and neuroscience product development and information technology support. Data collection involved semi-structured interviews, document analysis and non-participant observation.

Findings show that ICTs were increasingly used to codify both standardised and customised services, though in different ways. For standardised services ICTs codified the service process, making them even more rigid. Due to the dynamic nature of customised services, drawing on experts' tacit knowledge, ICTs codified the possessors of knowledge rather than the service process they undertook. This study also identified a duality between the tacit development of customised services and modular service codification.

The model is validated using case studies from three companies in the medical and information technology sectors limiting its generalisability.

The importance of considering the degree of tacitness or explicitness of service knowledge is important for service codification. The paper provides managers with empirical examples of how ICTs are used to support all three strategies, allows them to identify their current position and indicates possible future trajectories.

The papers main contribution is the development of a model that integrates the literature on service strategies with knowledge management strategies to classify service standardisation, customisation and modularisation in terms of both service orientation and degree of ICT codification.

Marketing.

This case study would suit any class that deals with the interaction between the nature of business and society and is rooted in a specific basis in developing Asia. The particular nature of the class could be used to shape the subsequent discussion if necessary: a marketing class would focus on the need for development of the local market and consumer behaviour, while a management class might be more interested in the issues relating to an appropriate ownership structure in an emerging market in a company based on an amalgamation of smaller units likely to have been run by technicians (farmers) or party functionaries.

Vinamilk is a Vietnamese company that has grown from humble beginnings as a collection of small-scale dairy co-operatives until the current time when it is one of the largest and most successful companies in that country and recognized as a significant developing Asian success. It has managed this while operating in a product category that has had very little tradition in Vietnam and for which demand has had to be created in order to enable the company to expand. The success of Vinamilk has now made it possible to imagine an international or a transnational future in which it would no longer be tied to its Vietnamese home or to be required to support government-supported developmental goals such as supporting employment and using local inputs. A debate is taking place, therefore, about the nature of the continuing relationship between firms and the public sector in a rapidly developing nation.

The objectives include: evaluation of the nature of the business-state relationship; evaluation of the nature of the home environment with respect to its attitude to business; and understanding better the nature of emerging markets and their interaction with international markets.

Teaching notes are available for faculty. Please consult your librarian for access.

Marketing theory and practice is under severe criticism – socialists and the practitioners criticize marketing in its current form which calls for active efforts by marketers to reposition the discipline – making it beneficial to the masses. The Western world is thoroughly investigated based on the opinions of public regarding marketing as a discipline. However, studies which present a non-Western consumer’s attitudes toward the role of marketing in a society are scant. This purpose of this study is to encapsulate Pakistani consumers’ understandings and attitudes toward marketing with an emphasis on their perceptions of the ethicality and transformative power of the discipline.

A purposive convenience sample of 40 professionals with diverse non-marketing backgrounds and of the widest possible demographic profile participated in in-depth, unstructured interviews. The content analysis and grounded theory method were used for the analysis.

Marketing is appreciated for creating product awareness and, occasionally, combating social problems, but this positive image is clouded by severely criticizing it for promoting materialism, being irritatingly pervasive and pushy, as well as for using unethical and unfair practices.

The study offers a valuable insight into the discipline’s performative and social legitimation in a fast-growing Asian economy. The authors recommend paths for a positive repositioning of the discipline that will improve its public image and enhance its potential for being recognized as a force for positive social change.

Further to enhancing our understanding of consumer attitudes toward marketing, this paper’s value lies in it being the first ever exploration of the developing country perspective. Most importantly, it contributes to a debate that could enlighten the much-needed repositioning of marketing as a discipline to make it useful for masses.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the implementation of digital transformation in small and medium-sized enterprises in Vietnam.

The research features in-depth personal interviews with SME executives and managers.

The findings of this study may be summarized into five main areas: (1) multi-tasking role and scarcity of resources; (2) risk; (3) data-driven decision-making processes; (4) efficient communications; and (5) strategic issues. These categories emerged from the content analysis process.

Qualitative research provides a good explanation for situations in actual firms but may not always be generalizable.

Means of overcoming problems with implementing digital transformation in Vietnamese SMEs are provided.

Most studies of Vietnamese companies focus on intensive manufacturing and membership in supply chains. Few studies consider the emergent service and technology sector.

In the late 1990s, the market for private equity securities (hereinafter “private equity market”) was booming. From quarter to quarter, the number of venture capital deals and the amount invested rose dramatically. Certainly, much of this attention and excitement resulted from the extraordinary market gains experienced by some investors in private equity securities (hereinafter “private equities”). For example, in a book published in 2000, Randall E. Stross described a private equity investment that grew in value by 100,000 percent in less than two years. Today, the extraordinary gains of the late 1990s have subsided. Indeed, some commentators now describe market conditions as a “brutal hit.” The number of deals and the dollars invested are down, and as one commentator put it, there has been an “exodus of momentum investors.” Nonetheless, private equities remain an important alternative investment. Private equities also remain an important compliance area for broker‐dealers and investment advisers. This article reviews some of the compliance issues that could arise in the current environment. Specifically, it focuses on the types of issues that are likely to arise during an examination by the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC” or “Commission”). The article begins with a quick summary of the circumstances under which SEC examiners review broker‐dealers’ and investment advisers’ activities in the private equity market. Next it reviews recent SEC enforcement actions involving private equities and some of the compliance lessons that can be drawn from the cases. Finally, it discusses an examination initiative relating to private equities that the SEC currently has underway. It concludes that private equities remain an important compliance area and an important focus of the SEC’s examination program.

This volume of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth showcases the timely and important work of active, early career sociologists, who are helping to define the direction of the sub-field. Their work shares basic premises and concerns, and these underlie and provide cohesion to this diverse collection of chapters. Children and youth are active agents in their own “socialization,” producing meaning and action collaboratively with their peers, and they struggle for agency and control in various social contexts – these are the themes that, both explicitly and implicitly, shape essentially all of the contributions. The underlying concern of our own introduction above, and of many of the chapters, is that the current processes and practices may stifle children's creativity and undermine their potential to collaboratively construct innovative solutions to societal problems.

Part II and last MECHETTI. Vienna FOUNDED in 1795 by Carlo Mechetti as a dealer; since 1807 in partnership with his nephew, Pietro; the publishing firm styled Carlo Mechetti & Neffe in 1809; after Carlo's death in 1811, Pietro became sole owner; he was succeeded in 1850 by his widow, Therese; c. 1855 the firm was taken over by A. Diabelli & co. (cp. Peter Cappi).