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Many grain exporting/importing countries implement temporary trade policies to intervene in grain trade volume during food crises. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of Chinese soybean trade policies on the domestic soybean market during the food crisis.

A Markov switching error correction model is constructed for the empirical analysis. Market integration, market equilibrium and market stability are compared among three regimes: the normal state, crisis state and post-crisis state. In order to reduce the disturbance from external markets factors on the results, the US soybean market is selected as a control group in that it did not use any soybean intervention trade policies during the food crisis.

The empirical results indicate that China’s temporary soybean trade policies lead to a decrease in market integration between domestic and international soybean markets and a reduction in domestic soybean market stability.

It is the first time that China’s soybean market is selected as a sample and case on this issue. The regime shifting non-linear model could be more applicable because there exists a non-linear transmission relationship between grains markets during food crises. The results imply that China’s temporary soybean trade policies do not improve market integration and stability. China should reconsider implementing soybean trade intervening policies to protect the domestic market and safeguard food security.

Against the background of the rapid increase of total imported food in China, China's imported high-quality food has increased more than low-quality ones, and China's imported food quality structure has continuously improved. It is a new issue that needs further examination.

Based on the assumption of non-homothetic preference, this paper apply the method provided by Eaton and Kortum (2002) in a new theoretical model and empirically analyzes the impact of per capita income on the quality structure of imported food by using SYS-GMM with firm import data from Chinese customs.

The study finds that income is a significant factor which affects the imported food quality structure in China. The higher the per capita income, the higher the imported food quality structure. Furthermore, per capita income has a significant positive impact on the imported food quality structure in different quality groups. The research confirms that China import more food with the highest quality as its per capita income increases.

Chinese policymaker needs to reconsider the role of food imports in improving food quality structure. The aim of the Chinese food industry's supply-side reform should be not only to remove excess capacity but also to produce high-quality products that meet the demand of discriminating consumers.

This paper constructs a new theme for imported food quality structure and investigates import food quality structure improvement from the perspective of demand by incorporating non-homothetic preferences. Another feature of this paper is that it conducts an empirical analysis with unique and highly disaggregated firm import data from Chinese customs to measure imported food quality, which is more refined than the national-product dimension data.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

The practitioners of postmodern organization theory have had to respond to the charge that postmodernism has a declivity toward skepticism. Their response to organizational skepticisim is to decenter dominant theories, paradigms and organizational forms, rather than to negate them. Decentering supplements discourse by augmenting its repertoire; the opposite of skepticism, which diminishes its object. The main ways in which postmodern organization theories try to overcome the specific sceptical position of paradigm incommensurability (the reduction of discourse about organizations and organizational discourse to a solipsism of private language games) are described and assessed in terms of three positions: John Hassard’s “multiple paradigm” approach on the level of methodology, Stewart Clegg’s “embedded rationalities” on the level of empirical conceptualization, and Kenneth Gergen’s “heteroglossia” on the level of discursive practice. Hassard and Clegg are engaged in the mapping function of postmodern organization theory, whereas Gergen is engaged in deconstraining organizations.

Over the last twenty years or so the study of organizations has gone through a period of considerable change and instability. Both in terms of its substantive agenda and the theoretical perspectives through which it has been articulated and pursued, discontinuity and flux have been the order of the day. The recurring theme has been one of a fundamental transformation — some would say a veritable “paradigm shift” — in the theoretical forms through which the field is defined and structured as a coherent discipline. Intellectual change and discontinuity have been mirrored by the emergence of novel organizational structures and practices which seem to signify a sharp break with more orthodox arrangements based on the principles of rational bureaucracy. Indeed, the scale and intensity of intellectual fermentation and institutional innovation have prompted some commentators to suggest that organizational studies can no longer be regarded as a discipline or, less ambitiously, as a sub‐ discipline within the general field of social science. At the other end of the theoretical spectrum, there are some people fighting a rearguard action against the proliferation of alternative approaches and the corrosive influence which it has exerted on established orthodoxies and the order that they once provided.

The intellectual trajectory of a central figure in contemporary organisation theory – Gareth Morgan – is identified and assessed through a detailed analysis of his published work over the last decade.

In 1962 Robert Presthus attempted to identify the major institutional features of the ‘organisational society’ (Presthus 1962). These were:

The focus for this paper is the changing relationship between expertise, professional power and organisational control within advanced industrial societies. The analysis of this changing relationship is located within a more detailed appreciation of the ways in which the ‘expert division of labour’ within such societies is being restructured and the impact of this restructuring process on established patterns also raises some fundamental questions concerning the increasingly strategic role which specialist knowledge, and the organisational structures through which it is developed and managed, plays in shaping the power struggles that will determine the distribution of rewards between contending social groups within the ‘new’ political economies beginning to emerge in ‘disorganized societies’.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

Looks at the life and poetry of W.B. Yeats to establish whether or not he engaged in marketing and what his marketing practices were. Uses Yeats as an example of Irish marketing at its best. Suggests that a Celtic Marketing Era will reappear to challenge the established “Anglo‐Saxon” approach to marketing and marketing education.