This article develops an alternative theoretical approach to the Supreme Court’s controversial electoral redistricting decisions in Shaw v. Reno (1993) and its progeny. Instead of…
Abstract
This article develops an alternative theoretical approach to the Supreme Court’s controversial electoral redistricting decisions in Shaw v. Reno (1993) and its progeny. Instead of relying on the traditional equal protection interpretation, this paper argues that controversies over electoral redistricting are at base disputes among competing visions of democracy. In the Court’s recent redistricting cases, the majority and the dissent adopted fundamentally different visions of democracy – Individualist Democracy and Democracy as Power. In addition to elaborating these rival understandings of democracy, this article develops the concept of Symbolic Democracy to explain a central paradox in the Court majority’s decision: its simultaneous denial and recognition of the relevance of racial groups in representation.
Offers an appraisal of the corporate experience and prospects of J. Sainsbury plc in the USA, ten years after its market entry. In Part 1, focuses on Sainsbury’s New England…
Abstract
Offers an appraisal of the corporate experience and prospects of J. Sainsbury plc in the USA, ten years after its market entry. In Part 1, focuses on Sainsbury’s New England subsidiary, Shaw’s, and shows that heavy capital investment, and the determined export of a British model of food retailing, has produced a chain of 119 stores enjoying rapid growth and impressive improvements in profitability. In Part 2, focuses on Sainsbury’s acquisition of 50 per cent of the voting stock (20 per cent of total equity) of Giant Food Inc., the market leader in the Washington DC‐Baltimore area. Shows that Sainsbury is poised to purchase full control of Giant (at an estimated cost of approximately $2 billion), is promoting a major expansion of Giant northwards into Philadelphia, and is on the verge of becoming one of the top ten firms in a US industry worth $410 billion per annum by 1995.
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This case is meant for MBA/MS/executive MBA students.
Abstract
Study level/applicability
This case is meant for MBA/MS/executive MBA students.
Subject area
Entrepreneurship development, leadership.
Case overview
This case is about the successful entrepreneurial journey of Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, founder of India-based biotechnology company Biocon Limited. Mazumdar-Shaw established Biocon in 1978 as a joint venture company. As a woman entrepreneur, Mazumdar-Shaw faced many challenges and setbacks during her initial days. She overcame these and took Biocon to new heights. Later, Mazumdar-Shaw decided to make a strategic shift in Biocon’s business model – going from manufacturing enzymes to biopharmaceuticals with the vision of making an impact on global health care by providing access to affordable, life-saving drugs.
Expected learning outcomes
The learning outcomes are as follows: understand the ecosystem of women entrepreneurs in developing countries; examine the challenges faced by women entrepreneurs in their entrepreneurial journey and how successful entrepreneurs convert challenges into opportunities; and analyze what entrepreneurial leadership is and understand how these leadership qualities play an important role in the success of entrepreneurial ventures.
Social implications
Mazumdar-Shaw was able to break through the gender barrier that was highly prevalent in Indian society then and successfully established her entrepreneurial venture in biotechnology, a discipline that was still nascent in the1970s. Though she has scaled great heights in the biotechnology area and developed her business, she has remained sensitive to the problems of those who are unable to get affordable medicines. Firmly believing that she should share the prosperity of the company with the poor and the marginalized, Mazumdar-Shaw, through her philanthropic venture, Biocon Foundation, started providing essential drugs at affordable prices to them.
Subject code
CCS 3: Entrepreneurship.
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Notes that the collaboration between Edwin F. Gay, founding dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, and Arch W. Shaw, a Chicago publisher, exemplifies the…
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Notes that the collaboration between Edwin F. Gay, founding dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, and Arch W. Shaw, a Chicago publisher, exemplifies the significance of historical sensibility on the origins of US management studies. Points out that the attention they gave to historical methods and data as tools of inquiry reflected Gay’s professional training in economic history, but it also reflected the sense both men had of the significance of institutions and institutional patterns in business life. Both men also urged more attention to distribution as a serious topic for academic research and teaching, and also recognized co‐ordinating activity as a central function of modern management. Adds that the potential gains from scale economies depended on how well general managers filled this function, and that for this task managers required an outlook that transcended technical expertise. Suggests that they had to understand the broader institutional setting in which they managed and that historical awareness could illuminate that context.
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Ethnoracial categories and classifications can change over time, sometimes leading to increased social mobility for marginalized groups or nonelites. These ethnoracial changes are…
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Ethnoracial categories and classifications can change over time, sometimes leading to increased social mobility for marginalized groups or nonelites. These ethnoracial changes are often attributed to emulation, where nonelites adopt the elite's social, cultural, and political characteristics and values. In some cases, however, nonelites experience ethnoracial shifts and upward mobility without emulating elites, which events can help explain. I argue that the type of event, whether endogenous or exogenous, affects the ability of elites to enforce their preferred ethnoracial hierarchy because it will determine the strategy – either insulation or absorption – they can pursue to maintain their power. I examine this phenomenon by comparing the cases of Irish social mobility in 17th-century Barbados and Montserrat. Findings suggest that endogenous events allow elites to reinforce their preferred ethnoracial hierarchy through insulation, whereas exogenous events constrain elites to employ absorption, which maintains their power but results in hierarchical shifts. Events are thus critical factors in ethnoracial shifts.
This article examines efforts of late nineteenth century educational reformers in Boston, Massachusetts (USA), to meet the pedagogical needs of an industrial age by balancing…
Abstract
This article examines efforts of late nineteenth century educational reformers in Boston, Massachusetts (USA), to meet the pedagogical needs of an industrial age by balancing manual work and intellectual activity. Led by Swedish educator Gustaf Larsson and Boston philanthropist Pauline Agassiz Shaw, they employed traditional Swedish wood handcrafts (slojd, or ‘sloyd’ in English) to teach theoretical academic subjects and foster individualised learning. The reformers hoped to create, for students in kindergarten through to twelfth grade, a progression of manual work to parallel intellectual activities in the curriculum. That task became difficult as tool work moved from wood to steel, machines replaced hand tools, and artistic handcraft fell victim to efficient production. The school failed to sustain itself following the deaths of Shaw and Larsson. Today sloyd is credited as being a forerunner of technology education as well as an important influence on arts education in the United States.
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Mark Tadajewski and D.G. Brian Jones
The purpose of this paper is to provide an historical analysis of an important early contribution to the history of marketing thought literature – the six-book series titled The…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide an historical analysis of an important early contribution to the history of marketing thought literature – the six-book series titled The Knack of Selling – which was published in 1913 and intended as an early training course for salesmanship.
Design/methodology/approach
This research utilized a close, systematic reading of The Knack of Selling series and places it in the professional and intellectual context of the early twentieth century. Books published about marketing are primary source materials for any study of the history of marketing thought. In this case, The Knack series constitutes significant primary source material for a study of early thinking about personal selling.
Findings
Echoing A.W. Shaw, Watson offers a more sophisticated interpretation of the “one best way” approach associated with Frederick Taylor. Watson’s advice did not entail the repetition of canned sales talks to each customer. His vision of practice was more complicated. Sales presentations were temporally and locationally relative. They were subject to ongoing evolution. As the marketplace changed, as customer needs and interests shifted, so did organizational and salesperson performances. To keep sales talks relevant to the consumer, personnel were encouraged to undertake rudimentary ethnographic research and interviews. Unusually, there is oscillation in the way power relations between marketer and customer were described. While relational themes are present, so are military metaphors.
Originality/value
This is the first systematic reading of The Knack of Selling that has been produced. It is an important contribution to the literature inasmuch as this book set is not in wide circulation. The material itself was significant as an input into scholarship subsequently hailed as seminal within sales management.
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The purpose of this paper is to describe the author’s serendipitous career and provide some lessons that might be of value to those pursuing the academic mission: teaching…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe the author’s serendipitous career and provide some lessons that might be of value to those pursuing the academic mission: teaching, research and service.
Design/methodology/approach
The method involves primary sources; mainly the author’s CV to jog recall of events and dates, some of his articles and the teachings and writings of many others that influenced or inspired various aspects of the author’s career.
Findings
The author’s experiences affirm that to achieve any degree of success in the professoriate, in addition to having some talent it is also helpful to be lucky. There is a lot to navigate at a university. Opportunities exist at every turn, some noticed some missed. When recognized, be prepared. Being a professor is not what you do, it is who you are. Preparation for an academic career involves becoming a self-improvement project (essentially, a life-long student learning lessons). It requires developing expertise (preferably excellence) in some field of study, as well as resourcefulness, resilience and perseverance.
Originality/value
Each individual’s story is unique. The author’s path seems to have included more twists and turns than most. Consequently, he tried to highlight the experiences with lessons learned in most sections, some obvious some less so, which he expects (at least hopes) will prove valuable to future educators.
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A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balanceeconomics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary toman′s finding the good life and society enduring…
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A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.
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Lin He and Calum Turvey
The purpose of this paper is to examine whether or not financial repression exists in the saving and investment activities of farm households in rural areas of China.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine whether or not financial repression exists in the saving and investment activities of farm households in rural areas of China.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper empirically investigates repression in rural China using the McKinnon‐Shaw model and microeconomic data combined with lending and savings rates and ceilings by rural credit cooperatives.
Findings
The paper finds only limited evidence of a repression dominated by savings, while investment response appears to be, at least on average, normal or unrepressed. More specifically, the paper finds that the relationship between growth and investment is consistent with an unrepressed economy but savings do show evidence of repression.
Originality/value
The political focus of economic reformation in China has been one of rapid economic growth in urban areas and a neglect of the agriculture sector. This focus on urban growth has led some Chinese scholars to speculate that the residual impact is a repressed agricultural and rural economy, at least in the context of McKinnon and Shaw framework. However, such speculations have not previously been verified. This paper presents the first attempt to determine the relationships exclusively in the context of the agricultural economy.