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In case you haven't heard, strategy is back. According to a recent Business Week article, “Business strategy is now the single most important management issue and will remain so for the next five years.” Strategy has gone in and out of fashion more often than “top‐down leadership.” But these days, corporations are searching for new avenues of growth to recover from the questionable restructuring caused by downsizing, reengineering, and other cost‐cutting measures. The common thread for businesses and political and consulting experts is that they all believe long‐term, sustained economic growth demands innovative, aggressive, actionable strategies. Strategic planning has become the crucial tool that can help steer companies in the right direction.

However, as the result of recent research, information has been accumulating which points to the fact that all anti‐rachitic agents are not utilised by the body in the same relative proportions. For instance, from the clinical standpoint it has been shown by Hess and his co‐workers (1933) that more anti‐rachitic units were required to prevent or cure rickets in children when ciosterol (irradiated ergosterol) was used than when cod liver oil was the method of administration. These clinical findings have found support from animal experiments. Thus, in work with chickens it was demonstrated that 100–200 times the number of units was required if irradiated ergosterol was used instead of cod liver oil.

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.

This study seeks to investigate the impact of firm reputation for service quality on customers' responses to service failures. Firm reputation is defined as customers' perceptions of how well a firm takes care of customers and is genuinely concerned about their welfare.

An experiment design methodology was utilized to test the conceptual model. The respondents were adult passengers waiting for flights at a major airport.

Overall, the findings revealed that excellent reputations provide firms with a “buffering effect”, insulating them from some of the negative consequences of failures. Firm reputation moderated the relationship between failure severity and satisfaction, lowered attributions of controllability and stability, and led to higher repurchase intentions following service failures. Attributions of controllability and stability were related only to repurchase intentions; satisfaction did not fully mediate these relationships.

A limitation is the use of an experimental methodology. Other methods would enhance the external validity of the findings.

The findings of this study provide compelling evidence that a firm's reputation can be one of its most important assets. Carefully building and maintaining this reputation is paramount for continued success in any industry, but especially important for service firms where failures are inevitable.

Very little research has examined the effects of firm reputation. This study contributes by testing the impact of firm reputation on customers' responses within a service failure context.

The number of investigations and investigators of vitamines seems to be increasing in geometric proportion, yet the sum total of our knowledge accumulates but little. The reason for this interest may be found in the unusual though well‐deserved concern aroused by the new light thrown on the all‐important problem of nutrition. Research has been stimulated as never before, and it is to be feared that workers have plunged ahead with great enthusiasm for the broader aspects of the subject and with but insufficient attention to the finer technical points. There is urgent need for more intensive and less extensive research if we are to arrive at a final understanding of the nature of the vitamines and their rôle in nutrition. A brief survey of the facts and a consideration of the present status of the subject may not be out of place.

As a result of the changes caused by the preparation of foods gradually passing out of the home into the hands of manufacturers, there has arisen an absolute need for a complete supervision of the public food supplies. A supervision which shall place some limit upon the substitution of cheaper and inferior methods and dangerous materials in place of the standard formerly used in our homes.

This chapter reconsiders commonly held views on the ownership and management of private property, contrasting capitalist and simple property, particularly in relation to how a firm shareholder governance model has shaped society. This consideration is motivated by the scale and scope of the modern global crisis, which has combined financial, economic, social and cultural dimensions to produce world disenchantment.

By contrasting an exchange value standpoint with a use value perspective, this chapter explicates current conditions in which neither the state nor the market prevail in organising economic activity (i.e. cooperative forms of governance and community-created brand value).

This chapter offers recommendations related to formalised conditions for collective action and definitions of common guiding principles that can facilitate new expressions of the principles of coordination. Such behaviours can support the development of common resources, which then should lead to a re-appropriation of the world.

It is necessary to think of enterprises outside a company or firm context when reflecting on the end purpose and means of collective, citizen action. From a methodological standpoint, current approaches or studies that view an enterprise as an organisation, without differentiating it from a company, create a deadlock in relation to entrepreneurial collective action. The absence of a legal definition of enterprise reduces understanding and evaluations of its performance to simply the performance by a company. The implicit shift thus facilitates the assimilation of one with the other, in a funnel effect that reduces collective projects to the sole projects of capital providers.

Because forsaking society as it stands is a radical response, this historical moment makes it necessary to revisit the ideals on which modern societies build, including the philosophy of freedom for all. This utopian concept has produced an ideology that is limited by capitalist notions of private property.

It has long been recognised that humans draw from a large pool of processing aids to help manage the everyday challenges of life. It is not uncommon to observe individuals adopting simplifying strategies when faced with ever increasing amounts of information to process, and especially for decisions where the chosen outcome will have a very marginal impact on their well-being. The transactions costs associated with processing all new information often exceed the benefits from such a comprehensive review. The accumulating life experiences of individuals are also often brought to bear as reference points to assist in selectively evaluating information placed in front of them. These features of human processing and cognition are not new to the broad literature on judgment and decision-making, where heuristics are offered up as deliberative analytic procedures intentionally designed to simplify choice. What is surprising is the limited recognition of heuristics that individuals use to process the attributes in stated choice experiments. In this paper we present a case for a utility-based framework within which some appealing processing strategies are embedded (without the aid of supplementary self-stated intentions), as well as models conditioned on self-stated intentions represented as single items of process advice, and illustrate the implications on willingness to pay for travel time savings of embedding each heuristic in the choice process. Given the controversy surrounding the reliability of self-stated intentions, we introduce a framework in which mixtures of process advice embedded within a belief function might be used in future empirical studies to condition choice, as a way of increasingly judging the strength of the evidence.

This chapter aims at providing an understanding of the research and devlopment (R&D) process in the pharmaceutical industry, by exploring the methodological challenges and approaches in the assessment of the determinants of innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. It (i) discusses possible methodological approaches to model occurrence of events; (ii) describes in detail competing risks duration models as the best methodological option in light of the nature of pharmaceutical R&D processes and data; (iii) concludes with an estimation strategy and overview of potential covariates that have been found to correlate with the likelihood of failure of R&D pharmaceutical projects.

This paper aims to examine the joint effect of the focal customer’s gender and fellow customer’s gender in influencing voice complaint intentions and intention to convey negative word of mouth (NWOM).

Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two dining conditions (same-gender fellow customer vs opposite-gender fellow customer). Their intention to voice a complaint and to spread NWOM were measured after reading a scenario describing a service failure. A 2 (focal customer gender: male vs female) × 2 (fellow customer: same gender vs opposite gender) between-subjects quasi-experimental design was conducted to test the hypotheses.

The results demonstrate that female customers’ voice complaint intentions were significantly higher when a fellow customer’s gender was female rather than male. In contrast, regardless of the fellow customer’s gender, no significant differences in voice complaint intentions were found among male customers. The results further indicate that voice complaint intentions mediate the impact of a fellow customer’s gender on intention to spread NWOM among female customers. However, both female and male participants show equally high levels of voice complaint intentions in the context of fine-dining restaurant.

This study broadens the understanding of customer complaining behavior and also provides insights to practitioners on how to manage customers who are in same- and mixed-gender situations.

This research extends the literature on agency–communal theory and complaining behaviors by examining the role of a fellow customer’s gender influencing the focal customer’s intentions to voice complaints and to spread NWOM.