The ‘T-Shaped Buyer’: a transactional perspective on supply chain relationships

This paper challenges the normative view of interdependent buyer-seller relationships and provides a more holistic perspective of the contextual reality that shapes buyer behaviour. By proposing an innovative qualitative methodology, which focusses on boundary-spanning, pre-sales interactions, the research penetrates complex and commercially sensitive buyer-seller relationships. The longitudinal research design uses web-based diaries and follow-up interviews to explore conditions of power based interdependence between buyers and sellers. The ensuing data is mapped using qualitative content analysis and the results are aggregated graphically for assessment. Using this approach the study develops a nuanced view of the dominant patterns of buyer behaviour, and challenges the opinion that a search for competitive advantage will strengthen cooperative relationships in conditions of power based interdependence. The paper introduces the metaphor of the 'T-Shaped Buyer' to explain the empirical findings and, while acknowledging the contextual limits of the study, suggests that this metaphor may cause both academics and practitioners to reflect on normative thinking

STRUCTURAL DYNAMIC OF THE PUBLIC SECTOR AND MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE: BETWEEN HIERARCHIES, MARKET AND NETWORK FORMS

In the current economic, social and political context, the problem of the competitiveness reform in public sector lies in the assumption of strategic approaches focused on meeting the public interest, with the lowest cost for society. The philosophy management which governs public sector reform tends to create new paradigms and contributes to shaping a new way of thinking and behavior. Central idea of this paper is that the two dominant models of administration: bureaucracy and governance, provides a range of institutional opportunities but also raises a number of barriers to strategic approaches to emerging public sector. Bureaucracy is for example, criticized because the lack of prioritization skills and lack of goals and also because lacks to stimulate innovation in the public sector. Bureaucracy leads to uniformity, flattening of public services. Governance model contains a number of similarities with the strategic approach in the public sector, when we talk about networks, interdependence and self-organizing nature of public administration. The issue that we are trying reveal to your attention is that the current institutional conditions are more complex than two models mentioned are able to cover. These new demands require the types of organizational structures based on flexible, decentralized structure to replace the traditional centralized, which now is totally inapplicable. Institutional framework may, for example, to provide an opportunity for the New Public Management, but also create a barrier to governance.bureaucracy, governance, public policy, networks, multilevel governance.

Equity, Justice, Interdependence: Intergenerational Transfers and the Ageing Population

The increase in the ratio of the elderly to the working age population as the demographic transition of low fertility and low mortality proceeds, has spurred a discussion concerning the equity of intergenerational transfers. The central question is if and how the state can afford the pensions and healthcare costs for growing older populations, and who should carry the burden. To a large extent, focus has been on public transfers while neglecting private transfers within families. There is also an obvious tendency of considering the impact of ageing in terms of pensions while health care has gained a lot less attention. A gender approach shows to be fruitful in the analysis of the costs and benefits of intergenerational transfers.equity; justice; interdependence; intergenerational transfers; ageing population

Swimming the New Stream: The Disjunctions Between and Within Popular and Academic International Law

Öhlins CES Technologies in Jönköping have in the last 30 years been developing control valves for semi active suspension systems used in the car industry. The system, marketed by Öhlins under the brand name CES (Continuously controlled Electronic Suspension), enables a wide working range and ability to adapt to the current road conditions. By controlling  the valve in different ways there are also possibilities to decide on a specfic damper characteristic such as sport or comfort. The CES valve is working as a pilot controlled pressure regulator and is continuously controlled with help of an electro magnet. The CES valve is mounted in a uniflow damper which in turn guarantees the flow through the valve to go in only one direction independently ofdamper stroke direction. The rst part of the thesis investigates the damping characteristics in the latest model of the CES valve (i.e the CES8700). A simulation model is made to approximate the damping in the solenoid plunger. Questions that are answered are: How is damping dened, what creates damping in the valve, how large is the damping, what parameters aect the damping. The second part of the thesis investigates new and already prototyped damping concepts with help of simulation. This has been done in order to optimize the valve damping and in turn the damper performance. The simulation results show that the valve dynamics can be improved but often at the expense of a slower valve

Rising Powers and State Transformation: The Case of China

This article draws attention to the transformation of statehood under globalisation as a crucial dynamic shaping the emergence and conduct of ‘rising powers’. That states are becoming increasingly fragmented, decentralised and internationalised is noted by some international political economy and global governance scholars, but is neglected in International Relations treatments of rising powers. This article critiques this neglect, demonstrating the importance of state transformation in understanding emerging powers’ foreign and security policies, and their attempts to manage their increasingly transnational interests by promoting state transformation elsewhere, particularly in their near-abroad. It demonstrates the argument using the case of China, typically understood as a classical ‘Westphalian’ state. In reality, the Chinese state’s substantial disaggregation profoundly shapes its external conduct in overseas development assistance and conflict zones like the South China Sea, and in its promotion of extraterritorial governance arrangements in spaces like the Greater Mekong Subregion

Commercialising Australia's interstate rail freight transport: Some ownership and investment issues

The paper addresses the issues of rights of way ownership and application of consistent investment appraisal techniques across modes of transport. There are linkages between ownership, rights of way, competitive strategies and market contestability which will have a significant bearing on the choice of investment criteria used by commercialised railways. Investment methodologies in competing modes of land transport must be consistent. Investment in individual elements of railway infrastructure must be integrated with the overall cost recovery strategy of the operator. Major railway projects must be submitted to both financial and economic evaluation, so that the interests of individual railway authorities and the community are considered

The Liberty of Free Riders: The Minimum Coverage Provision, Mill’s “Harm Principle,” and American Social Morality

In this Article, the authors show that cost-shifting and adverse selection problems link the federalism dimension of the debate over the Affordable Care Act to the doctrinally separate and suppressed individual rights dimension. As the scope of these free-rider problems justifies federal power to require individuals to obtain health insurance coverage, so the very existence of the free-rider problems illuminates the difficulty of arguing directly — as opposed to indirectly through the Commerce Clause — that the minimum coverage provision infringes individual liberty. The interdependence between some people’s decisions to forgo insurance and the well-being of other people means that refusing insurance is far from being a purely self-regarding action. For reasons rooted in this interdependence, serious obstacles confront anyone who aims to establish that the liberty claims of free riders should be constitutionally or morally decisive. The authors identify these obstacles to recognition of the claimed liberty interest with help from law, economics, and philosophy. First, they show that an economic substantive due process objection to the minimum coverage provision is doctrinally unavailable. Indeed, its unavailability explains why opponents of the provision take the less straightforward doctrinal approach of recasting the Commerce Clause in libertarian terms. Second, we invoke the long-standing tradition of argument in economics that market failures justify government regulation. Finally, the authors draw from the “harm principle” of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Mill’s deep commitment to libertarianism, which reflects the same anti-authoritarian spirit that moves many libertarians today, does not condemn the minimum coverage provision. This is because Mill’s criterion categorically forbids only paternalism in law-making, and the provision is justified on non-paternalistic grounds. When the regulation under consideration is not paternalistic, Mill’s libertarianism points explicitly to law and social morality to resolve boundary questions about what members of a society owe one another. In our judgment, these considerations — from federal and state safety net programs to charitable hospital practices — weigh in favor of the permissibility of the minimum coverage provision

The Future of the Western World: The OECD and the Interfutures Project

In 1975, the OECD created a research committee entitled ‘Interfutures. Research project into the development of the advanced industrial societies in harmony with the developing world’. The purpose of Interfutures was to examine how the new tools of futures research could be put to use in order to shape strategies for dealing with a new phenomenon of ‘interdependence’, and to set out a ‘long-term vision’ of the Western world. This article argues that Interfutures was appointed in order to draft an alternative image of the future to two radical visions of the early 1970s. The first was the so-called New International Economic Order. The second was the 1972 Club of Rome report, The limits to growth. As a response to these two visions, Interfutures presented a vision of globalization as a process oriented around an expanding world market, piloted by Western interests and continued resource extraction