7,445 research outputs found

    Sunk costs and the dynamics of creative industries

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    This chapter examines the long-run evolution of modern entertainment industries such as the film and music industries. It investigates ways to conceptualise and quantify the subsequent waves of creative destruction, and investigates specifically how sunk costs affect the evolution of the industry through its interaction with variety, market integration, product differentiation and price discrimination, and how old entertainment formats almost never became extinct. It finds that within this framework, four economic tendencies shaped the entertainment industries evolution: first, endogenous sunk costs often led to a competitive escalation of production expenditures, which we call ‘quality races’, which increased industrial concentration. Second, the fact that marginal revenues largely equalled marginal profits led to extreme vertical integration through ownership or revenue-sharing contracts, as well as to an oversupply of variety and a dual market structure with high-concept blockbuster products and low-budget niche products. Third, entertainment’s public good characteristics led to substantial income inequality among creative inputs and business models optimising exclusion possibilities in the value chain. Finally, the project-based character of entertainment production implied large intra- and inter-industry agglomeration benefits and often led to geographical concentration. Dynamic product differentiation allowed various old formats to survive the waves of creative destruction, albeit in much smaller incarnations

    Avoiding obscure topics and generalising findings produces higher impact research

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    Much academic research is never cited and may be rarely read, indicating wasted effort from the authors, referees and publishers. One reason that an article could be ignored is that its topic is, or appears to be, too obscure to be of wide interest, even if excellent scholarship produced it. This paper reports a word frequency analysis of 874,411 English article titles from 18 different Scopus natural, formal, life and health sciences categories 2009-2015 to assess the likelihood that research on obscure (rarely researched) topics is less cited. In all categories examined, unusual words in article titles associate with below average citation impact research. Thus, researchers considering obscure topics may wish to reconsider, generalise their study, or to choose a title that reflects the wider lessons that can be drawn. Authors should also consider including multiple concepts and purposes within their titles in order to attract a wider audience

    Pluralism in the Market of Science? A citation network analysis of economic research at universities in Vienna.

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    Pluralism has become a central issue not only in the public discourse but also in heterodox economics, as the focus on impact factors and rankings based on citations continues to increase. This marketization of science has been an institutional vehicle for the economic mainstream to promote its ideas. Citations thus have become a central currency in economics as a discipline. At the same time they allow to investigate patterns in the discourse. Analyzing articles published by the two major economics departments and the more interdisciplinary Department for Socioeconomics in Vienna, this paper is novel in applying both bibliometric techniques and citation network analysis on the department level. We find that (1) Articles in heterodox journals strongly reference the economic mainstream, while the mainstream does not cite heterodox journals, (2) Articles written by researchers of the Department of Socioeconomics cite more heterodox journals irrespective of whether they are published in mainstream or heterodox journals, (3) The economics departments display a citation network exhibiting a clear "mainstream core - heterodox periphery" structure, as Dobusch & Kapeller (2012b) suggest the overall discourse in economics to be, while the Department of Socioeconomics could be described as a plural though not pluralistic department with many distinct modules in the network , reflecting various disciplines, topics and schools of thought. (authors' abstract)Series: Ecological Economic Paper

    Words by the tail : assessing lexical diversity in scholarly titles using frequency-rank distribution tail fits

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    This research assesses the evolution of lexical diversity in scholarly titles using a new indicator based on zipfian frequency-rank distribution tail fits. At the operational level, while both head and tail fits of zipfian word distributions are more independent of corpus size than other lexical diversity indicators, the latter however neatly outperforms the former in that regard. This benchmark-setting performance of zipfian distribution tails proves extremely handy in distinguishing actual patterns in lexical diversity from the statistical noise generated by other indicators due to corpus size fluctuations. From an empirical perspective, analysis of Web of Science (WoS) article titles from 1975 to 2014 shows that the lexical concentration of scholarly titles in Natural Sciences & Engineering (NSE) and Social Sciences & Humanities (SSH) articles increases by a little less than 8% over the whole period. With the exception of the lexically concentrated Mathematics, Earth & Space, and Physics, NSE article titles all increased in lexical concentration, suggesting a probable convergence of concentration levels in the near future. As regards to SSH disciplines, aggregation effects observed at the disciplinary group level suggests that, behind the stable concentration levels of SSH disciplines, a cross-disciplinary homogenization of the highest word frequency ranks may be at work. Overall, these trends suggest a progressive standardization of title wording in scientific article titles, as article titles get written using an increasingly restricted and crossdisciplinary set of words

    Clusters and industrial districts: where is the literature going? Identifying emerging sub-fields of research

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    Ingenio Working Paper SeriesThe industrial district and cluster literature has generated an extraordinary quantity of articles, debates, and topics for discussion, and encompasses one of the most vibrant lines of research in the field of economics, geography, management and related disciplines. The literature, however, is fairly fragmented. In this paper, bibliometric methods are used to analyze cluster literature published between 1957 and 2014 in order to explore prospective research priorities through the method of bibliographic coupling. Beyond focusing on foundational works in the past, this approach shifts the focus away from the practice of analyzing co-citations and seminal contributions to one of looking at current and emerging trends in the literature. Using the ISI-Web of Knowledge (Web of Science) as a database, examination of two samples of 3,955 and 2,419 articles is made. Results reveal the existence of sub-fields of inquiry that are following their own particular research agendas, which remain distinct yet interconnected to one another.N

    Clusters and Industrial Districts: Where is the Literature Going? Identifying Emerging Sub-Fields of Research

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    This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Jose-Luis Hervas-Oliver, Gregorio Gonzalez, Pedro Caja & Francisca Sempere-Ripoll (2015) Clusters and Industrial Districts: Where is the Literature Going? Identifying Emerging Sub-Fields of Research, European Planning Studies, 23:9, 1827-1872, available online at: http://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2015.1021300[EN] The industrial district and cluster literature has generated an extraordinary quantity of articles, debates and topics for discussion, and encompasses one of the most vibrant lines of research in the field of economics, geography, management and related disciplines. The literature, however, is fairly fragmented. In this paper, “bibliometric” methods are used to analyse the cluster literature published between 1957 and 2014 in order to explore “prospective” research priorities through the method of “bibliographic coupling”. Beyond focusing on foundational works in the past, this approach shifts the focus away from the practice of analysing co-citations and seminal contributions to one of looking at current and emerging trends in the literature. Using the ISI Web of Knowledge (Web of Science) as a database, an examination of two samples of 3955 and 2419 articles is made. Results reveal the existence of sub-fields of inquiry that follow their own particular research agendas, which remain distinct yet interconnected to one another.We thank financial support from Ministerio de Economia, Spanish Government, through ECO2010: 17318 Innoclusters.Hervás Oliver, JL.; González, G.; Caja Meri, P.; Sempere-Ripoll, F. (2015). Clusters and Industrial Districts: Where is the Literature Going? Identifying Emerging Sub-Fields of Research. European Planning Studies. 23(9):1827-1872. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2015.1021300S1827187223

    The Past and Future of Evolutionary Economics : Some Reflections Based on New Bibliometric Evidence

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    This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Geoffrey M. Hodgson, and Juha-Antti Lamberg, ‘The past and future of evolutionary economics: some reflections based on new bibliometric evidence’, Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, first online 20 June 2016. The final publication is available at Springer via doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40844-016-0044-3 © Japan Association for Evolutionary Economics 2016The modern wave of ‘evolutionary economics’ was launched with the classic study by Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter (1982). This paper reports a broad bibliometric analysis of ‘evolutionary’ research in the disciplines of management, business, economics, and sociology over 25 years from 1986 to 2010. It confirms that Nelson and Winter (1982) is an enduring nodal reference point for this broad field. The bibliometric evidence suggests that ‘evolutionary economics’ has benefitted from the rise of business schools and other interdisciplinary institutions, which have provided a home for evolutionary terminology, but it has failed to nurture a strong unifying core narrative or theory, which in turn could provide superior answers to important questions. This bibliometric evidence also shows that no strong cluster of general theoretical research immediately around Nelson and Winter (1982) has subsequently emerged. It identifies developmental problems in a partly successful but fragmented field. Future research in ‘evolutionary economics’ needs a more integrated research community with shared conceptual narratives and common research questions, to promote conversation and synergy between diverse clusters of research.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

    Journal positioning meta-issues as evolving contexts: Organizational marketing at the crossroads

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    As Industrial Marketing Management (IMM) has completed 45 years of publication, Industrial Marketing Management: An Interorganizational Interdisciplinary Journal comes of age yet again. A description of the proliferation of journals and associated titles within cognate subfields is provided noting the societal forces creating this necessity. Relief is brought to the complexity and diversity of journals therein. The unit of analysis is that of an individual circumspect scholar viewing the journal mix landscape and its associated impact on their scholarship and career. Contexts and criteria are offered for sorting out this meta-dilemma that has been evolving since time immemorial. Peter J. LaPlaca's (PJL's) presence in our field and IMM is explicated with awe and appreciation. Closing thoughts are offered regarding our collective future and some criteria for getting there – the next interlude. The reader is invited to ascertain their unique scholarly path. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are used in the evaluation of the mere incidence of article outlets and the moderating effect on institutional and industry constraints as accelerated over the past 45 years. Industry sources that measure and monitor journal use and their activity are broadly and succinctly portrayed. Historical analyses of college business school education's evolution with the associated impact of these industrial forces for journal publishing are derived. A narrative describing the evolution in the quantity of journals and their proliferation is provided. The analysis is by definition contemporary yet retrospective, qualitative yet adductive. PJL's long-term contribution to the field is documented with awe and appreciation. Individual scholars are to know that their own acumen and that of those whom they may come to supervise are constrained yet enabled by the mere quantity of journal options and their inevitable domain enmeshment. The impact on education and the management thereof are noted in detail and associated sense making in the performance of our job. The analyses of the journals publishing provides a paradox of opportunity yet a twisted knot of options for any scholar requiring yet further criteria to untie. Over most of our career lifespans the data and analysis provided help contextualize the character of your scholarly journey. A glimpse into the evolution of research in the area of business-to-business marketing and its components over the last few decades helps magnify the positioning of the journals for prospective authors and would-be readers

    Service Development as Action Design Research: Reporting on a Servitized E-Recruiting Portal

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    In this paper we reflect retrospectively on an e-recruiting service design and development project action design research. The project itself pre-dated the publication of the Action Design Research Method by Sein, Henfridsson et al., (2011). When viewed as action design research, we find that many of the principles of ADR, such as defining the problem as an instance of a class of problem, practice inspired research, mutually influential roles and guided emergence are not only synergistic with service design, but in fact, the effective design of services embeds and requires a similar approach. To this extent, we considered ADR to be an appropriate choice for services research, development and implementation at the nexus of theory and practice. We further identified some extensions and elaborations to the ADR method in a service development context. In particular, we posit that guided emergence occurs between the theoretical foundations of a service project and the artefact development, as well as between the artefact development and the organizational context. We find that in a multi-disciplinary project, theoretical contributions may be emergent, and multiple theoretical contributions are possible using a range of different lenses. We also identify some practical difficulties with reporting the learning from service development projects. Overall, we found that ADR was likely to be a highly appropriate approach for framing and deriving learning from innovative service design projects, but may require further enhancement
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