Transacting Expertise in Emergency Management and Response

In this paper we extend transactive memory systems (TMS) theory to develop an understanding of the distributed coordination of expertise in high-reliability organizations. We illustrate our conceptual developments in a study of emergency management and response in Greece. We focus on the interaction between operators/dispatchers, ambulance crew, and specialist doctors, including the information and communication technologies (ICT) they use to respond to emergency incidents. Our case contributes to an in-depth understanding of the ways in which high-reliability organizations can sustain a distributed coordination of expertise over the duration of emergency incidents. This is achieved through the cultivation of TMS during a socialization and training period, the dynamic development of trust in emergent actions, and a commitment to shared protocols, which allow for improvisation and bricolage during unexpected incidents. Our findings also explore the role of ICTs in inscribing TMS in computerized protocols, while mediating the development of trust across the team, as well as mediating the construction of running narratives, which enable leaders to coordinate expertise in unexpected incidents

Where Everybody Knows Your Name: Extraorganizational Clan-Building as Small Firm Strategy for Home Field Advantage

Small firms are comparatively resource disadvantaged when it comes to competing against scale-oriented competitors. However, one area where small firms may have a differential advantage is in building and nurturing highly personalized customer relationships. Drawing on extant work in external market, internal hierarchical, and internal clan coordinating mechanisms, we conceptualize an additional coordinating  mechanism  the extraorganizational clan, and hypothesize its relationship to small firm performance. We test our hypothesis, linking extraorganizational clan-building and firm performance, on a sample of over 300 small retail firms. Our findings show that selected aspects of clan-building behaviors have a positive effect on small firm performance. We conclude by reflecting on what our findings suggest for sustainable small firm competitive advantage

Risks and Risk Management in Agri-food Chains

Abstract. Risks management studies in the agri-food sector predominately focus on the technical methods and the capability to perceive, prevent, mitigate, and recover from diverse risks. In most economic publications the risks are usually studied as another commodity regulated by the market supply and demand, and the farmers “willingness to pay” for an insurance contract modeled. At the same time, the risk management analysis largely ignore a significant “human nature” based (bounded rationality, opportunism) risk, critical factors for the managerial choice such as the institutional environment and the transaction costs, and diversity of alternative (market, private, collective, public, hybrid) modes of risk management. This paper incorporates the interdisciplinary New Institutional Economics and presents a comprehensive framework for analyzing the risk management in the agri-food sector. First, it specifies the diverse (natural, technical, behavioral, economic, policy etc.) type of agri-food risks, and the market, private, public and hybrid modes of their management. Second, it defines the efficiency of risk management and identifies (personal, institutional, dimensional, technological, natural) factors of governance choice. Third, it presents stages in the analysis of risk management and for the improvement of public intervention in the risk governance. Forth, it identifies the contemporary opportunities and challenges for the risk governance in the agri-food chain. Finally, it identifies challenges, assesses efficiency, and present responses of the agri-food risk management after the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan in March 2011.Keywords. Agri-food chain and risk management, Market, Private and public governance, Fukushima nuclear disaster.JEL. Q10, Q56, R33

Of Predatory Lending and the Democratization of Credit: Preserving the Social Safety Net of Informality in Small-Loan Transactions

53 Am. U. Int\u27l L. Rev. 1217 (2004)

Advancing Community Development and Public Policy Through an MIS-Enhanced Network

Effective community development requires the establishment of links among multiple organizations and institutions. How well the network functions depend on the specificity and accuracy of the information exchanged. In this paper, we illustrate how the introduction of a management information system (MIS) to a network of economic development programs across the United States meets the diverse information needs of the multiple members and standardizes their communication. We discuss how the MIS, as a tool for community development, supports the collection and flow of information among network members, leading to expansion of the network. The success of this MIS-enhanced network is seen in changes in local, state, and federal policy. Lessons learned from this example can be applied to other community development initiatives

The Bank's balance sheet during the crisis

This article sets out how monetary policy implementation and liquidity provision during the financial crisis have affected the size and composition of the Bank of England’s balance sheet. It extends and updates a recent speech by Paul Fisher, Executive Director Markets, and describes the main components of the Bank’s balance sheet prior to and during the crisis.

The Question of Spectrum: Technology, Management, and Regime Change

There is general agreement that the traditional command-and-control regulation of radio spectrum by the FCC (and NTIA) has failed. There is no general agreement on which regime should succeed it. Property rights advocates take Ronald Coase's advice that spectrum licenses should be sold off and traded in secondary markets, like any other assets. Commons advocates argue that new technologies cannot be accommodated by a licensing regime (either traditional or property rights) and that a commons regime leads to the most efficient means to deliver useful spectrum to the American public. This article reviews the scholarly history of this controversy, outlines the revolution of FCC thinking, and parses the question of property rights vs. commons into four distinct parts: new technology, spectrum uses, spectrum management, and the overarching legal regime. Advocates on both sides find much to agree about on the first three factors; the disagreement is focused on the choice of overarching regime to most efficiently and effectively make spectrum and its applications available to the American public. There are two feasible regime choices: a property rights regime and a mixed licensed/commons regime subject to regulation. The regime choice depends upon four factors: dispute resolution, transactions costs, tragedies of the commons and anticommons, and flexibility to changing technologies and demands. Each regime is described and analyzed against these four factors. With regard to pure transactions costs, commons may hold an advantage but it appears quite small. For all other factors, the property rights regime holds very substantial advantages relative to the mixed regime. I conclude that the choice comes down to markets vs. regulation as mechanism for allocating resources.

Taking \u3ci\u3eSteel Seizure\u3c/i\u3e Seriously: The Iran Nuclear Agreement and the Separation of Powers

This Article examines the constitutional validity of President Obama’s decision, as part of his 2015 agreement with Iran, effectively to repeal seventeen different sanctions provisions for the fifteen-year life of the agreement. Although Congress had legislated extensively in this area, the President effected this change by entering into a “nonbinding political agreement” with Iran and by aggregating individual waiver provisions in the sanctions laws into an across-the-board waiver of sanctions. We argue that the commitments made by the President in the Iran agreement violate a fundamental separation-of-powers limit on executive power—what we term the Steel Seizure principle,” after Youngstown—the Steel Seizure case. As the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed in Steel Seizure, the President does not have lawmaking power even where national security and foreign relations concerns are at stake. A vast literature has grown around Steel Seizure, especially its influential concurring opinion by Justice Robert Jackson. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the majority view of the Justices that President Truman’s seizure order was unlawful not because it contravened any express statutory prohibition but because it flouted the congressional “plan” for addressing the particular policy issue. This aspect of Steel Seizure highlights what is particularly problematic about President Obama’s decision to aggregate authorities in the sanctions laws and to commit the United States to an across-the-board waiver of nuclear-related sanctions pursuant to his agreement with Iran. President Obama treated the waiver provisions as an invitation to end the congressionally prescribed sanctions regime for addressing Iran’s nuclear weapons program and to replace it with his own nonsanctions regime for addressing the same issue. Yet the President lacks the unilateral power to overturn Congress’s prescribed policy and to replace it with his own.The President can be viewed both as an agent and, particularly in the foreign relations area, as a co-principal with Congress. The Steel Seizure principle highlights the limits of the co-principal conception of the President’s role in foreign affairs. Once Congress has developed a legislative framework for a subject matter, that framework occupies the field; the President’s role becomes one of a responsible agent. In the Iran sanctions laws, Congress provided bounded waiver authority, acting responsibly to allow limited executive discretion rather than requiring the President to seek new legislation each time flexibility was needed. It did not, however, invite the President to override the sanctions framework altogether. An emergent literature in administrative law and U.S. foreign relations law has praised Congress’s willingness to delegate waiver authority to the President for providing needed flexibility and other policy benefits. Yet that literature recognizes that the President’s exercise of waiver authority must be carefully circumscribed to avoid enabling the President effectively to revise a statutory regime out of disagreement with Congress’s policy choices. Such limiting principles are no less necessary in the foreign affairs context, where President Obama used purported waiver authority in the Iran sanctions statutes to pursue his own policy in defiance of Congress