Contracts, relationships and innovation in business-to-business exchanges

Purpose: – This paper aims to contrast two approaches to the study of contracts in business and industrial marketing: first, as a legal document in shaping at the outset exchanges and interactions, for instance in projects; and second, as relational norms in becoming integrated into a business relationship through interactions, for instance as a resource. Design/methodology/approach: – The paper draws on cross-case comparison of three projects, as actors develop an engineering service for optimizing the maintenance of large-scale capital equipment by analyzing real-time data from sensors and user records. Comparison is by coding interview and observational data as micro-sequences of interactions among actors. Findings: – Preparing contracts allows a project to commence and is an early form of interaction, intensifying new relationships or cutting into and recasting established ones. Relational norms augment and can supersede the early focus on the contract, thus incorporating incremental innovation and absorbing some uncertainties. Research limitations/implications: – The research approach benefits from detailed comparison and captures some variety across its three cases, but the discussion is limited to theoretical generalization. Practical implications: – The analysis and discussion highlights and focuses on when different approaches to understanding contracting are more apparent across durable business relationships. Transitions from a contractual document to a view of relational norms are subtle, vulnerable and not always made successfully. Originality/value: – This paper’s originality is in it comparison of overlapping approaches to understanding businesses’ uses of contacts in business and industrial marketing, of contract and relational norms. It develops a valuable research proposition, in the transition from a mainly contractual to a mainly relational uses of contracts, thus identifying contract as a particular business resource, to be deployed and embedded

Socioeconomic status and neural processing of a go/no-go task in preschoolers: an assessment of the P3b

While it is well established that lower socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with poorer executive functioning (EF), how SES relates to the neural processing of EF in childhood remains largely unexplored. We examined how household income and parent education related to amplitudes of the P3b, an event-related potential component, during one EF task. We assessed the P3b, indexing inhibition and attention allocation processes, given the importance of these skills for academic success. Children aged 4.5-5.5 years completed a go/no-task, which assesses inhibitory control and attention, while recording EEG. The P3b was assessed for both go trials (indexing sustained attention) and no-go trials (indexing inhibition processes). Higher household income was related to larger P3b amplitudes on both go and no-go trials. This was a highly educated sample, thus results indicate that P3b amplitudes are sensitive to household income even within the context of high parental education. Findings build on the behavioral literature and demonstrate that SES also has implications for the neural mechanisms underlying inhibition and attention processing in early childhood.Published versio

Generating potentials via difference equations

The condition for pressure isotropy, for spherically symmetric gravitational fields with charged and uncharged matter, is reduced to a recurrence equation with variable, rational coefficients. This difference equation is solved in general using mathematical induction leading to an exact solution to the Einstein field equations which extends the isotropic model of John and Maharaj. The metric functions, energy density and pressure are well behaved which suggests that this model could be used to describe a relativistic sphere. The model admits a barotropic equation of state which approximates a polytrope close to the stellar centre.Comment: 11 pages, To appear in Math. Meth. Appl. Sc

Knowledge Creating Routines: Dialogical Exchanges to Guide Repertoires of Potential Action

We substantiate how generative routines, from a dialogical exchange perspective, guide repertoires of potential actions. Research on generative and emergent qualities of organisational routines, and their ability to assist actors arriving at new distinctions in practice, remains underdeveloped. Researchers have established that routines have the qualities of being generative, emergent and producers of ideas. Recent contributions argue for a dialogical approach to creating new organisational knowledge. This paper further develops the explanatory power of routines by combining dialogical exchanges within the ostensive-performative theory of routines. We examine the power of dialogical exchanges using words, understood as imaginal others within schemas, and text within artifacts, as a basis for a processual view appropriate for studying ‘knowledge creating’. We analyse data from a multi-level analysis in a university-industry context crossing the theory-practice divide. We find that words and texts within productive dialogical exchanges are influenced and shaped by perceived quality and presence of central artifacts and imaginal others. When they coalesce and are intertwined they coordinate guidance in routines. The combination and recombination of these assemblages coalesce and guide repertoires of potential actions. Through this we gain an improved understanding of generative routines and in turn how knowledge creating occurs

History matters: on the mystifying appeal of Bowles and Gintis

Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis have made a broad and sustained contribution to many areas of contemporary economic thought and policy discussions, centring on human interactions in economic settings. Since the mid-1980s, their work, collectively and individually, has developed from a concern with contested exchanges to analyses of behavioural repertoires pursued through evolutionary game theory in which they claim that ‘history matters’. Despite their alignment with the mainstream, they retain an appeal to some heterodox economists. We argue that this appeal is misplaced. Their theoretical work and knowledge claims rest on methodological individualism and equilibrium reasoning, which fosters an obtuse reductionism. They present a confused methodology, which seems to be motivated by a desire to remain coherent to standard economics. We show how their acceptance of methodological individualism and ergodic modelling undermines their knowledge claims as well as their declaration that history matters in their analysis

Inversion of circular means and the wave equation on convex planar domains

We study the problem of recovering the initial data of the two dimensional wave equation from values of its solution on the boundary \partial \Om of a smooth convex bounded domain \Om \subset \R^2. As a main result we establish back-projection type inversion formulas that recover any initial data with support in \Om modulo an explicitly computed smoothing integral operator \K_\Om. For circular and elliptical domains the operator \K_\Om is shown to vanish identically and hence we establish exact inversion formulas of the back-projection type in these cases. Similar results are obtained for recovering a function from its mean values over circles with centers on \partial \Om. Both reconstruction problems are, amongst others, essential for the hybrid imaging modalities photoacoustic and thermoacoustic tomography.Comment: [14 pages, 2 figures

The performativity of sustainability: making a conduit a marketing device

This paper examines how a conduit, as a ‘working infrastructure’ with material and social qualities, shapes and connects the business and practices of sustainable waste management. Conduits have had a prominent but passive role in explanations of food leftovers within households. We show that a conduit, as an assemblage of investments and practices among interested actors, requires and allows for the further economisation and calculation of waste management. Conduits shape business-to-business exchanges and relationships, deriving demand across domains of exchange and managing risks to the continuation of industrial processes. They resist singular stewardship, instead allowing multiple actors to recognise their interdependence and contest the development of facilities and services. Marketing communications form an important dimension of the conduit, albeit distributed across different parts of the conduit, in aligning actors’ practices of sorting and ‘moving things along’ at and between locations