20 research outputs found
Marketing Control in International Headquarters-Subsidiary Working Relationships of Industrial Goods Firms: The Role of Environmental Context
Abstract
The use of marketing and sales control mechanisms is a core management activity for multinational corporations. However, research on controlling marketing and sales of international subsidiaries is scarce. In particular, the influence of a firm’s
economic and cultural environment on different control mechanisms has not been thoroughly examined yet. In attempting to fill these gaps, we build on Jaworski’s
(J Mark 52:23–39, 1988) framework from a subsidiary perspective on marketing and sales controls, applied by the headquarters of medium-sized industrial goods corporations. Through a rival model analysis, we determine the impact of the local environmental context on marketing and sales control types exerted by headquarters on subsidiaries located in foreign countries. To analyze the proposed model, this
study deploys survey data of 184 subsidiaries from different industries and different European countries with headquarters in Switzerland. The results show that while environmental factors influence the marketing and sales control configurations, the effectiveness of marketing and sales controls is not contingent on environmental factors
Local Interstellar Neutral Hydrogen sampled in-situ by IBEX
Hydrogen gas is the dominant component of the local interstellar medium.
However, due to ionization and interaction with the heliosphere, direct
sampling of neutral hydrogen in the inner heliosphere is more difficult than
sampling the local interstellar neutral helium, which penetrates deep into the
heliosphere. In this paper we report on the first detailed analysis of the
direct sampling of neutral hydrogen from the local interstellar medium. We
confirm that the arrival direction of hydrogen is offset from that of the local
Helium component. We further report the discovery of a variation of the
penetrating Hydrogen over the first two years of IBEX observations.
Observations are consistent with hydrogen experiencing an effective ratio of
outward solar radiation pressure to inward gravitational force greater than
unity ({\mu}>1); the temporal change observed in the local interstellar
hydrogen flux can be explained with solar variability
The Dynamics of Brane-World Cosmological Models
Brane-world cosmology is motivated by recent developments in string/M-theory
and offers a new perspective on the hierarchy problem. In the brane-world
scenario, our Universe is a four-dimensional subspace or {\em brane} embedded
in a higher-dimensional {\em bulk} spacetime. Ordinary matter fields are
confined to the brane while the gravitational field can also propagate in the
bulk, leading to modifications of Einstein's theory of general relativity at
high energies. In particular, the Randall-Sundrum-type models are
self-consistent and simple and allow for an investigation of the essential
non-linear gravitational dynamics. The governing field equations induced on the
brane differ from the general relativistic equations in that there are nonlocal
effects from the free gravitational field in the bulk, transmitted via the
projection of the bulk Weyl tensor, and the local quadratic energy-momentum
corrections, which are significant in the high-energy regime close to the
initial singularity. In this review we discuss the asymptotic dynamical
evolution of spatially homogeneous brane-world cosmological models containing
both a perfect fluid and a scalar field close to the initial singularity. Using
dynamical systems techniques it is found that, for models with a physically
relevant equation of state, an isotropic singularity is a past-attractor in all
orthogonal spatially homogeneous models (including Bianchi type IX models). In
addition, we describe the dynamics in a class of inhomogeneous brane-world
models, and show that these models also have an isotropic initial singularity.
These results provide support for the conjecture that typically the initial
cosmological singularity is isotropic in brane-world cosmology.Comment: Einstein Centennial Review Article: to appear in CJ