Ownership of co-creation assets: driving B2B value propositions in the service economy

The benefits of specialization have been driving the rise of the service economy and pushing capability frontiers and economic growth. In service economies, almost any activity, asset, and skill can be bought on competitive markets, making it harder to build competitive advantage on any of those inputs. Against that background, the question emerges what constitutes sustainable value propositions of service providers. Drawing on an emerging stream of research on the non-ownership value of services, we argue that service providers create value by taking on ownership of service assets and thereby transform uncertainty of value creation into economic opportunities. In our view, service providers offer the essential value proposition of transforming their clients’ uncertainty downsides into opportunities related to assets such as vehicles, real estate, equipment and computing platforms. Clients benefit by delegating ownership of assets to the domain of a service provider. In turn, clients can focus their investment on their most promising assets. Service providers create sustainable competitive advantage by assuming ownership and excelling at the management of (a) unique physical assets, (b) unique intangible assets and (c) maintaining an appropriate architecture of social capital through customer relationships and business ecosystems

Translation Zone(s): A Stuttering: An Experiential Approach to Linguistic Hospitality

This essay outlines the potential of artistic research for engaging audiences in cultural literacy and linguistic hospitality, which according to Paul Ricoeur occurs “where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home” (10). It builds upon Emile Benveniste’s (1969) and Jacques Derrida’s (1997, 2000) transcultural etymological investigation of hospitality which is central to Alison Phipps’ ethical, socially oriented ethnographic praxis. Focusing on the use of a sensory and reflexive methodology in Translation Zone(s): A Stuttering, a participatory arts research project-developed during an Arts and Humanities Research Council Cultural Engagement Fellowship-this essay aims to extol the value of adopting an experimental approach to language, to embrace “not knowing” as a constructive methodological strategy and to extend the scope of research within this area to encompass other epistemological fields. The project is recontexualised in the aftermath of the United Kingdom’s EU referendum (2016) and looks towards the possibilities that the affective nature of art affords, considering how it could be used to encourage a critical debate about language and counteract the increasingly nationalist rhetoric and identity politics associated with being a native English speaker

The decline in the wage share: falling bargaining power of labour or technological progress? Industry-level evidence from the OECD

We investigate whether the downward trend in the wage share is driven by technological change or a decline in labour’s bargaining power. We present an econometric analysis using industry-level data for 14 OECD countries for the 1970-2014 period and test whether the determinants of the wage share differ between manufacturing and service industries, between workers of different skill groups and across countries with different bargaining regimes. Our findings suggest that the wage share declined due to a fall in labour’s bargaining power driven by offshoring to developing countries and changes in labour market institutions such as union density, social government expenditure and minimum wages. In contrast, the effect of technological change is not robust. While we find evidence for a negative effect on medium-skilled workers, our results cast doubt on the hypothesis of skill-biased technological change

Job protection legislation and productivity growth in OECD countries

"We examine the effect of dismissal regulation on productivity in the OECD, using annual cross-country aggregate data on the stringency of employment protection legislation and industry-level data on productivity from 1982 to 2003. Our empirical results suggest that mandatory dismissal regulations have a depressing impact on productivity growth in industries where layoff restrictions are more likely to be binding. By contrast, we find no evidence of a productivity effect of regulations concerning temporary contracts, which suggests that partial reforms, facilitating the use of fixed-term and atypical contracts, are unlikely to have an important impact on efficiency and technological change and cannot therefore be a substitute for comprehensive reforms whereby dismissal restrictions for open-ended contracts are also weakened." Copyright (c) CEPR, CES, MSH, 2009.