Market empowerment - for six days only:an exploration of the empowerment of market actors to constitute, perform and dismantle

This paper explicates the enduring and permanent structures that empower market organisers to act as they shape the temporary markets of the Durga Puja festival in India. Market organisers invoke, create and assemble market devices that empower market actors to perform these temporary markets. Using a visual sociology methodology we show how organisers calculate and intervene to empower certain market actors - specifically, ‘those at the BoP’, as well as to disempower certain forms of action - the use of toxic substances in the production of the Durga icon. We show how sometimes market empowerment and disempowerment are sustained beyond the performance of the temporary market, transforming the community and environmental practices. In this way, the paper foregrounds the two-way relationship between broader social structures and the performance of temporary markets by showing how market practices sometimes spread out beyond the market and become part of the broader structures of everyday life

Market orientation and vertical de-integration: creating customer and company value

This thesis explores the relationship between a firm's supply chain and a firm's degree of market orientation and economic performance. The results suggest that certain types of supply chain design - in particular those models that make for close links with the firm's customers - lead to superior marketing and shareholder value. Two sets of environmental forces have been particularly influential in reshaping supply chains over recent years. One is the enormous growth in production capacity, especially in the Far East, which has lead to more industries operating with excess capacity. Production skills and resources were once seen as at the heart of a firm's core capabilities and the source of its competitive advantage. Today, in more and more sectors, the key skill is marketing - creating customer preference in oversupplied markets through branding and customer relationship management. Downstream activities in the supply chain have risen in prominence compared to upstream activities. The second change has been the information revolution brought about by the computer and the Internet. This has lowered the transaction costs of integrating the activities performed by the different businesses constituting a supply chain and made it increasingly attractive to achieve control without ownership. Supply chains can now become networks integrated through seamless in formation exchanges We explore these changes at the microeconomic level. The research draws upon the existing literature and on primary data including exploratory interviews, main-study in-depth interviews and survey data. Matched pair samples of 20 high performance and 20 low performance business units based in the UK provided the main body of data results. Data analysis involved four distinct phases; within case analysis and cross case analysis for the qualitative data collected; exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to identify dimensions of influence as a method of integration; discriminant analysis and Lambda to investigate the association between supply chain configuration typologies, market orientation and business performance. Two major contributions stem from this research. First, the interdisciplinary domain for supply chain configuration can be established. Whereas traditionally competitive advantage has been built through a focus on operations efficiency - streamlining processes to reduce cost, today increased communications, global markets and the speed at which Internet technologies are developing, demand and facilitate an additional perspective for supply chain management - the effectiveness perspective. The concept of effectiveness brings the subject of supply chain management from the sphere of operations management into the domain of marketing strategy. From this perspective the building, maintenance and management of customer relationships becomes central to the supply chain configuration. Highly efficient production processes, where fiercely protected technical know-how enables the delivery of superior quality products, no longer acts as a sustainable source of competitive advantage. To achieve this, firms must focus on two principle activities: building brand value and carefully fostering relationships with key customers. For firms positioned upstream in the supply chain, building a strong brand identity offers potentially a means to integrate downstream with both customers and consumers. The second contribution comes from the association of supply chain configuration with other variables. Our results show a relationship between market orientation, business performance and supply chain configuration. We conclude that companies are beginning to recognise opportunities that arise from using technology and information to blur traditional boundaries between suppliers, manufacturers and end users. We discuss how technology enables co-ordination across company boundaries to achieve new levels of efficiency and effectiveness, as well as extraordinary returns to investors. For example, a company, its suppliers, and even its customers might begin to share information and activities to speed the design of a product and raise the likelihood of its success in the marketplace. This should enable suppliers to begin developing components before the overall product design is complete, providing vital timely feedback regarding component specification, cost and time objectives. Equally, customers are able to review a product as it evolves and provide input on how it meets their needs. Managers must concern themselves with the design stages of the product and facilitate knowledge and information flows through the entire supply chain. Business seems to be on the threshold of a new era of inter-firm relationships. Supply chain customers sharing the same suppliers are able to provide leadership, encouraging shared distribution systems and payment/ordering systems. Over capacity in firms forces such considerations. Collaborative approaches can drive down costs and ultimately offer improved services for consumers, making available the goods they want, where and when they want them. But this configuration of an interconnected, interdependent supply network requires much more openness. Interfirm boundaries must become almost invisible. Trust, commitment, open communication and information sharing must permeate the culture of partnering firms. The sharing of real time customer information both within and between firms facilitates the reduction of inventory and increases speed to market, reducing risk and increasing cost savings. Customer information provides a sound basis for segmenting markets, allowing the understanding of customer needs to develop in a deeper way. This customer closeness gives access to information critical in aiding accurate forecasting which is central to the elimination of unnecessary costs and enabling firms to dramatically extend the value they deliver to customers thus creating competitive advantage. Shrinking the time and the resources it takes to meet customers' needs in a world where those needs are constantly changing is the challenge. As Wayne Gretzky, the famous hockey player explained, "the key to winning is getting first to where the puck is going next". The same could be said about succeeding in business. Listening to customers and then using and sharing this most valuable information resource throughout the supply chain will be the key

The Open Innovation Team:An Independent Evaluation of a Cabinet Office Initiative

The Cabinet Office Open Innovation Team (‘OIT’) was set up in 2016 to help Whitehall departments generate analysis and ideas by deepening collaboration with academics. In practice, this requires the OIT to engage deeply with the policy work of multiple departments, and the many academics who might be relevant and valuable to those policy makers. Through events, workshops, individual meetings, tailored reports and literature reviews, the OIT brings these new sources of academic expertise in to Whitehall to help shape government thinking. The OIT is relatively small, with four full time officials and a rotating group of PhD students on secondment from leading UK universities. Despite this size, the ability of the OIT to catalyse new relationships and knowledge sharing is already evident (see OIT reports to University partners). The OIT’s pilot phase ends in late 2018, and the team is now agreeing a second round of funding from university partners. These partners provide the financial resource to cover direct salary and operating expenses, whilst Cabinet Office covers location and infrastructure costs, making this a unique business model within government in terms of its funding approach and ways of working. This review captures insights from 14 months of academic research with the OIT, in order to: ▪ Make visible the promising practices developed by the OIT, giving stakeholders a greater understanding of its strategic choices, operating structures, and ways of creating value. ▪ Shape management practice within the OIT through our analysis and recommendations. ▪ Provide an evaluation of the OIT that yields actionable information for all stakeholders

‘That’s bang out of order, mate!’:Gendered and racialized micro-practices of disadvantage and privilege in UK business schools

The existence of gendered and racialized inequalities in academia has been well documented. To date, research has primarily addressed the intersectional disadvantages faced by members of minority groups with much less attention paid to the privileges experienced by dominant group members. This paper draws on 21 interviews and 36 audio‐diary entries completed by a diverse group of senior higher education leaders who have successfully navigated the career ladder in UK business schools. By juxtaposing minority with dominant group members' narratives, the study advances intersectionality research, offering a contextualized analysis of the micro‐practices of both disadvantage and privilege in academia. Through a focus on how micro‐practices perform differently for members of different groups, it foregrounds “obvious” as well as nuanced differences that contribute to the accumulation of disadvantage and privilege throughout an individual's career and emphasizes simultaneity as crucial to understanding the workings of gendered and racialized disadvantage and privilege

Markets, Infrastructrures and Infrastructuring Markets

Despite a growing understanding of market infrastructures - the rules and socio-material arrangements that enable agreements on the properties of goods, and the calculation of value, equivalence and exchange - we know little of what lies beneath the arrangements that underpin and are implicated in exchange. The socio-material lens has done much to explain how specific assemblages circulate information and goods, but has done little to explain how different infrastructures configure relations between dispersed market practices. Using the history of the development of the market for market research we show how knowledge-based infrastructures constitute markets as knowledge objects: new expertise emerged through alliances between academia, government, and private actors form a new occupation embodied in specialist agencies that set themselves up in an infrastructural relation to marketing practices. Our conceptualization of markets as knowledge objects extends extant understandings of markets by showing how: 1) extant knowledge-based infrastructures are drawn on to construct new markets; 2), infrastructural relations emerge between different markets to constitute multiple systems of provision and demand, leading to an increasingly valuable knowledge infrastructure; and 3) organized practices in one market are often heavily reliant on connections to other markets, including knowledge-based infrastructures such as market research services

Implementing Marketization in Public Healthcare Systems:Performing Reform in the English National Health Service

To implement marketization in public healthcare systems, policymakers need to situate abstract models of prescriptive practice in complex settings. Using a performativity lens we show how policy processes bring about the changes they presume. Investigating the implementation of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, and the development of a policy instruments and Clinical Commissioning Groups, we explicate the performance of a marketization programme. This longitudinal perspective on the interactions amongst the Act’s aims, the multiple constituencies the Act attempted to enrol and the existing socio-technical arrangements the Act aimed to change, generates three core contributions. We (1) characterise the performativity of policy instruments as a process of bricolage that incorporates the principled attitude of making do on both sides of the divide – those who design the policy and those who are charged to implement it; (2) identify the mechanisms through which the performativity of an envisioned model of marketization operates at multiple scales within a complex and highly distributed system of provision; and (3) document and explicate why specific performances result in misfires and unintended outcomes. Thus, we conceptualise policy performativity as a non-linear, dynamic process where theories and their effects are constantly being assessed and reconfigured

Managing to make markets:Marketization and the conceptualization work of strategic nets in the life science sector

Abstract This paper presents one of the first studies to identify and explain the marketization work of a strategic net. Through a study of the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst – a strategic net formed to support the marketization of Life Science Discoveries - we generate insights into the everyday work that makes marketization happen. Marketization is understood as the process that enables the conceptualisation, production and exchange of goods. Our findings focus on one specific form of marketization work found to be core to the strategic net: conceptualisation work. Three forms of conceptualisation work are identified: conceptualising actors' roles, conceptualising markets and conceptualising goods. These manifest as routinized, recursive practices. Our analysis reveals how these practices gather together multiple forms of scientific, technical and market knowledge to generate new market devices that transform market rules and conventions, and introduce new methods and instruments of valuation that change the market. In contrast to extant studies that claim a strategic net's activities influence markets; our findings position the conceptualisation work of the strategic net as constitutive of markets and the broader system of provision for ‘healthcare’ and ‘health futures’

MANY Project Toolkit for Community Engagement in Complex Projects:Lessons from a 5G Digital Infrastructure Project

This toolkit shares social science research insights from the MANY (Mobile Access North Yorkshire) project: working to put 5G connectivity infrastructures in place for very rural communities. The toolkit is designed to guide project managers and those in roles seeking to directly engage with communities in difficult and sometimes controversial projects. The toolkit is divided into three elements - themes (foundational elements for community engagement), principles (what community engagement is trying to achieve) and methods (how to achieve it). You can see how the Themes, Principles and Methods all fit together, ‘in a nutshell’, in the Toolkit Matrix (page 35) and how the methods are underpinned by the principles and themes. The toolkit is designed to help you use community engagement insights (themes, principles and methods) to shape your project, deliver real value, and put your own action plan in place