Parent Organizing as a Strategy for Sustainable Policy Change

In this issue of Making the Link, Ada Sanchez and Ron White of the Peppercorn Foundation discuss parent organizing as a strategy for sustainable policy change and recommend steps funders can take to learn more and take effective action to nurture and support parent organizing on the local, state and national level

Does Sport Matter?: An Analysis Of The Personality Of Sport

This paper examines the intrinsic characteristics of sport and reaffirms the idea that celebrity endorsers bring more to the endorsement process than just their personal qualities. This idea was previously proposed by McCracken (1989) in his transfer of meaning theory. The importance of this research lies in the fact that given the risks associated with celebrity endorsement, marketers must be aware of all factors that influence consumers’ evaluations of the celebrity endorsement. The proposition therefore is that an athlete’s sport is a factor that influences consumers’ celebrity endorsement evaluations. In other words the athlete and his sport cannot be separated

Cara a cara ante los limites del conocimiento

¿Puede el ser humano asimilar la larga lista de importantes hallazgos científicos que se suceden cada día? ¿Como puede asumir éticamente tal vértigo? ¿Se puede pensar sin estar atento a avances como la secuenciación del Genoma Humano o la ingeniería genética? Los profesores José Manuel Sánchez Ron, catedrático de Historia de la Ciencia de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, y Francisco García Olmedo, catedrático de Biología Molecular de la Universidad Politécnica, hablan sobre estos interrogantes en un momento en el que se cuestionan valores asumidos durante milenios. Ambos publican estos días, respectivamente, El futuro es un país tranquilo (Espasa) y Entre el placer y la necesidad (Crítica)

A Scientific Critique of the Resource-Base View (RBV) in Strategy Theory, with Competence-Base Remedies for the RBV’s Conceptual Deficiencies and Logic Problems

Part I of this paper applies the principles of the philosophy of science and the derived scientific method to analyze the foundational concepts and core proposition of the Resource-Based View (RBV) as popularized by Barney (1986, 1991, 1997). This analysis identifies seven fundamental conceptual deficiencies and logic problems in Barney’s conceptualization of "strategically valuable resources” and in Barney’s VRIO framework for identifying strategically valuable resources that can be sources of sustained competitive advantage. Three problems -- the Value Conundrum, the Tautology Problem in the Identification of Resources, and the Absence of a Chain of Causality -- relate to the RBV’s and VRIO’s failure to provide an adequate conceptual basis for identifying strategically valuable resources. The Uniqueness Dilemma, the Cognitive Impossibility Dilemma, and an Asymmetry in Assumptions about Resource Factor Markets result in an inability of the VRIO framework to support identification of resources that can be sources of sustained competitive advantage. More fundamentally, the core proposition of the RBV – that resources that are strategically valuable, rare, inimitable, and organizationally embedded are sources of sustainable competitive advantage – is argued to result directly in the Epistemological Impossibility Problem that precludes use of the scientific method in RBV research. This paper argues that until these conceptual deficiencies and logic problems are recognized and remedied, the RBV – in spite of its current popularity -- is and will remain theoretically sterile and incapable of contributing in any systematic way to the development of strategy theory. Part II of this paper then suggests how foundational concepts developed within the competence perspective on strategy provide essential remedies for the identified deficiencies and problems in the RBV -- and thereby provide a more conceptually adequate basis for representing the nature of firms in the scientific study of their interactions and competitive outcomes

A Systemic Approach for Modeling and Analysis of Coopetition

Coopetition has been defined as an approach to managing that combines competition and cooperation. Coopetition transcends the traditional paradigms of competition and cooperation in an effort to achieve the advantages of both. As an inter-organizational relationship which is of a higher complexity than cooperation between non competitors, coopetition presents challenges both for business managers and researchers in the strategy field. In this paper we present a systemic approach to modeling and to the analysis of coopetition between firms in a business environment that can contribute to our understanding of the strategic incentives and processes for enterprises to engage in a coopetitive relationship. Our approach comprises a modeling technique called Systemic Enterprise Architecture Method (SEAM) that incorporates conceptualizations from competence-based management (CBM) theory. We illustrate our approach by applying it to the case of Amazon.com’s coopetitive strategies

Towards a Reverse Mirroring Hypothesis

This paper elaborates important systemic interrelationships between firms' strategic choices of product architectures and organization architectures, and between firms' architectural choices and the industry structures and competitive/cooperative dynamics that emerge in an industry. We formalize a "Reverse Mirroring Hypothesis" suggesting that organizational architectures desired by firms influence their choices of product architectures. We embed firms' strategic architectural decisions in a co‐evolutionary model linking product market evolution, firms' architectural choices, and industry evolution. We invoke both transaction costs and capabilities perspectives to suggest how firms' assessments of their relative potential for capturing gains from specialization versus gains from trade influence their strategic architectural choices. We develop concepts of architectural commonality, architectural specificity, industry standard architectures, and firmspecific architectures to analyze strategic implications of firms' architectural choices

A Framework to Model and Analyze the WHY and the HOW of Coopetition

Coopetition has been defined as an approach to managing that combines competition and cooperation. It transcends the traditional paradigms of competition and cooperation in an effort to achieve the advantages of both. As an inter-organizational relationship that is of a higher complexity than either simple competition or cooperation, coopetition presents both conceptual and practical challenges for business managers and researchers in the strategy field. In this paper we present a systemic approach to modeling coopetition between firms that provides a methodology for analyzing the strategic incentives for enterprises to engage in coopetition relationships and the organization design required to address the complexities inherent in such multi-faceted relationships. Our approach comprises a modeling technique called Systemic Enterprise Architecture Method (SEAM) that incorporates important conceptualizations adapted from competence based management (CBM) theory. We illustrate our approach by applying it to the case coopetition between IBM and Apple in the development of PowerPC CPU

The SWISS-2DPAGE database: what has changed during the last year

Swiss-2DPAGE (http://www.expasy.ch/ch2d/) is an annotated two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (2-D PAGE) database established in 1993. The current release contains 21 reference maps from human and mouse biological samples, as well as from Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Escherichia coli and Dictyostelium discoideum origin. These reference maps now have 2480 identified spots, corresponding to 528 separate protein entries in the database, in addition to virtual entries for each SWISS-PROT sequence. During the last year, the SWISS-2DPAGE has undergone major changes. Six new maps have been added, and new functions to access the data have been provided through the ExPASy server. Finally, an important change concerns the database funding sourc

Determining highway corridors

In the highway development process, the first planning stage is that of selecting a corridor along which the highway is to pass. Highway corridor selection represents a multicriteria decision process in which a variety of social, enviromental and economic factors must be evaluated and weighted for a large number of corridor alternatives. This paper proposes a demand-based approach to provide a set of potential corridors. The problem is formulated as a continuous location model which seeks a set of optimal corridors with respect to the demand of potential users while satisfying budget constraints. This model uses geographical information in order to estimate the length-dependent costs (such as pavement and construction cost) and the cost of earth movement. A procedure for finding the best local minima of the optimization model is proposed. This method is tested using the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm, two algorithms of the Simulated Annealing type and the Simplex Nedelmar method. An application using the Castilla-La Mancha\s geographic database is presented