Meta-analyses of Post-acquisition Performance: Indications of Unidentified Moderators

Empirical research has not consistently identified antecedents for predicting post-acquisition performance. We employ meta-analytic techniques to empirically assess the impact of the most commonly researched antecedent variables on post-acquisition performance. We find robust results indicating that, on average and across the most commonly studied variables, acquiring firms’ performance does not positively change as a function of their acquisition activity, and is negatively affected to a modest extent. More importantly, our results indicate that unidentified variables may explain significant variance in post-acquisition performance, suggesting the need for additional theory development and changes to M&A research methods

Absenteeism in Remission: Planning, Policy, Culture

It has been estimated that employee absenteeism costs the U.S. economy on the order of $40 billion per year. Not surprisingly, great time and effort has been dedicated to research assessing the causes of employee absenteeism with the obvious goal of reducing its incidence in the workplace. It is argued in this article that much of this effort has been of virtually no practical value to the practicing manager. In fact, the prescriptions that would naturally arise from much of this research would almost certainly land managers in the lap of litigation in federal court. Two promising strategies —attention to absence policy and absence culture—are described in this article. Both have the advantage of practical application as well as a distinguished tradition in reducing absenteeism

New Directions in the Management of Employee Absenteeism: Attention to Policy and Culture

[Excerpt] Over one million American workers who are otherwise employed will not attend work on any given day: they will be absent. Given the expense and disruption associated with such widespread employee absenteeism, it will come as no surprise that a great deal of time has been spent to determine the causes of employee absenteeism and how its incidence might be reduced. Sadly, however, it has been concluded that the heavy investment of research effort on absenteeism has failed to generate significant dividends, whether one’s criterion is the prediction, explanation, or control of absence (Chadwick-Jones, Nicholson, & Brown, 1982). While prior absence research has not and does not serve the practicing manager very well, new research on employee absenteeism provides promising avenues for management. This chapter will provide an overview of the magnitude of the absenteeism problem and a rationale for why much of the earlier study of workplace absenteeism did not, as a practical matter, provide much information or direction to managers. Then the new directions in the management of absenteeism” will be examined

Corporate Governance in the Small Firm: Prescriptions for CEOS and Directors

Examinations of boards of directors of smaller corporations have been largely absent from the academic literature. This study addresses this void by examining several aspects of commonly prescribed board configurations for entrepreneurial (high growth) and small (stable growth ) corporations. Specifically, we address board composition and board leadership structure, as well as the impact of officer and director stock holdings and institutional holdings. Stepwise multiple regression analysis  reveals  that  these  governance   variables significantly  add  to  the  explanation of financial performance for both sets of firms. The implications of these findings for Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and boards of directors are discussed

The Relationship Between Minority Business Enterprises and Corporate Purchasing Personnel: Perceptions from Both Sides of the Table

This paper addresses the nature of the difficulties MBEs face when conducting business with large companies through MBE purchasing programs. Data collected from MBEs and purchasing personnel were analyzed with logistic regression to demonstrate that MBEs and their corporate purchasing counterparts have different perceptions across human, environmental, and organizational dimensions of transaction cost economics. These differences help to explain the problems: (1) that MBEs have in selling to large companies and the problems that MBEs and purchasing personnel have in implementing MBE purchasing programs; (2) of reaching agreement in the marketplace; and, (3) of collectively pursuing the economic development of the minority business community. We offer recommendations for improving the relationship between these parties

Goal: 5000-7500 words Currently: 6,465 words (including everything) Exclusive Dealing: Before Bork, and Beyond

Abstract: Antitrust scholars have come to accept the basic ideas about exclusive dealing that Bork articulated in The Antitrust Paradox. Indeed, they have even extended his list of reasons why exclusive dealing can promote economic efficiency. Yet they have also taken up his challenge to explain how exclusive dealing could possibly cause harm, and have modelled a variety of special cases where it does. Some (albeit not all) of these are sufficiently plausible to be useful to prosecutors and judges

Confidential Gossip and Organization Studies

This essay sets out the case for regarding confidential gossip as a significant concept in the study of organizations. It develops the more general concept of gossip by combining it with concepts of organizational secrecy in order to propose confidential gossip as a distinctive communicative practice. As a communicative practice, it is to be understood as playing a particular role within the communicative constitution of organizations. That particularity arises from the special nature of any communication regarded as secret, which includes the fact that such communication is liable to be regarded as containing the ‘real truth’ or ‘insider knowledge’. Thus it may be regarded as more than ‘just gossip’ and also as more significant than formal communication. This role is explored, as well as the methodological and ethical challenges of studying confidential gossip empirically

Designing Ecosystems of Intelligence from First Principles

This white paper lays out a vision of research and development in the field of artificial intelligence for the next decade (and beyond). Its denouement is a cyber-physical ecosystem of natural and synthetic sense-making, in which humans are integral participants -- what we call ''shared intelligence''. This vision is premised on active inference, a formulation of adaptive behavior that can be read as a physics of intelligence, and which inherits from the physics of self-organization. In this context, we understand intelligence as the capacity to accumulate evidence for a generative model of one's sensed world -- also known as self-evidencing. Formally, this corresponds to maximizing (Bayesian) model evidence, via belief updating over several scales: i.e., inference, learning, and model selection. Operationally, this self-evidencing can be realized via (variational) message passing or belief propagation on a factor graph. Crucially, active inference foregrounds an existential imperative of intelligent systems; namely, curiosity or the resolution of uncertainty. This same imperative underwrites belief sharing in ensembles of agents, in which certain aspects (i.e., factors) of each agent's generative world model provide a common ground or frame of reference. Active inference plays a foundational role in this ecology of belief sharing -- leading to a formal account of collective intelligence that rests on shared narratives and goals. We also consider the kinds of communication protocols that must be developed to enable such an ecosystem of intelligences and motivate the development of a shared hyper-spatial modeling language and transaction protocol, as a first -- and key -- step towards such an ecology.Comment: 23+18 pages, one figure, one six page appendi

Operation Moonshot: rapid translation of a SARS-CoV-2 targeted peptide immunoaffinity liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry test from research into routine clinical use

OBJECTIVES: During 2020, the UK's Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) established the Moonshot programme to fund various diagnostic approaches for the detection of SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen behind the COVID-19 pandemic. Mass spectrometry was one of the technologies proposed to increase testing capacity. METHODS: Moonshot funded a multi-phase development programme, bringing together experts from academia, industry and the NHS to develop a state-of-the-art targeted protein assay utilising enrichment and liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) to capture and detect low levels of tryptic peptides derived from SARS-CoV-2 virus. The assay relies on detection of target peptides, ADETQALPQRK (ADE) and AYNVTQAFGR (AYN), derived from the nucleocapsid protein of SARS-CoV-2, measurement of which allowed the specific, sensitive, and robust detection of the virus from nasopharyngeal (NP) swabs. The diagnostic sensitivity and specificity of LC-MS/MS was compared with reverse transcription quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) via a prospective study. RESULTS: Analysis of NP swabs (n=361) with a median RT-qPCR quantification cycle (Cq) of 27 (range 16.7-39.1) demonstrated diagnostic sensitivity of 92.4% (87.4-95.5), specificity of 97.4% (94.0-98.9) and near total concordance with RT-qPCR (Cohen's Kappa 0.90). Excluding Cq>32 samples, sensitivity was 97.9% (94.1-99.3), specificity 97.4% (94.0-98.9) and Cohen's Kappa 0.95. CONCLUSIONS: This unique collaboration between academia, industry and the NHS enabled development, translation, and validation of a SARS-CoV-2 method in NP swabs to be achieved in 5 months. This pilot provides a model and pipeline for future accelerated development and implementation of LC-MS/MS protein/peptide assays into the routine clinical laboratory