The culture of market oriented organisations

This paper investigates the relationship between corporate culture and market orientation using a different methodology to those usually found done in empirical studies on this topic. Conventionally, one or two key informants provide information on the firm’s marketing practices in large scale quantitative cross-sectional studies; these few respondents provide their opinion on the firm’s actual marketing practices which are then considered as a reliable representation of both the (whole) firm’s culture and its market orientation. We have taken a different approach. Firstly, we chose to do multiple case studies in stead of cross sectional research. These case studies were small scale and qualitative; next a large(r) scale quantitative study was done within those organisations. Secondly, all employees in an organisation were invited to participate in the study: only then is it possible to measure culture as the shared beliefs in the company. Corporate culture itself as well as the marketing practices have been investigated as two separate constructs in our case studies. Both are measured via employee perceptions. Thirdly, we are looking at the possible configuration of market orientation and corporate culture. Almost all of the propositions generated are supported. The degree of openness appeared to be crucial to an organisation’s market orientation. Moreover, such a culture is also resultsoriented, employee-oriented and professional. It also has a balanced position on the two other dimensions: pragmatic/normative and loose/tight control. From the marketing perspective, the essential building blocks of a market oriented culture include: the internal cooperation, internal communication, drive to be the best, lack of pursuing self interest, learning from mistakes and from experiences in the market place, clarity about customer needs and better relative quality than competitors’. Because market orientation and corporate culture were measured as two distinct constructs, this study offers new insights in both domains as to what organisations should change to be(come) market oriented.Strategy;

In situ spectroscopy in and above manganese catalyzed oxidations

Oxidations are essential component steps in many industrial processes. These range from large scale applications, e.g., the production of plastics and resins, to the small scale applications such as the production of medicines. Oxidations typically make use of catalysts that are responsible for activation of the oxidant and transfer of oxygen atoms to an organic compound. In this thesis two different manganese based complexes, used as such catalysts, are studied to elucidate the mechanisms by which they facilitate oxidation of organic substrates with the oxidant hydrogen peroxide. The aim is to get a better understanding of the working mechanism of these catalyst. Both manganese based complexes show an increasing oxygen concentration in the headspace above the solution, pointing towards the disproportionation of hydrogen peroxide to dioxygen and water. The amount of hydrogen peroxide disproportionation is relevant, since it affects the efficiency of the process. For one of the manganese based complex, a combination of different spectroscopies is used to identify the transformation the manganese complexes undergo. A mixture of several manganese complexes is observed, although these species are considered resting states. For the other manganese based catalyst the concentration is too low to detect. By using other physical organic methods, we can still get information about the active form of the manganese complex

EXPLAINING SATISFACTION IN DOUBLE DEVIATION SCENARIOS: THE EFFECTS OF ANGER AND DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

Research has shown that more than half of attempted recovery efforts only reinforce dissatisfaction, producing a ‘double deviation’ effect. Surprisingly, these double deviation effects have received little attention in service marketing literature. Yet no study has specifically investigated which are the main determinants of the formation of customer satisfaction judgments in double deviation contexts. To fill this gap, we develop and empirically test a model based on the existing service recovery literature. Specifically, we focus on two theoretical frameworks: social justice theory and theories of emotion. We examine the effect of anger with service recovery on satisfaction with service recovery, as well as the role of distributive justice on the elicitation of the specific emotion of anger with service recovery and satisfaction with service recovery. Results support the model and highlight the important role of specific recovery-related emotions in double deviation contexts. Implications for practice and future research are discussed. La investigación previa ha mostrado que más de la mitad de los esfuerzos de recuperación sólo refuerzan la insatisfacción, produciendo un efecto de desviación doble. Sorprendentemente, estos efectos de desviación doble han recibido muy poca atención en la literatura de marketing de servicios. Hasta la fecha, ningún trabajo ha investigado empíricamente cuáles son los principales determinantes en la formación de los juicios de satisfacción en contextos de desviación doble. Para cubrir este hueco, desarrollamos y analizamos empíricamente un modelo basado en la literatura de recuperación de servicios existente. Específicamente, nos basamos en dos esquemas conceptuales: la teoría de la justicia social y las teorías sobre emociones. Examinamos el efecto del enfado con la recuperación del servicio en la satisfacción con la recuperación del servicio, así como el papel de la justicia distributiva como activador de emociones específicas de enfado y como antecedente de la satisfacción con la recuperación del servicio. Los resultados confirman el modelo propuesto y ponen de manifiesto el importante papel de las emociones específicas relacionadas con la recuperación en contextos de desviación doble. Finalmente, se discuten las implicaciones de gestión y las líneas futuras de investigación.enfado con la recuperación del servicio, justicia distributiva, satisfacción con la recuperación del servicio, desviación doble, industria bancaria anger with service recovery, distributive justice, satisfaction with service recovery, double deviation, banking industry

Board Size Effects in Closely Held Corporations

Previous work on board size effects in closely held corporations has established a negative correlation between board size and firm performance. We argue that this work has been incomplete in analysing the causal relationship due to lack of ownership information and weak identification strategies in simultanous equation analysis. In the present paper we reexamine the causal relationship between board size and firm performance using a dataset of more than 5,000 small and medium sized closely held corporations with complete ownership information and detailed accounting data. We test the potential endogeneity of board size by using a new instrument given by the number of children of the founders of the firms. Our analysis shows that board size can be taken as exogenous in the performance equation. Furthermore, based on a flexible model specification we find that there is no empirical evidence of adverse board size effects in the typical range of three to six board members. Finally, we find a significantly negative board size effect in the minority of closely held firms which have comparatively large boards of seven or more members.

TMB: Automatic Differentiation and Laplace Approximation

TMB is an open source R package that enables quick implementation of complex nonlinear random effect (latent variable) models in a manner similar to the established AD Model Builder package (ADMB, admb-project.org). In addition, it offers easy access to parallel computations. The user defines the joint likelihood for the data and the random effects as a C++ template function, while all the other operations are done in R; e.g., reading in the data. The package evaluates and maximizes the Laplace approximation of the marginal likelihood where the random effects are automatically integrated out. This approximation, and its derivatives, are obtained using automatic differentiation (up to order three) of the joint likelihood. The computations are designed to be fast for problems with many random effects (~10^6) and parameters (~10^3). Computation times using ADMB and TMB are compared on a suite of examples ranging from simple models to large spatial models where the random effects are a Gaussian random field. Speedups ranging from 1.5 to about 100 are obtained with increasing gains for large problems. The package and examples are available at http://tmb-project.org

Integration of prosodic and grammatical information in the analysis of dialogs

The analysis of spoken dialogs requires the analysis of complete multi-sentence turns. Especially, the segmentation of turns in sentential or phrasal segments is a problem. In this paper we present a system for turn analysis. It is based on an extension of HPSG grammar for turns and takes into account extra-linguistic prosodic information. We show how this information can be integrated and represented in the grammar, and how it is used to reduce the search space in parsing

Distributed parsing with HPSG grammars

Unification-based theories of grammar allow for an integration of different levels of linguistic descriptions in the common framework of typed feature structures. Dependencies among the levels are expressed by coreferences. Though highly attractive theoretically, using such codescriptions for analysis create problems of efficiency. We present an approach to a modular use of codescriptions on the syntactic and semantic level. Grammatical analysis is performed by tightly coupled parsers running in tandem, each using only designated parts of the grammatical description. In the paper we describe the partitioning of grammatical information for the parsers and present results about the performance

Enlarged cerebrospinal fluid spaces in opiate-dependent male patients: A stereological CT study

Computed tomography was performed in 9 male patients with a diagnosis of opiate dependence and in 9 age-matched psychiatric controls (neurotic depression). Patients with a history or diagnosis of another substance dependence (alcohol, cocaine, cannabis) were excluded from the study. The volumes of internal and external components of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) were measured with a point-counting stereological method. Analysis of variance with age as a covariate revealed a significant enlargement of external and external CSF spaces in male patients with opiate dependence. There was no significant correlation between the length of opiate dependence and the volumes of internal and external CSF spaces. The present results suggest that opiate dependence is associated with structural brain alterations. However, the relationship between opiate dependence and structural brain changes is complex and still not well understood