Small business, big markets, one world

Dit rapport is een introductiepaper van het International Small Business Congress 2002, dat gehouden zal worden in Amsterdam van 27 tot en met 30 oktober 2002. Aangezien de euro op 1 januari 2002 geïntroduceerd wordt, zal speciale aandacht worden besteed aan de economische integratie in Europa en de gevolgen daarvan voor het kleinbedrijf.

Organizational structure and performance in Dutch SMEs

The relationship between organisational structure and performance has received little attention over the past few decades, especially in regards to firms with less than 100 employees. All too often, the stereotype of SMEs as unstructured, informal 'adhocracies' is heard. Based on the study of a stratified sample of more than 1400 Dutch SMEs (in three size classes and nine economic sectors) we show that this stereotype is false. We derive a set of typical organisational structures. We further investigated the circumstances under which these structures seem to perform well, and the circumstances under which they appear to perform poorly. Un update of this report is made on Januari 2005 (N200420).

Barriers to Entry

Entry of firms into a market is an important economic mechanism that influences industry dynamics and contributes to allocative and dynamic efficiency. However, there are barriers that can prevent companies from entering a market, hampering the competitive process. Therefore, it is clear that barriers to entry are an important issue in competition policy. In this report, we studied a number of 37 different barriers with a special focus on the possible size effect of the barrier, the sustainability of the barrier, the way it can be measured and the relation with other barriers to entry.

Weapons, Body Postures, and the Quest for Dominance in Robberies:A Qualitative Analysis of Video Footage

Objective: A small-scale exploration of the use of video analysis to study robberies. We analyze the use of weapons as part of the body posturing of robbers as they attempt to attain dominance. Methods: Qualitative analyses of video footage of 23 shop robberies. We used Observer XT software (version 12) for fine-grained multimodal coding, capturing diverse bodily behavior by various actors simultaneously. We also constructed story lines to understand the robberies as hermeneutic whole cases. Results: Robbers attain dominance by using weapons that afford aggrandizing posturing and forward movements. Guns rather than knives seemed to fit more easily with such posturing. Also, victims were more likely to show minimizing postures when confronted with guns. Thus, guns, as part of aggrandizing posturing, offer more support to robbers’ claims to dominance in addition to their more lethal power. In the cases where resistance occurred, robbers either expressed insecure body movements or minimizing postures and related weapon usage or they failed to impose a robbery frame as the victims did not seem to comprehend the situation initially. Conclusions: Video analysis opens up a new perspective of how violent crime unfolds as sequences of bodily movements. We provide methodological recommendations and suggest a larger scale comparative project

Reconstruction and Analysis of the Po River Inundation of 1951

Flood inundation models have become essential tools in flood risk management, being used also in the analysis of historical flood events, which is often needed for a reliable assessment of the potential flood hazard. This study aims at reconstructing the 1951 inundation of the Polesine Region, Italy. The 1951 flooding was a mayor natural catastrophe that caused a large inundated area (1080 km2) and produced devastating social consequences. The reconstruction of the 1951 hydraulic conditions is based on partial knowledge of discharges and water stages at the Pontelagoscuro gauging station (downstream of the 1951 levee breach) using extrapolation of the rating curves beyond the measurement range. This is, even today, something open to uncertainty. We applied a decoupled hybrid approach to the hydraulic modeling: a 1D model is used to simulate the flow into the river and to compute the flow through the levee breach; this result is then adopted as the inflow condition for a 2D model application on the inundated area. A good agreement between the patterns of the observed and reconstructed inundation areas was found, and the timing of the inundation was also found to be close to the information derived from the historical chronicles. The results of the flood inundation modelling exercise provide two practical insight: (i) obstacles in the floodplains increased the flooded area by 40% and prolonged the time to reach the sea from 5 to 15 days, (ii) the peak discharge of the event was overestimated by up to 20