1,720,993 research outputs found
ENVIRONMENT MONITORING IN COMPANIES: A CONTINGENCY STUDY
No full textTo cope with increasing competition in the 1960s, managers started to transpose military practices to business. This chapter is a literature review about the systems, processes, tools and practices used by companies to monitor what happens in their environment. Initially, control systems aimed at measuring various internai indicators of the firm's performance to take timely corrective actions. In a globalized world that is changing quickly, the controlling paradigm is facing limits and firms need not just to implement their strategy but also to adapt it. In parallel to the control literature, a wide and rather unstructured stream of research rose to describe and predict the state of the environment. How these studies inform practice remains inconclusive. Through the contingency theory of the firm, we call for more research on the systems, processes, tools and practices for environment monitoring and on the association between monitoring intensity and innovativeness of firms.
Chapter 2: Monitoring the Environment: A Multiple Case Study
The purpose of this chapter is to study how companies monitor their environment. To keep their strategy aligned with market conditions, companies need to have a clear idea of trends and potential changes occurring in their environment. Relying on structured interviews with top and middle managers of two organizations, we explored how these managers defme their environment and process data about it to make stratégie décisions.
We observed that environment monitoring is only partially formalized and structured. The différent practices and tools, however, make the Company better informed about the ongoing changes. Four main lessons emerged. First, top management increases its involvement as soon as the situation becomes particularly urgent. Second, when the legitimacy of the strategy is at stake, the diversity of people reflecting on the issue increases. Third, information channels are more structured and disciplined when assessing the power (nuisance capacity) of an actor of the environment. Finally, environment monitoring intensity tends to be positively associated with the company's efforts to innovate.
Chapter 3: Déterminants of Environment Monitoring Intensity and its
Impact on Firm's Innovativeness
Environment monitoring is essential to accurately and timely detect opportunities and threats. This survey-based study on managerial and organizational systems, tools and practices explores the déterminants of environment monitoring and its impact on innovativeness. We observe that a wide involvement of people, a disciplined and structured information sourcing process, as well as a top management team focus, are positively associated with environment monitoring intensity. Conversely, performance measurement systems such as the Balanced Scorecard are not associated with environment monitoring intensity. We also observe a positive association between the environment monitoring intensity and innovativeness of companies
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
THREE ESSAYS ON MANAGEMENT CONTROL
No full textThis dissertation analyzes three drivers of firms’ long-term performance within the dynamic landscape of the contemporary business environment: stakeholder management, resource management and artificial intelligence (AI) tools management.
The debate concerning whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities are value- enhancing or value-destroying is very active in both academic and business words. In the first chapter we contribute to this academic debate by analyzing the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP). We use the Covid-19 pandemic as an exogenous shock and use both stock returns and risk measures to examine this relationship across a sample of companies in the travel and leisure (T&L) industry, which were heavily impacted during this period. Consistent with stakeholder salience theory, our results indicate that CSP in salient CSR activities is associated with higher CFP. We also find that companies following a stakeholder salience approach outperform their peers adopting either a stakeholder approach (high-CSP for all CSR activities) or a shareholder-only approach (low- CSP for all CSR activities) and constitute the only group of companies that did not experience a significant decline in stock returns during the Covid-19 market downturn. Finally, we find that the CSP-CFP relationship has an inverted U-shape suggesting the existence of an optimal level of CSP that maximizes CFP.
This work has both theoretical and practical contributions. managers need to define effective and context-dependent CSR activities by focusing on salient CSR activities and defining the optimal CSP level. In can also be informative to regulators, NGOs and other stakeholders to understand the stakeholder-firm relationship. More specifically, it can help deduce when
pressures on managers are necessary – i.e., when it is not (or no longer) financially beneficial for firms to voluntarily address these issues – and deploy resources and measures accordingly. In the second chapter, we empirically examine the relationship between asymmetric cost adjustments (i.e., costs stickiness) and capital structure and profitability. We develop a novel measure of cost stickiness and address endogeneity issues using instrumental variables. We first find that high-sticky-cost firms have lower financial leverage, shorter debt maturity, and higher cash holdings. Our findings imply that cost stickiness increases the risk of default, reducing the optimal leverage. They also suggest that cost stickiness increases financial constraints, leading managers to favor internal financing to pay for operational excess capacity and to sustain investments when sales are low. Moreover, we find that cost stickiness has a positive effect on profitability. Finally, we compare the effects of cost stickiness and the related concept of operating leverage. We observe that, while they have similar effects on capital structure,
operating leverage has an overall negative effect on profitability unlike cost stickiness.
While extensive research has been conducted to document cost stickiness and the factors under which it is amplified, research on the effects of cost stickiness have been very limited. Therefore, by introducing an accounting topic (cost stickiness) as an important determinant of financial leverage, cash holdings, and debt maturity, we add to both the accounting literature by looking further at the financial consequences of asymmetric cost behavior and the corporate finance literature examining the firms’ operating policies affecting capital structure.
In the third chapter, we examine the algorithm appreciation phenomenon and how gender and knowledge influence the level of trust humans place in AI. AI is increasingly utilized to provide real-time assistance and recommendations across a wide range of tasks, especially since the emergence of AI Chatbots such as ChatGPT. However, it is unclear how users perceive the
trustworthiness of these tools, more so given the publicized “hallucinations” that they may experience. We conduct a randomized field experiment to analyze how subject characteristics affect trust in AI versus human peers. We randomly assign students to two experimental groups receiving advice labeled to come from an AI system (treatment group) or labeled as coming from human peers (control group). Our results are in line with recent laboratory experiments documenting algorithm appreciation. However, we find that algorithm appreciation varies with subject knowledge and gender. Specifically, both male and high-knowledge subjects place considerably less weight on AI advice. Our results remain consistent even over an extended out-of-sample period and after providing subjects with performance information.
This highlights the need to tailor AI tools to subject characteristics to significantly enhance their effectiveness and ultimately also the adoption rates. A personalized approach to AI can enhance engagement and mitigate potential adoption barriers. Further research in technology management is needed to explore various factors influencing AI trust. For example, future experimental projects, in collaboration with current co-authors explore various related questions such as: how to build and restore trust in AI; identify the main subject characteristics influencing trust in AI; understand the drivers of gender differences in AI and peer trust; and exploring task characteristics affecting trust in AI.
From a managerial perspective, understanding the circumstances in which AI assistance is beneficial and determining effective control mechanisms is crucial. While literature explores the benefits and challenges of AI, the impact of controlling AI assistance on task performance remains relatively unexplored. One of our ongoing research projects focuses on investigating the effects of restraining and controlling AI assistance on task performance, considering potential trade-offs and implications for human-AI dynamics
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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