John H Finch

This paper proposes a pragmatic alliance between critical realism and non-parametric statistical techniques in pursuit of causal explanations of economic phenomena by retroductive means. The alliance depends on clarifying the interpretive requirements for forming categories as nominal or classificatory scales or as ordinal or ranking scales. It also depends on establishing the scope of demi-regularities, as something to be explained and as something that allows a rough and ready extension of experimental conditions. The roughness and readiness of demi-regularities is matched by the assumptions and conditions of non-parametric analysis.

The purpose of our article is to propose that compromising is a constitutive characteristic of those marketing systems that entail matters of public interest or concern. In such markets, actors design compromises as they encounter criticisms of and contending justifications for the market’s products, as these refer to price, efficiency in production and use, regulatory compliance or ecological sustainability. Tests and justifications are vital in order to determine what is valuable and by which measure. As a theory framework, the economic sociology of conventions provides a basis for assessing these contests, compromises, and justifications over the issue of worth in a marketing context. Through an ethnographic study of the regulated activities of chemicals service companies supporting the upstream petroleum industry, we assess how actors evaluate and justify the market’s products and services in this environmentally sensitive setting by means of tests drawing from different orders ...

... The ARA framework provides a strategic understanding of how businesses plan, undertake and review an activity ([Baraldi et al., 2007], [Bowey and Easton, 2007], [Ford and Mouzas, 2010], [Harrison et al., 2010], [Harrison and Prenkert, 2009] and [Lenney and Easton, 2009]). ...

This paper critically reviews extant literature on Technology Roadmapping (TRM) and identifies a gap in which SMEs are rarely studied within the TRM process, whether as stakeholders for other companies or as focal companies in their own right. TRM literature typically discusses the processes and opportunities for exploring and communicating the dynamic connections between technological resources, the organisational objectives and the changing environments surrounding the market and product. However, within the academic literature channels of communication are non-existent to SMEs who may not only find such a process valuable to support their own product and capabilities, but may also bring a significant contribution to the TRM process benefitting the TRM initiators themselves (generally large firms or intermediary organisations). This literature review serves as a stimulating discussion around the fundamental

Sales practitioners continue to come to terms with the selling conditions of mature consumer and business markets. Mature markets display signs such as cost-focused competition, similarity in the perceived functionality of offerings, and multiple suppliers vying for highly knowledgeable and powerful customers. While researchers have noted that in mature industrial markets the relationship to sales personnel can be an important differentiator for buyers, sales research has not specifically examined the consequences of market maturity ...

ABSTRACT Joseph Schumpeter and Josef Steindl provide distinctive contributions to the analysis of growth and development under capitalism. They each relate growth outcomes to the dynamics of competition. They also each analyse the evolution of competition and use this analysis to determine the growth prospects of mature capitalism. Both reach pessimistic conclusions, although for different reasons. This paper critically examines the analysis of each author and makes suggestions for building on their work to provide a more complete theory of economic growth and transformation, which can be used to assess current and future growth prospects for advanced capitalist economies. Scientific analysis is not simply a logically consistent process that starts with some primitive notions and then adds to the stock in some straight-line fashion. It is not simply progressive discovery of some objective reality - as is, for example, discovery in the basin of the Congo. Rather it is an incessant struggle with creations of our own and our predecessors' minds and it 'progresses', if at all, in a criss-cross fashion, not as logic, but as the impact of new ideas or observations or needs, and also as the bents and temperaments of new men, dictate. (Schumpeter, 1954, p.41)

Markets are Trading Zones: on the Material, Cultural and Interpretative Dimensions of Market Encounters. J Finch, S Geiger Reconnecting Marketing to Markets. Edited by L. Araujo, JH Finch and H. Kjellberg. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010.

ABSTRACT We develop a three-way categorization of capacity and its utilization covering micro, meso and macro framings, beginning with the approaches of Marshall, Steindl and Penrose. Within firms, we combine Steindl's analysis on fixed capital with Penrose's consideration of resources, including a higher-order form of capacity. We examine the implications of capacity expansion for competition and for the maturity of the industry, which reflects back on the value of the firm. We then argue that our higher-order concept of capacity can be made operational for empirical study by identifying a critical bottleneck that restrains firm growth at each point in its development.

From the late 1940s to the early 1970s Andrews, Downie, Penrose and Richardson contributed to reassessments of Marshall's explanation of industrial organization. Each author emphasizes a particular aspect of industrial organization — internal and external organization, innovation, and cross-entry — and each elaborates Marshall's much discussed notion of evolutionary principles. Marshall sought coordination of developing knowledge and feared atrophy through

ABSTRACT Brian Loasby's work has an important role in connecting an earlier generation of post Marshallian theorists with contemporary researchers pursuing industry studies in the Marshallian tradition. This paper investigates the methodological consequences of post Marshallian theory by examining the work of Andrews, Penrose and Richardson in the context of modern ideas concerning the history of economic thought and of conducting empirical research in order to develop and enrich a theoretical framework. It is concluded that interpretations of historical texts are the creative achievement of members of a scientific community, and so should not be preoccupied with recovering what the original author really meant; that post Marshallian research may fruitfully be progressed by conducting rigorous case study research which recognises the complexity of organising relations across industries; and that such a research programme must necessarily be conducted within an scientific community, given the painstaking commitment that case study research requires, in order that theoretical generalisations may be attempted.

ABSTRACT FINCH J. H. (1998) The re-employment experiences of former aerospace employees within a local economy, Reg. Studies 32 , 421-433. Aerospace production has been undergoing major reorganization since the late 1980s. This paper investigates one aspect of changing organization: the re-employment experiences of those made redundant by British Aerospace (BAe) during reorganization of its production capacity across its sites in Lancashire in the North West of England. Results of statistical analysis draw attention to different rates of success in converting individuals' sets of skills and knowledge to employment in different types of companies operating in different industrial sectors within the local economy. Previous job type, age and length of employment experience form statistically significant effects in affecting chances of securing re-employment. FINCH J. H. (1998) Reembaucher les anciens salaries de l'industrie aerospatiale au sein d'une economie locale, Reg. Studies 32 , 421-433. L'industrie aerospatiale subit une restructuration importante depuis la fin des annees 80. Cet article cherche a examiner un aspect particulier de cette restructuration: a savoir les experiences des salaries reembauches qui avaientete licencies par la British Aerospace, (Bae), a cause de la restructuration de sa capacite de production a travers ses locaux situes dans le Lancashire dans le nord-ouest de l'Angleterre. Les resultats de l'analyse statistique attirent l'attention sur des taux de reussite differents quant a l'adaptation des competences et des connaissances de l'individu a l'emploi dans des differentes types d'entreprises des secteurs industriels differents au sein de l'economie locale. La categorie de l'ancen emploi, l'age et l'anciennete du travail ont des impacts non-negligeables sur les possibilites d'etre reembauche. FINCH J. H. (1998) Erfahrungen ehemaliger Arbeitnehmer bei Aerospace mit Wiederbeschaftigung in der ortlichen Wirschaft, Reg. Studies 32 , 421-433. Bei Aerospace ist die Produktion seit Ende der achtziger Jahre erheblichen Umstellungen unterworfen gewesen. Dieser Aufsatz untersucht einen Aspekt der Umstellung: die Erfahrungen jener, die ihren Arbneitsplatz bei British Aerospace (BAe) im Zuge der Umorganisierung der Produktionskapazitat an allen Firmenstandorten Lancashires in Nordwestengland verloren und wieder eine Erwerbstatigkeit gesucht haben. Die Ergebnisse der statistischen Analyse lenken die Aufmerksamkeit auf die verschiedenen Erfolgsraten bei der Anpassung individueller Kenntnisse und Fahigkeiten an Erwerbstatigkeit in andersartigen Gesellschaften auf anderen Gebieten der Wirtschaft am gleichen Orte. Die Art fruherer Beschaftigung, Alter und Dauer der Arbeitserfahrung fu ¨hren zu statistisch signifikanten Wirkungen, welche sich wiederum auf die Chance einer Wiederbeschaftigung auswirken.

Buyer-supplier collaborations in industrial settings often involve novel technologies, relationships, and joint sense-making. These relationships entail highly uncertain and vulnerable co-developments with only few participants each. This paper proposes an approach to capture the value of joint sense-making in an inter-firm innovation. As innovativeness is not objectively measured and only few respondents are available per collaboration, large quantitative studies are not possible. This paper presents a standardised cognitive mapping tool using the Repertory Grid technique by Kelly (1955). This tool we derived from a longitudinal cross-case study in a trans-national German engineering company. We tested this technique by conducting semi-quantitative triangulation research of socio-technological characteristics in our study.

This paper examines and systematizes the topology of a set of a supply chain’s strategic B2B dyads of a multinational high-tech corporation in which joint learnin g over time enables the customisation of products and services toward processual and technological innovation. We highlight the graphical representation of a dyadic inter-corporate interstice where the rich exchange in an immediate innovation supply chain takes place. This topology depicts the actors' joint alignment zone and its delimiting abstraction layers and thus visualises networking activities and outcomes scaffolded in a three-tier interaction interface. This value creation topology is consistent with and extends extant research.

Joseph Schumpeter and Josef Steindl provide distinctive contributions to the analysis of growth and development under capitalism. They each relate growth outcomes to the dynamics of competition. They also each analyse the evolution of competition and use this analysis to determine the growth prospects of mature capitalism. Both reach pessimistic conclusions, although for different reasons. This paper critically examines the analysis of each author and makes suggestions for building on their work to provide a more complete theory of economic growth and transformation, which can be used to assess current and future growth prospects for advanced capitalist economies. Scientific analysis is not simply a logically consistent process that starts with some primitive notions and then adds to the stock in some straight-line fashion. It is not simply progressive discovery of some objective reality - as is, for example, discovery in the basin of the Congo. Rather it is an incessant struggle wi...

In-house legal groups are unusual, being distinct by virtue of their members" qualifications, career trajectories and continuing involvement in a profession as well as a company. They represent a niche forum with a resource pool of specialist knowledge and skills from which a professional service is demanded and delivered. In-house lawyers have retained as their primary role making and delivering legal services for their colleagues in the organization. Their capacities to develop and offer their services are affected mainly through their professional backgrounds the experience. However, the learning processes that define the mode and context of the legal services are shaped not only by professional influences but also exhibit elements of innovation and creativity, which emerge in the context of their companies.

We address the agenda initiated by Callon and colleagues of markets making calculation and of calculation making markets. For Callon, markets are framed as organised social spaces within which actors undertake buying and selling activities and so exchange property rights over goods, rather than thin boundaries across which actors undertake buying and selling activities as objects are transformed from worlds of production to consumption. While we are impressed by Callon's notion of spillovers, in which actors struggle to take objects and their dimensions into account and so qualify these as goods, we question whether these inherent spillovers can be stabilised within the organised social space of the market through calculating and qualifying. Instead we see spilling over into other organised social spaces, such as in the lifeworlds of production and consumption, as vital to the stabilising of the object, which we term 'the marketing object' in recognition of its multiple ...

Competitive Paper submitted to Special Track B, Developing Marketing Practices and Market Forms, 24 th Abstract: This paper presents a view of sales people as boundary shapers, rather than boundary spanners. Contributing to the perspective of markets as performed through market actors and drawing on situated learning theories, it presents a case study from the upstream petroleum industry that demonstrates how sales personnel negotiate and enact multiple, simultaneous and dynamic market forms in their customer relationships.

ABSTRACT Joseph Schumpeter and Josef Steindl provide distinctive contributions to the analysis of growth and development under capitalism. They each analyse the evolution of competition and use this analysis to determine the growth prospects of mature capitalism. Both reach pessimistic conclusions, although for different reasons. This paper critically examines the analysis of each author and makes suggestions for building on their work to provide a richer theory of economic growth and transformation, which can be used to assess current and future growth prospects for advanced capitalist economies.

ABSTRACT We develop a three-way categorization of capacity and its utilization covering micro, meso and macro framings, beginning with the approaches of Marshall, Steindl and Penrose. Within firms, we combine Steindl's analysis on fixed capital with Penrose's consideration of resources, including a higher-order form of capacity. We examine the implications of capacity expansion for competition and for the maturity of the industry, which reflects back on the value of the firm. We then argue that our higher-order concept of capacity can be made operational for empirical study by identifying a critical bottleneck that restrains firm growth at each point in its development.