This paper raises the question of how to protect the design of new offerings (products, services and experiences) from unfair competition and plagiarism, already from the very beginning of the design process and how to effectively manage.

This paper discusses the similarities and differences between peer-reviewed scientific articles and students’ theses (bachelor, one-year master, and two-year master). A sample of theses and scientific articles is analyzed as a basis for a discussion of what is a good thesis.

It holds that the Goals are different and that those goals should affect the principal process to be documented, the Research Process or the Presentation of the research results. It also proposes that the Structure of a thesis should to some degree be different from the scientific article. Finally, it proposes a Framework for a good thesis.

This conceptual paper discusses the phenomenon of differentiation made possible through branding or innovation or a combination of the two. Differentiation is eventually the driving force for the development of its own negation, commoditization. When customers have endured a commoditized market long enough the opportunities open up for creative destruction, this concept of Schumpeter (1942), means that an entrepreneur invents a completely new way of satisfying the customers’ unsatisfied needs, making the industry that no longer bothered about their customers. Many researchers have tried to re/brand destructive innovation as their own, with concepts, such as of ”transilience”, and “blue ocean strategy’, as opposed to ‘red ocean strategy’.

The paper focuses on innovation as a differentiation strategy and on temporary monopoly rent as a driver of innovation. Increased competition and shortening and life cycles makes capitalism more volatile and the strategies to reduce the risks involved are discussed. These strategies lead to the real-world implementation of the concentration of capital forecasted by Marx and feared by Schumpeter.

The paper identifies the need to continuously monitor the concentration of capital and to understand individual markets by studying the firm’s profit.

This conceptual paper discusses the phenomenon of differentiation made possible throughbranding or innovation or a combination of the two. Differentiation is eventually the driving forcefor the development of its own negation, commoditization. When customers have endured acommoditized market long enough the opportunities open up for creative destruction, this conceptof Schumpeter (1942), means that an entrepreneur invents a completely new way of satisfying thecustomers’ unsatisfied needs, making the industry that no longer bothered about their customers. Many researchers have tried to re/brand destructive innovation as their own, with concepts, suchas of ”transilience”, and “blue ocean strategy’, as opposed to ‘red ocean strategy’.

The paper focuses on innovation as a differentiation strategy and on temporary monopoly rent asa driver of innovation. Increased competition and shortening and life cycles makes capitalism morevolatile and the strategies to reduce the risks involved are discussed. These strategies lead to thereal-world implementation of the concentration of capital forecasted by Marx and feared by Schumpeter.

The paper identifies the need to continuously monitor the concentration of capital and to understand individual markets by studying the firm’s profit.

This conceptual paper explores the phenomena of changing cost-structures and the implications for the volatility of capitalism and the possibility to manage firms in such a hostile environment and proposes future research. It also provides an explanation of why the relevance of accounting is lost, the so-called “relevance lost” debate (see among others Francis

& Schipper, 1999).The changing cost-structures raises fundamental questions concerning the resulting the volatility of capitalism and the management of firms in such an increasingly more volatile environment. In Philipson, Johansson & Scheley (2016), we raised the question if it was possible to “...to ride the dragon.” Considering the importance of these phenomena, it is astonishing that we have not found any empirical research concerning them. They restresearch questions, based on the author’s almost 25 years of experience, as a senior executive in Scandinavian industry.

This article proposes to build a entrepreneurial learning environment for future business professionals, based on a better knowledge about requirements, a pedagogic ethos, and the economic necessity to build structural capital in higher education.

Professional academic education has to comply with many demands; a professional community that requires productive workers, a faculty that requires the students to get a certain level of understanding of one or several social science subjects, and social science methodology. This paper proposes to build such educations based on community based concept maps and a Vygotskian pedagogics.

The costs of running higher education typically has a cost structure with 60-65% salaries, 20-25% fixed costs, mainly buildings, and some 10% expenses. The high share of salaries and almost non-existing productivity increases the relative cost of higher education as the productivity in producing other product and services increases. Together with the increasing share of the population that need higher education the cost for society has radically increased. In an effort to economise with limited resources most western countries have radically differentiated the financing between technical and medical education on the one hand and social science on the other. The situation for social science education has thus become increasingly strained. Social science professors hope to influence the state to increase the founding, UNT (2013-10-26); HSV (2013-10-26).

Having taken initiative to, developed, implemented, and during five years managed two bachelor and one master (one- and two-year) programs in marketing, I also participated in the self-evaluation of these in the summer of 2011, which was part of the requirement of The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education, now The Swedish Higher Education Authority. The programs were based on a very clear ideas on subject ”progression”.The self-evaluation provoked a revision to improve the methodological progression of the programs. But it was evident that these changes were not enough.

From this background we face four problems that motivate the need for entrepreneurial learning in higher education:

Very complex requirements from stakeholders

Limited resource allocation, need to become more efficient

Low quality of present education

The need to build structural capital to become more efficient

To deal with these problems we assume some core ideas:

It is necessary to strengthen the integrity of the program. 

To make higher education more efficient we have to build structural capital.

Based on a ’Vygotskian’ view on pedagogics, it is necessary:

The program must be broken down to courses and then to moments of proximal development that are gradually widening during the program. 

To develop methods to identify for each individual student’s ’zone of proximal development’, se below, which is both possible for the student to span and which is challenging enough.

To develop the ’caring’ aspects of the teacher – student relation.

In the following text we develop our view concerning these problems, and explain why we have chosen these core ideas. 

The first part deals with the complex requirements on higher education. Concept maps are introduced as a tool for understanding and handle complexity. This part explains why we focus on structural capital. 

The second part deals with the pedagogic foundations of the project. In this part we explain the methods we want to use to strengthen the quality in higher education. ’The zone of proximal development’ is used to explain how entrepreneurial learning can be achieved in higher education, and why we focus on the relationship between student and teacher. 

The last part deals with thoughts about how we can build and use structural capital in higher education to make education more efficient and give students more time with teachers.

This article proposes to build a entrepreneurial learning environment for future business professionals, based on a better knowledge about requirements and the economic necessity to build structural capital in higher education.

I have examined or tutored some 500 bachelor theses and some 100 master theses at several Swedish universities. Over the past 20 years Swedish secondary school graduates has become less and less apt in mathematics, Mullis, I.V.S. et al. (2009). Due to this development university students mostly chose to make qualitative studies, irrespective if this is the best choice to study the research question on not. Most of them don’t even make good qualitative studies.To help them get good qualitative use of their empirical material I have developed the following method. It is suitable for studies based on interviews, focus groups and observations. It is suitable both for deductive and abductive research, well grounded theory, and critical studies. As the dataset grows, the method becomes cumbersome, which I don not consider is a big problem, as big qualitative datasets would preferably be analyzed by non-parametric statistics, rather than the iterative interpreting qualitative method I suggest here. 

I have examined or tutored some 500 bachelors theses and some 100 masters theses at several Swedish universities.

Over the past 20 years Swedish secondary school graduates has become less and less apt in mathematics, Mullis, et al. (2009). Due to this development university students mostly chose to make qualitative studies, irrespective if this is the best choice to study the research question on not. Most of them don’t even make good qualitative studies. After analysis of the requirements of what is needed, Prahalad’s (2006) ‘sandbox of innovation’, I have developed an abductive method for analysing qualitative data to help the students to get good use of their empirical material, a well-grounded theory, in contrast to the inherent deductive nature of grounded theory. It is suitable for studies based on interviews, focus groups and observations.

As the dataset grows, the method becomes cumbersome, which I don not consider is a big problem, as big qualitative datasets would preferably be analysed by non-parametric statistics, rather than the iterative interpreting qualitative method I suggest here. The method has so far been used to advantage by students in some 15 bachelor and master theses. I also discuss the limitations of the method. 

This paper addresses the question of how to protect the design of products and services from unfair competition and plagiarism, already at the very beginning of the design process. It further discusses how to manage designing effectively. Finally it discusses how to exploit the intellectual assets emerging from the design process.

The future wealth of the industrialised world is largely based on the design and marketing of new products and services. To an increasing extent design is based on the co-operation of numerous companies and experts in technology and content. The variable cost of the production of the product or service has become an increasingly smaller share of its price. Hence the protection of embedded intellectual assets is becoming a critical aspect of all business ventures.

In this paper I propose a technological environment (“Environment” is used in the information technology sense) for design in complex networks of independent companies and experts. An environment intended to make possible the protection of intellectual assets and in which the participants can build trust between each other for common exploitation of assets owned individually and jointly

This is a conceptual paper. In her doctoral thesis, “Capital functions and the position of the workers” (in Swedish), published in 1980, Philpson36, explored a Marxian theory of Business administration, based on a little known work by Marx21, “Resultate des unmittelbares produktionsprozesses”. She explored the three concepts “levels of functions of capital”, after Bettelheim8, the “generalisation of capital functions” and hence globalisation and the possibility to use the concept of “hegemony” in business administration, after Gramsci.15

Two of the principle concepts were Marx’ “inner” and “outer” conditions of production. These pre-empted the Resource-Based View (RBV) and the School of Industrial Organization (IO) with hundred years. In Philipson36, she proposed 72 phenotypes for the principle strategic situations for companies, based on their inner and outer conditions of production. The resource based view and the Industrial Organization School have long been two antagonistic explanations of the strategic possibilities of firms.

This study is a synthesis of these two schools based on the framework developed in Philipson36. It suggests a phenomenology for studying firm strategy that might possibly give precedence for a different mix of the two schools in the phenomenological cases.

In spite of the development of the RBV and the IO over the last 30 years, the most interesting questions to pursue for strategy research are how companies transcends their resources to reinvent themselves and how they transcend their resources to face new environmental conditions of which they do not have enough experience and resources; hence the trans- cendence of their limitations. 

Purpose

“Business model” emerged fairly recently as an academic concept; competing with “sustainable strategic competitiveness”, “strategic fit” (Porter, 1996), and “dominant logic” (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986) to give key explanatory understanding of firm performance.

This paper investigates key antecedents to the use of radical innovation of the business model of a service firm to achieve competitive advantage.

Design/methodology/approach

The article is based on action research, in which the re-engineering of a service business turned into radical innovation of the business model.

Findings

Radical innovation (conceived of as a new dominant logic) of the business model of a service firm is shown to give sustainable competitive advantage.

It shows how fundamental the concept of business model is to understanding the nature of the business, and links it to fundamental academic discussion of recent decades around concepts such as “sustainable competitive advantage”, “structural capital” and “tacit knowledge”.

Research limitations/implications

This is based on a case and more research is needed to generalize the findings.

Practical implications

In contrast to the knowledge management and structural capital evangelization, much tacit knowledge cannot be converted to structural capital.

Originality/value

Business model is a central concept to understand business performance, but must not be conceived as all-encompassing. We give a model for what the concept should cover and contrast it to other important models.

We show the role of tacit knowledge in a business model.

‘Business model’ is a fairly new academic concept; competing with Porter’s ‘sustainable strategic competitiveness’ and ‘strategic fit’ (Porter, 1996), Prahalad & Bettis ‘dominant logic’ (Prahalad & Bettis, 1986) to give key explanatory understanding of firm performance. We discuss business modelling based on an action research case and show just how fundamental it is. It links fundamental academic discussion of recent decades around concepts such as ‘sustainable competitive advantage’, ‘structural capital’ and ‘tacit knowledge’. 

In his groundbreaking work Sources of Innovation, Eric von Hippel discussed from where in (and out of) the value-chain innovations came in different industries, the customer, the manufacturer, the supplier or the third party innovator (universities, research laboratories, etc.).The world has changed and new phenomena have become apparent. This article is a conceptual paper, discussing these new phenomena and presenting a tentative updated pheno-typology of the sources of innovation. Except von Hippel (1988) it draws heavily on Kaulio (1998), Borrus & Zysman (1997) and Hart & Sangbae (2002) to build these phenotypes. 

In his groundbreaking work Sources of Innovation, Eric von Hippel discussed from where in (and out of) the value-chain innovations came in different industries, the customer, the manufacturer, the supplier or the third-party innovator (universities, research laboratories, etc.).

The world has changed and new phenomena have become apparent. This article is a conceptual paper, discussing these new phenomena and presenting a tentative updated pheno-typology of the sources of innovation. To build these phenotypes it draws heavily on Kaulio (1998), Borrus & Zysman (1997) and Hart & Sangbae (2002).

In his ground-breaking work Sources of Innovation, Eric von Hippel discussed from where in (and out of) the value-chain innovations came in different industries: the customer, the manufacturer, the supplier or the third-party innovator (universities, research laboratories, etc.).

The world has changed, and new phenomena have become apparent. This article is a conceptual paper that discusses these new phenomenaand presenting a tentative updated pheno-typology of the sources of innovation, adding six to von Hippel’s original four. To build these phenotypes it draws heavily on Kaulio (1998), Borrus & Zysman (1997) and Hart & Sangbae (2002). 

As principal take-away, the consequences for the knowledge production and transfer are discussed for each of the 10 phenotypes, in comparison to the in-house, non-open innovation, default phenotype.

This paper give students a method for orienting themselves in the frontiers of science.

This conceptual paper gives a new interpretation of knowledge management, based on Vygotskian psychology, critiquing the dominating paradigm of Nonaka. We question the role of individual and organizational learning and creation in his model; thus proposing a whole new focus for knowledge management research and radical managerial consequences for practitioners.

The paper presents the work of Nonaka and associates from 1994 and forward and the limited critique that have appeared in press.

It identifies the major flaws of Nonaka’s theory, as 

1. The eclecticism,
2. The reductionism, Individual and organisational learning to be understood by one model,
3. The behaviourist and cognitive psychological underpinning,
4. The flawed understanding of tacit knowledge.

As an alternative is presented a model of individual learning based on a Vygotskyan psychology and some of the implications organisational learning.

The findings of the paper

The paper shows 

1. how much more complex than perceived by Nonaka and associates, it is to access tacit knowledge and 
2. discusses methods of accessing it, 
3. the limits of these methods and 
4. what to do when it cannot be accessed.

This is a conceptual paper giving a fundamental critique of knowledge management, as conceptualised by Nonaka and colleagues by a critical reading of Polanyi, inspired by the Russian psychologist Vygotsky and the US engineering professor Ferguson. The findings are that the externalisation of tacit knowing is much more complex and less prone to be managed than suggested in extant literature. In creating knowledge from such tacit knowing the community pf practice is identified as crucial.

This conceptual paper traces the history of production from simple offerings, with the logic of a product structure to a virtual structure, then how components are outsourced in a supply chain. In Wintelism, individual functions, within a product architecture and specified interfaces, are outsourced. Focal firms view the value chain as an ecosystem to optimize value.

Destructive innovation restruct and destruct ecosystems that are outperformed by ecosystems providing new offerings. Fundamental destructive innovations disrupt the very way production is made, the mode of production, replacing it by another. This paper raises the question if we are close to such a fundamental disruption.

Since management and ownership separated, the objective of accounting was management control. In the wake of Enron, WorldCom and Vivendi voices, inspired by agency theory, were raised for further control. But an important motive was the interests of the global auditing firms.

If general management is corrupt recruitment procedures should change. Are people bad – theory Y?  Then replace management with machines.

Most managers wouldn’t manipulate if they could steer; they’d get rewarded accordingly. But they can’t. Most corporations are not steerable – no viable steering instruments, nor manageable entities.

Increased control is problematic; presuming the reason for failure is dishonest executives; not their lack of control! If they can’t control increased control of them might lead to implosion.

This paper shows that (1) it is possible to increase the quality of accounting information, but also that (2) this is insufficient. This should have (3) consequences for regulation of shareholder capitalism.

This is a conceptual paper about the most fundamental concept in the science of business administration, value. It traces its history, discusses the demarcation approach of the service dominant logic, arguing against it. We hold that customer co-creation is already presumed in the concept of use-value; the customer can realize the value-potential of a product or a service by satisfying experiences from the offering. Under certain circumstances relationships influence the value, often motivating temporal suspension of market relations. In other cases, relationships do not give the potential for additional value and the exchange between seller and buyer continues to be a transaction.The micro-foundations of value are searched in the social psychology oof these experiences and how they build the value.The paper suggests the need for radical re-focusing of business practices.

This is a conceptual paper about the most fundamental concept in the science of business administration, value. It traces its history, discusses the demarcation approach of the service dominant logic, arguing against it. We hold that customer co-creation is already presumed in the concept of use-value; the customer can realize the value-potential of a product or a service by satisfying experiences from the offering. Under certain circumstances relationships influence the value, often motivating temporal suspension of market relations. In other cases relationships do not give the potential for additional value and the exchange between seller and buyer continues to be a transaction.The micro-foundations of value are searched in the social psychology of these experiences and how they build the value.The paper suggests the need for radical re-focusing of business practices, by proposing a conceptual model based on the macro-foundations of value.

This a conceptual paper concerning the relation between innovativeness and monopoly rent/abnormal earnings. It discusses how these concepts can be measured and proposes that abnormal earnings are the result differentiation, by innovativeness (monopoly rent) or branding, by under- or overvalued assets, or by imperfect market information (value irrelevance). Specifically, innovativeness as a driver of monopoly rent/abnormal earnings is discussed. 

Swedish secondary school graduates has become less and less apt in mathematics, since the past 20 years (Mullis, et al., 2009). University students mostly chose to make qualitative studies, irrespective of if this is the best choice to study the research question on not. Many of them don’t even know how to make good qualitative studies. 

After analysis of the requirements of what is needed, using Prahalad’s (2006) ‘sandbox of innovation’, I have developed an abductive method for analyzing qualitative data to help students to get good use of their empirical material, a well-grounded theory, in contrast to the inherent deductive or inductive nature of grounded theory. It is suitable for studies based on interviews, focus groups and observations.

As the dataset grows, the method becomes cumbersome, which I don’t consider is a big problem, as big qualitative datasets would preferably be analyzed by non-parametric statistics, rather than the iterative interpreting qualitative methodology I suggest here. 

Purpose - This paper aims to investigate how the dominating myths of of a company changes.

Design/methodology/approach - The article is based on action research, and an analysis based on Marx and Gramsci.

Findings - In contrast to institutional theory and the individualistic so called top-echelon theories it is shown that top management is not necessarily in control of a company's direction and that it is necessary also for top-management to liberate themselves from hegemonic minds that threaten company survival.

Research limitations/implications - This is based on a case, and more research is needed to generalize the findings.

Practical implications - Elements of how to play the political games of subcultural conflicts It is shown.

Originality/value - The article shows that top management is neither necessarily in control of the company and neither have a clear understanding how to gain control, but that such control can be achieved as a truce between subcultures of acceptable intentionality.

In my doctoral thesis Capital functions and the position of the workers (in Swedish), published in 1980, I explored a Marxian theory of Business administration, based on a little known work by Marx: “Resultate des unmittelbares produktionsprozesses”.

I explored concepts like three levels of functions of capital: owning, administering and leading; the generalization of capital functions and hence globalization; the possibility that the workers could acquire the control of lower functions of capital, cf. Bettelheim (1980) and hence undermining the owning of the company. This led to the hypothesis that the productive forces has not reached anywhere near its highest possible development under capitalism and hence that communism today or in our life time is a romantic dream. We should instead try to increase the productive forces within capitalism and broadening workers’ control over capital functions to make a future communist society possible. Only through such an expansion of actual control, could the working class prepare itself for democratic (in contrast to despotic) communism.

I left academia in 1977 because of the resistance to my ideas. I became a practitioner, working as a management consultant, executive in large corporations and owner of small companies. Whenever I could I tried to apply my theories, with good and bad results.

One of these was the reengineering of a subsidiary of ABB, Asea Brown Boveri, the Swedish- Swiss, electrical equipment giant. In 1988 – 1992 I developed and implemented a new business idea and the computer architecture to support it, to make the subsidiary more effective (ABB would not have let me do it otherwise) and, as a personal agenda, to extend workers’ control over leading and administrating. The results where both encouraging and limited, but still shows clearly how a work force can extend their control and the preparedness for further extension of that control. 

This current paper addresses various aspects of the role of accounting for management control and discusses the limits of current management control systems. The paper draws on the discussion of accounting relevance of the current accounting assumptions for use in management control that receives consequences on corporate governance. Focus is on the boundaries of information, limiting the control of management and the possibility of improving corporate governance. It identifies, based on previous studies weaknesses in the practices and conceptualization of the going concern concept. Institutionalized thoughts and actions are identified as embodied in rituals and routines, where the accounting rituals are used in decision-making. Based on increasing volatility in the environment and the competence needed to adapt to the environment, it is argued that traditional accounting rituals are unsuitable for many companies. The paper indicates a need for de-institutionalization and reconsidering of accounting practices and thus particularly the assumption of going concern.

In the light of recent corporate scandals company failure is usually explained based on agency theory, leading to the conclusion that corporate boards and regulators must use agency theory to control management better.

The authors use institutional theory to problematize this advice. We identify the role of accounting as to give predictability, hence preventing company failure. But this predictability can be questioned; it implies stability. Albeit partly with circumstantial evidence, we question this stability with factors making the conditions for management decision-making volatile, as explained by antecedents, and leading to unmanageable entities. The implications of this volatility have consequences for corporate governance, and question the going-concern assumption, the basis of accounting.

Hence, from the dominant explanations that corrupt management, or management with different interests than the principal, leads to company failure, we evolve another chain of cause and effect: volatility, with company failure as a result. It is argued that traditional accounting rituals are unsuitable for many companies. The paper indicates a need for de-institutionalization and reconsidering of accounting practices, and particularly the fundamental assumption of going concern.

The objective of this paper is to build a model of how tacit knowing is externalised and becomes reflected external knowledge. 

Knowledge Management (Nonaka, 1991, 1994; Nonaka, Toyama and Konno, 2000) is an important field in Business Administration. Based on the model provided by Nonaka and his colleagues, researchers and practitioners have fallen into the pipe dream that employees’ tacit knowledge can be coded and canned in computers (structural capital), eventually leading to the enterprise without humans. Earlier critics (Gourlay, 2002, 2006; Gourlay and Nurse, 2005, Grant, 2007; Author 1, 2016a, 2019) of the knowledge management paradigm have shown that it does not understand Polanyi’s concept tacit knowing and that it is much more complicated to “externalize” such knowing than presumed by KM. The understanding in extant management literature of this process has been very problematic. 

Building on concepts in philosophy, psychology, pedagogics, organizational science, and engineering, a model is built and exemplified. This paper develops a theoretical framework for how tacit knowing can be externalized, what is required for such an externalization, and discusses the problems in such externalization, limiting it.

This is a conceptual paper. In her doctoral thesis, “Capital functions and the position of the workers” (in Swedish), published in 1980, Philpson36, explored a Marxian theory of Business administration, based on a little known work by Marx21, “Resultate des unmittelbares produktionsprozesses”. She explored the three concepts “levels of functions of capital”, after Bettelheim8, the “generalisation of capital functions” and hence globalisation and the possibility to use the concept of “hegemony” in business administration, after Gramsci.15

Two of the principle concepts were Marx’ “inner” and “outer” conditions of production. These pre-empted the Resource-Based View (RBV) and the School of Industrial Organization (IO) with hundred years. In Philipson36, she proposed 72 phenotypes for the principle strategic situations for companies, based on their inner and outer conditions of production. The resource based view and the Industrial Organization School have long been two antagonistic explanations of the strategic possibilities of firms.

This study is a synthesis of these two schools based on the framework developed in Philipson36. It suggests a phenomenology for studying firm strategy that might possibly give precedence for a different mix of the two schools in the phenomenological cases.

In spite of the development of the RBV and the IO over the last 30 years, the most interesting questions to pursue for strategy research are how companies transcends their resources to reinvent themselves and how they transcend their resources to face new environmental conditions of which they do not have enough experience and resources; hence the trans- cendence of their limitations. 

During a trip from Budapest to Berlin in 1990, Joakim made observations about a grey market trade between Rumanian Roma and Vietnamese guest students in Berlin. It was seemingly inexplicable how the two groups could enter into business relationships without a common language.

This paper interprets the observed events and raises fundamental questions about society, market economy, and democracy. It discusses the role of trust and reputation as the prerequisite of conditional trust and suggest that there are now validation for classical economic value theory and for relationship management. This has important consequences for sociology, business administration, and economics. 

During a trip from Budapest to Berlin in 1990, Joakim Philipson made observations about a grey market trade between Rumanian Roma and Vietnamese guest students in Berlin. It was seemingly inexplicable how the two groups could enter into business relationships without a common language. This paper uses the narrative as a basis for a discussion and interpretation of conditional trust and validates classical economic value theory. As “...research on trust... is relatively diverse and multidisciplinary” (Dirks and Ferrin, 2001; Lewicki et al., 1998; both after Gordon, 2007), we are drawing on research in as diverse fields as sociology, game theory, anthropology, and classical economics to question the paradigm that is the basis of both transaction cost economics and relationship management. As such the paper is a narrative case used for conceptual discourse.

With a background in the scandals in Enron, WorldCom, Vivendi, Adelphia, Tyco, Global Crossing, and others, this article discusses three ethical issues:

1) Are managers corrupt?

2) Is money corrupting management?

3) Or, are things too complex to be manageable?

Consequently, the authors argue that

1) Present accounting procedures are antiquated and provide limited value to those steering companies and could be improved.

2) That such improvement would not be sufficient to give corporate management real control over the company.

3) The question, thus, is that if corporate capitalism’s accounting practices, dating back to the 14th century, cannot keep up with the pace of business today, is corporate capitalism then sustainable and what governance issues does this prospect raise?

This study of the relation between two factors that might explain why the Swedish wood component manufacturing industry use customer involvement in product development to a very small extent, failed to give high complexity and high production cost interesting predictory value in explaining the limited role of customer involvement in product development.

In a complementary study, although with a small response rate, of the much more complex machine industry for the wood component industry even indicated that product complexity negatively impact customer involvement.

During the 1990s, many organizations and consumers experienced great movements and actions. Some key environmental factors provided the setting whereby companies changed their attention and orientation toward marketing and the consumer. Companies have recognized the fact that they must change and restructure their way of establishing and maintaining business relationships. For example, many manufacturers discovered, or more adequately, re-discovered that close relationships with suppliers are invaluable with constantly changing technology and increasing global competition.

The term relationship marketing has become a buzzword, with the concept being used to reflect a number of differing themes or perspectives, and has become a ”catch-all” phrase. Unfortunately, the roots and the precise meaning of relationship marketing are not always clear in the literature. This paper is part of a long term research effort to provide a deeper insight and understanding of the relationship philosophy. The purpose of the article is to theoretically and conceptually explain the evolution of the Relationship approach, to elaborate on the indispensable role of the traditional marketing mix theory on the development of the relationship management and strategy. The paper also discuss the notion of relationship marketing as a paradigm shift. Our research reveals that the philosophy of viewing marketing as a cross-functional approach or orientation is not a new discovery of the 1980s or 1990s. The paper also argue that, it would be appropriate if we replace the concept relationship marketing with relationship management. This is not just a semantic point, it is an essential distinction which can be strategically significant for the long-term survival of the organization

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to verify whether relationship marketing is a new paradigm that has replaced transactional marketing. Design/methodology/approach – A literature and empirical study indicated that relationship marketing is neither an invention of the late twentieth century, nor prevailing in practice. This suggested that rather than a complete paradigm shift, relationship marketing and transactional marketing are complementary. Through interviewing five Scandinavian companies about their marketing priorities, their mix of transactional and relationship marketing approaches was studied.

Findings – The paper finds that no company exclusively used the relationship marketing approach. Some were merely utilizing the traditional marketing concept of 4Ps; others were blending a relationship and transactional marketing mix. Research limitations/implications – This is a limited study, which calls for further validating. Practical implications – The Kotlerism of the 4Ps is still dominating. Relationship concepts are utilized to some extent. A relationship strategy can be used as a supporting approach. Thus, there is need to blend relationship and transactional marketing mixes.

Originality/value – The paper argues that the relationship marketing is not a paradigm shift; focus should be on relationship management, not marketing. The paper also shows the complementarities of relationship management and transactional marketing. 

According to our knowledge, no examination has been made regarding the triangle relationship between Quality, Innovation and Differentiation, QID, and what significance has QID for a firm's competitive position.

This article aims to theoretically and empirically develop an understanding of the  role of quality, innovation and differentiating in the competitiveness of an organization and proposes a holistic, cross-disciplinary model of the quality, innovation and differentiation QID). A case study shows that linking QID is necessary for sustaining competitive advantage in the hyper-competitive world.  The features and essentials in the attainment of such an approach are tentatively constructed through the total relationship management (TRM) and the 5Qs (five qualities) models. It shows that that QID and competitiveness are all linked. QID and total relationship management are strongly related to competitive advantages.  Thus we argue that TRM can be seen as administrative and process innovation, which facilitate technological innovation.