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Western Economies (western + economy)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting75%

Selected Abstracts

Service Management,Academic Issues and Scholarly Reflections from Operations Management Researchers,

DECISION SCIENCES, Issue 2 2007
Richard Metters
ABSTRACT Services are now a larger portion of the economy than manufacturing for every nation on Earth, and services are an overwhelming portion of Western economies. While decision-making research has begun responding to this change, much of the scholarly work still addresses manufacturing issues. Particularly revealing is the field of operations management (OM), in which the proportion of manuscripts dedicated to services has been estimated at 3%, 6%, and 7.5% by various authors. We investigate several possible reasons for the neglect of services in research, including the difficulty in defining services, viewing services as derivative activities, a lack of defined processes, a lack of scale in services, and the effect of variability on service performance. We argue that times have changed, and none of these reasons is valid anymore. We sound the warning that failure to emphasize services in our research and teaching may signal the decline of the discipline. We note the proportion of OM faculty in business schools has shrunk in the past 10 years. Finally, we examine a selection of service research agendas and note several directions for high-impact, innovative research to revitalize the decision sciences. With practitioners joining the call for more research in services, the academic community has an exciting opportunity to embrace services and reshape its future. [source]

GUNS AND OIL: AN ANALYSIS OF CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS TRADE IN THE POST-COLD WAR ERA

ECONOMIC INQUIRY, Issue 2 2010
NEHA KHANNA
This paper analyzes the global conventional weapons trade between 1989 and 1999. We postulate that a key reason for the huge transfer of weapons to the Persian Gulf region is the enormous value of the oil wealth there along with the dependence of Western economies on access to the relatively cheap and steady supply of crude oil. We find a strong, positive, and robust empirical association between arms trade and crude oil trade and explain it as the result of a target price band arrangement that was responsible for the remarkably stable crude oil prices during our study period. (JEL F10, F59, Q38) [source]

Managing knowledge in the healthcare sector.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT REVIEWS, Issue 3 2008
A review
Over the past decade, knowledge management (KM), as a concept and a set of practices, has penetrated into the fabric of organizational and managerial processes in the healthcare sector, which has been the site of numerous innovative KM practices. As a result scholars from a range of academic (and non-academic) fields have begun to document how KM is conceived and practised in health care, what the recurrent issues are and how they can be addressed. The purpose of this paper is to review the current literature on KM concepts, policies and practices in the healthcare sector. Based on the analysis of the most relevant contributions in the last six years, three overarching themes that have occupied the interests of authors are identified and discussed: the nature of knowing in the healthcare sector, the type of KM tools and initiatives that are suitable for the healthcare sector, and the barriers and enablers to the take up of KM practices. The paper concludes with some considerations on what the literature tells us about the state of the art and the future of KM in this important sector of Western economies. [source]

,Asian values' as reverse Orientalism: Singapore

ASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 2 2000
Michael Hill
It is possible to demonstrate, using Singapore as a key example, the way in which the attribution of a set of ,Asian values' represented a Western project which is best labelled ,reverse Orientalism'. This process entailed the attribution of a set of cultural values to East and Southeast Asian societies by Western social scientists in order to contrast the recent dynamic progress of Asian development with the stagnation and social disorganisation of contemporary Western economies and societies. The contrast provided legitimation for some of the nation-building policies of political leaders in such countries as Singapore and was incorporated in attempts to identify and institutionalise core values. [source]