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Sex trafficking, trafficking for the purpose of forced sexual exploitation, is a widespread form of human trafficking that occurs in all regions of the world, affects mostly women and girls, and has far-reaching health implications. Studies suggest that up to 50 % of sex trafficking victims in the USA seek medical attention while in their trafficking situation, yet it is unclear how the healthcare system responds to the needs of victims of sex trafficking. To understand the intersection of sex trafficking and public health, we performed in-depth qualitative interviews among 277 antitrafficking stakeholders across eight metropolitan areas in five countries to examine the local context of sex trafficking. We sought to gain a new perspective on this form of gender-based violence from those who have a unique vantage point and intimate knowledge of push-and-pull factors, victim health needs, current available resources and practices in the health system, and barriers to care. Through comparative analysis across these contexts, we found that multiple sociocultural and economic factors facilitate sex trafficking, including child sexual abuse, the objectification of women and girls, and lack of income. Although there are numerous physical and psychological health problems associated with sex trafficking, health services for victims are patchy and poorly coordinated, particularly in the realm of mental health. Various factors function as barriers to a greater health response, including low awareness of sex trafficking and attitudinal biases among health workers. A more comprehensive and coordinated health system response to sex trafficking may help alleviate its devastating effects on vulnerable women and girls. There are numerous opportunities for local health systems to engage in antitrafficking efforts while partnering across sectors with relevant stakeholders.

This purpose of this article is to provide a framework into which we can integrate global strategy with stakeholder theory. Our aim is to create the basis for a research agenda that deals specifically with issues that are unique to global strategy and to use this perspective to demonstrate the insights that may arise for core stakeholder theory through the pursuit of such an agenda. We argue that a global perspective implies not only the management of stakeholders in various locations across the globe, but also the management of the rising phenomenon of multinationals and other organizations as truly global stakeholders. We argue that global stakeholder management involves a range of issues that are not yet fully considered either in the field of global strategy or the field of stakeholder theory. For example, drawing on recent research that emphasizes stakeholder claims as arising from rules of law (Stout 2012; Klein et al 2013), global strategy can involve selectively exposing the corporation across jurisdictions to particular stakeholders. This presents an opportunity for gains from the trade in intellectual ideas, concepts, theories, and empirical findings.

This study's main contribution is examination of the excess capacity held by brewers during a period in which they tacitly cooperated on price. The analysis covers the industry in the United States between repeal of Prohibition in 1933 and wartime rationing of raw material in 1942. From April 1933 to May 1935, "destructive price-cutting" among brewers was illegal under the National Industrial Recovery Act. Subsequent rivalry among trade associations facilitated the development of tacitly cooperative pricing arrangements. The trade associations appear to have adopted a different agenda as cooperation spread among all brewers. Instead of just facilitating cooperation on price, the associations may have facilitated cooperation in the distribution of responsibility for enforcement. Members apparently distributed responsibility by coordinating the allocation of excess capacity. These and other results are interpreted to suggest additional avenues for research on the distribution of responsibility for punishments in a cooperative regime. Copyright 1995 by the University of Chicago.

Life expectancy has risen sharply in the last 50 years. We applied the classic Michaelis–Menten enzyme kinetics to demonstrate a novel mathematical relationship of income to childhood (aged 0–5 years) and adult (aged 15–60 years) survival. We treat income as a substrate that is catalyzed to increase survival (from technologies that income buys) for 180 countries from 1970 and 2007. Michaelis–Menten kinetics permit estimates of maximal survival and, uniquely, the critical income needed to achieve half of the period-specific maximum. Maximum child and adult survival rose by about 1% per year. Critical incomes fell by half for children, but doubled for men. HIV infection and smoking account for some, but not all, of the rising critical incomes for adult survival. Altering the future cost curve for adult survival will require more widespread use of current interventions, most notably tobacco control, but also research to identify practicable low-cost drugs, diagnostics, and strategies. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.00051.001, eLife digest In 1975 Samuel Preston published a classic paper that showed life expectancy was related to national income. When plotted as a graph, with national income on the horizontal axis and life expectancy on the vertical axis, the Preston curve shows that an increase in national income leads to an increase in life expectancy, with the increases in life expectancy becoming proportionally smaller as income increases. Moreover, Preston showed that innovations in healthcare (such as vaccinations, public health education, and sanitation systems) were increasing the maximum life expectancy that can be achieved for any given national income (defined as GDP per capita): this can be seen by comparing the Preston curves from 1960 and 2000 shown in Figure 1A. Indeed, global life expectancy increased by about 25 years over the course of the 20th century, which suggests that the level of daily income needed to achieve a certain life expectancy should be falling over time. To explore this in greater detail, Hum et al. have constructed a mathematical model to investigate the relationship between health and income across different age groups and income levels. They found that most of the gains in life expectancy for low- and middle-income countries have been achieved by reducing child mortality, with gains in life expectancy for adults being restricted mostly to high-income countries. The model, which is based on the mathematical equations used to describe the kinetics of enzymatic reactions, makes it possible to estimate the improvements of health that can be made over time, and also the level of income that is needed to achieve these improvements. In particular, Hum et al. have established a new parameter, the critical income, which is the level of income needed to achieve half of the maximal health found in high-income countries for the year in question. Based on available data from over 150 countries, they found that critical incomes fell by half for children between 1970 and 2007, but doubled for adult males during the same period. The rise in critical income for adults was due partly to the HIV epidemic and increases in smoking in low- and middle-income countries, reflecting the growing problems presented by noncommunicable diseases. Hum et al. conclude that increasing the survival among adults will require increased use of proven cost-effective interventions, most notably tobacco control, plus new research to identify low-cost drugs, diagnostics, and other public health strategies. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.00051.002

The fields of strategy and organization are dominated by the stylized idea that the purpose of the firm is to maximize returns on investment for equity shareholders. This idea is based on simplifying assumptions about externalities, contractual ties, investments, and the nature of competition. As a result, the dominant conceptualization of the firm’s purpose as shareholder value maximization may lead to serious misunderstandings regarding the firm’s contractual obligations. Furthermore, the idea of shareholder value maximization may lead to problematic and inaccurate representations of organization, innovation, and other aspects of value creation and capture. Creating and capturing value in the presence of spillovers, relationship-specific investments, and complex contractual ties is difficult in ways that are obscured by a relentless focus on shareholder value. In this essay, we develop these claims and point to the consequences for the canonical business school curriculum, which does not deal sufficiently with the challenges of value creation and capture under more realistic assumptions. We compare the shareholder view with a stakeholder view and seek to advance a synthetic agenda that puts limits on stakeholder claims without problematic, stylized assumptions. 453108 SOQ10310.1177/1476127012453108Klein et al.Strategic Organization 2012

Biopharmaceutical innovation has had a profound health and economic impact globally. Developed countries have traditionally been the source of most innovations as well as the destination for the resulting economic and health benefits. As a result, most prior research on this sector has focused on developed countries. This paper seeks to fill the gap in research on emerging markets by analyzing factors that influence innovative activity in the indigenous biopharmaceutical sectors of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa. Using qualitative research methodologies, this paper a) shows how biopharmaceutical innovation is taking place within the entrepreneurial sectors of these emerging markets, b) identifies common challenges that indigenous entrepreneurs face, c) highlights the key role played by the state, and d) reveals that the transition to innovation by companies in the emerging markets is characterized by increased global integration. It suggests that biopharmaceutical innovators in emerging markets are capitalizing on opportunities to participate in the drug development value chain and thus developing capabilities and relationships for competing globally both with and against established companies headquartered in developed countries.

This paper contains theoretical and empirical analysis of competition to retain customers. A formal game-theoretic model suggests that large firms are likely to exhibit greater customer retention rates than their smaller rivals in equilibrium even when their (common) customer retention technology does not exhibit increasing returns to scale. This hypothesis is corroborated by an empirical analysis of competition in ordinary life insurance.

In certain circumstances, a first-mover need not preemptively invest in capacity to discourage entry into a new market. Asymmetric learning about buyer acceptance may make preemption unnecessary. This paper explores the tension between competitive pressure to invest and the real option value in an entry opportunity under uncertainty about demand. If an outsider's expectation about buyer valuation makes entry appear less attractive, and if an incumbent can keep proprietary its updated information about demand, then it may be able to secure its advantage and partially deter imitators without a substantial initial capacity investment.

This social science case study examines the sex trafficking of women and girls in Metro Manila through a public health lens. Through key informant interviews with 51 health care and anti-trafficking stakeholders in Metro Manila, this study reports on observations about sex trafficking in Metro Manila that provide insight into understanding of risk factors for sex trafficking at multiple levels of the social environment: individual (for example, childhood abuse), socio-cultural (for example, gender inequality and a "culture of migration"), and macro (for example, profound poverty caused, inter alia, by environmental degradation disrupting traditional forms of labor). It describes how local health systems currently assist sex-trafficking victims, and provides a series of recommendations, ranging from prevention to policy, for how health care might play a larger role in promoting the health and human rights of this vulnerable population.

'Sustainability' has become a central criterion used by funders - including foundations, governmental agencies and international agencies - in evaluating public health programmes. The criterion became important as a result of frustration with discontinuities in the provision of care. As a result of its application, projects that involve building infrastructure, training or relatively narrow objectives tend to receive support. In this article, we argue for a reconceptualisation of sustainability criteria in light of the idea that health is an investment that is itself sustaining and sustainable, and for the abandonment of conceptualisations of sustainability that focus on the consumable medical interventions required to achieve health. The implication is a tailoring of the time horizon for creating value that reflects the challenges of achieving health in a community. We also argue that funders and coordinating bodies, rather than the specialised health providers that they support, are best positioned to develop integrated programmes of medical interventions to achieve truly sustainable health outcomes.

This paper explores innovation, experimentation, and creativity in the public domain and in the public interest. Researchers in various disciplines have studied public entrepreneurship, but there is little work in management and economics on the nature, incentives, constraints, and boundaries of entrepreneurship directed to public ends. We identify a framework for analyzing public entrepreneurship and its relationship to private entrepreneurial behavior. We submit that public and private entrepreneurship share essential features but differ critically regarding the definition and measurement of objectives, the nature of the selection environment, and the opportunities for rent seeking. We describe four levels of analysis for studying public entrepreneurship, provide examples, and suggest new research directions. © 2010 EURAM Macmillan Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

States, state agencies, multilateral agencies, and other non-market actors are relatively under-studied in strategic management and organization science. While important contributions to the study of public actors have been made within the agency-theoretic and transaction-cost traditions, there is little research in political economy that builds on resource-based, dynamic capabilities, and behavioral approaches to the firm. Yet public organizations can be characterized as stocks of human and non-human resources, including routines and capabilities; they can possess excess capacity in these resources; and they may grow and diversify in predictable patterns according to behavioral and Penrosean logic. This paper shows how resource-based, dynamic capabilities, and behavioral approaches to understanding public agencies and organizations shed light on their nature and governance.

In this article the authors respond to comments made about a paper they published in a pervious issue that discussed that examined organizational decline. The authors proposed two models of the process in their original work, the second of which drew the most scrutiny. In this article they reexamine this model of organizational decline and address various aspects of the model more intensively. The main areas that they focus on are explaining why administrative ratios were not included in their model as well as offering a better argument for why the assumption of symmetry between decline and growth was not needed in their model.

This paper deals with three issues concerning economic valuation in global health. First, we argue that the economic value of health delivery in resource-limited settings is not fully captured through the adding up of successive assessments of individual interventions. Second, we suggest that economic valuations can be used to identify social barriers to the success of health technologies in resource-limited settings. Third, we briefly discuss new directions for research on economic valuations given the interdependency between poor health and economic impoverishment.

In this paper, we study the evolution of private military corporations (PMCs), which are for-profit organizations that subcontract military field services to sovereign authorities as well as to others. Between Eisenhower’s famous “military-industrial complex” speech in 1961 and the post-9/11 war in Iraq, PMCs were transformed from relatively minor subcontractors to major companies with unique capabilities that made them strategically central to the sovereign military organizations from which they had grown. Throughout this period, PMCs exhibited a “hybrid organizational form” as delineated within organizational economics. Our purpose is grounded theorizing in which we derive insights about the evolution of PMCs as hybrid organizational forms. Our analysis suggests that hybrid forms of organization enable transactions and capability development that are not possible within either markets or hierarchies. Hybrid forms may thus represent a conduit for institutional entrepreneurship and the emergence of new industry structures. Their intertemporal characteristics warrant further theoretical study.

This paper explores how management theories can be extended and applied to innovation, experimentation, and creativity in the public domain. Researchers in various disciplines have studied public entrepreneurship, but there is little research specifically on the management of organizations to innovate in the public interest. We begin by extending concepts of the entrepreneur to the public domain, and then turn to the role of the entrepreneur in fostering institutional change. The conclusion refines the institutional theory of the state to incorporate the role of entrepreneurs in organizing public and private institutions.

The predominant focus in research on organizations is on private or public institutions without consistent consideration of their interdependencies. The emphasis in scholarship on private or public interests has strengthened as disciplinary and professional knowledge has deepened: Management scholars, for example, tend to consider the corporation as the unit of analysis, whereas scholars of public policy often analyze governmental, multilateral, community, and nonprofit organizations. This article advocates a partial merging of these research agendas on the grounds that private and public interests cannot be fully understood if they are conceived independently. We review three major areas of activity today in which public and private interests interact in complex ways and maintain that current theories of organization science can be deployed to understand these interactions better. We also suggest that theories of public-private interaction require development and describe a concept called global sustainable value creation, which may be used to identify organizational and institutional configurations and strategies conducive to worldwide, intertemporal efficiency and value creation. We conclude that scholarship on organizations would advance if private-public interactions were evaluated by the criterion of global sustainable value creation, and we identify organizational research opportunities that jointly consider public and private interests. © 2009 INFORMS.

In 1966 the Supreme Court expressed a desire to arrest consolidation of the brewing industry “in its incipiency.” This article argues that a national brewing oligopoly had already emerged by that date. In the 1930s and 1940s, restrained demand and regulatory pressure discouraged price and advertising competition and forced brewers to adopt cost-saving technologies. By the end of the Second World War, the largest brewers harbored unexploited economies of scale in processing. With relief from war shortages in the 1950s, large regional brewers expanded to pursue processing economies and secured their advantages with scale in distribution and advertising.

This paper describes how firm characteristics evolve in different industries. In particular, it reports on relationships between industry performance and competitor diversity in the American economy from 1981 to 1997. Industry performance is measured using a prospective measure of performance (Tobin's q) and a measure of performance that reflects historical competence (accounting profitability). Competitor diversity is characterized by differences in size, operating margin, asset composition, and asset utilization. The results indicate significant diversity among competitors in both high- and low-performance industries. The study suggests that low industry performance may be associated with processes of transition in competitor characteristics.

In 1986, Teece proposed a seminal framework for analyzing why innovators may fail to benefit from their innovations. He argued, in part, that firms with the requisite complementary assets can often expropriate an innovator’s returns especially when appropriability regimes are weak. In this paper, we explore the implications of this framework from the perspective of an incumbent firm – more precisely, of investors in that firm – facing innovation by inventors from outside its industry. We demonstrate that the financialmarket value of publicly traded firms depends on patented innovation by competitors, both existing rivals and industry outsiders. Our empirical study generates three main results. First, the financial-market value of an incumbent is negatively associated with “important” patenting by outsiders. Second, in industries characterized by weak appropriability regimes or by a strong reliance on complementary assets, this relationship is reversed: important patenting by outsiders is positively associated with the incumbent’s financial-market value. Third, the effect of outsiders’ patented innovation on the focal incumbent is qualitatively different than that of existing rivals’ patented innovation on the incumbent. These results are consistent with implications of Teece (1986) and with recently developed models that formalize elements of his framework. More generally, these results support theories about both the market-stealing and spillover effects of innovation.

We examine differences in the risk-mitigation practices of venture-capital investors in managing both US and non-US ventures. The analysis focuses on actions taken by investors to manage the risks in venture firms. In particular, we evaluate whether investors disburse an average dollar to non-US ventures through more rounds, a shorter elapsed time between rounds, and broader syndication than to US ventures. After controlling for exogenous characteristics such as the industry affiliations of the ventures, the evidence is consistent with the finding that US ventures are not less risky than ventures from other parts of the world. Investors do not disburse funds to non-US ventures in more rounds, require less elapsed time between rounds, or syndicate more broadly than for US ventures. This may occur because investors select relatively higher quality ventures outside the US than in the US. The conclusions emphasize that the venture community has not developed fully in its understanding of international investing.

It's fairly obvious: To make intelligent investments within your organization, you need to understand how your whole industry is changing. But such knowledge is not always easy to come by. Companies misread clues and arrive at false conclusions all the time. To truly understand where your industry is headed, you have to take a long-term, high-level look at the context in which you do business, says Boston University professor Anita McGahan. She studied a variety of businesses from a cross section of industries over a ten-year period, examining how industry structure affects business profitability and investor returns. Her research suggests that industries evolve along one of four distinct trajectories--radical, progressive, creative, and intermediating--that set boundaries on what will generate profits in a business. These four trajectories are defined by two types of threats. The first is when new, outside alternatives threaten to weaken or make obsolete core activities that have historically generated profits for an industry. The second is when an industry's core assets--its resources, knowledge, and brand capital--fail to generate value as they once did. Industries undergo radical change when core assets and core activities are both threatened with obsolescence; they experience progressive change when neither are jeopardized. Creative change occurs when core assets are under threat but core activities are stable, and intermediating change happens when core activities are threatened while core assets retain their capacity to create value. If your company's innovation strategy is not aligned with your industry's change trajectory, your plan for achieving returns on invested capital cannot succeed, McGahan says. But if you understand which path you're on, you can determine which strategies will succeed and which will backfire.

The central organizing principle for this volume – the industry life cycle model – is so widely accepted and its basic premises so taken for granted that it has become conventional wisdom in business. Executives in a range of industries use the model to guide their thinking about when and how to invest in various industries. Diversification decisions, for example, are often made on the basis of life cycle logic, especially as large, established companies seek high-growth opportunities for investment.

BACKGROUND:Scaling up innovative healthcare programs offers a means to improve access, quality, and health equity across multiple health areas. Despite large numbers of promising projects, little is known about successful efforts to scale up. This study examines trans-national scale, whereby a program operates in two or more countries. Trans-national scale is a distinct measure that reflects opportunities to replicate healthcare programs in multiple countries, thereby providing services to broader populations. METHODS:Based on the Center for Health Market Innovations (CHMI) database of nearly 1200 health programs, the study contrasts 116 programs that have achieved trans-national scale with 1,068 single-country programs. Data was collected on the programs' health focus, service activity, legal status, and funding sources, as well as the programs' locations (rural v. urban emphasis), and founding year; differences are reported with statistical significance. FINDINGS:This analysis examines 116 programs that have achieved trans-national scale (TNS) across multiple disease areas and activity types. Compared to 1,068 single-country programs, we find that trans-nationally scaled programs are more donor-reliant; more likely to focus on targeted health needs such as HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, or family planning rather than provide more comprehensive general care; and more likely to engage in activities that support healthcare services rather than provide direct clinical care. CONCLUSION:This work, based on a large data set of health programs, reports on trans-national scale with comparison to single-country programs. The work is a step towards understanding when programs are able to replicate their services as they attempt to expand health services for the poor across countries and health areas. A subset of these programs should be the subject of case studies to understand factors that affect the scaling process, particularly seeking to identify mechanisms that lead to improved health outcomes.

The purpose of this panel symposium is to show why and how context matters, and to draw attention to the benefits of integrating causal mechanisms and context to explain complex organizational phenomena. Our goal is to initiate a new dialogue among various constituents of the Academy of Management by bringing forward new questions and perspectives that highlight the salience of “contexts”. We believe this panel will generate fresh new debates particularly among Business Policy and Strategy (BPS), International Management (IM), and Organization and Management Theory (OMT) division members; and also will be of interest to members of the Entrepreneurship, Organization Behavior and Research Methods Divisions.

Each panellist intends to evaluate the power and limitations of words for governance systems from a different point of view and line of argumentation. Ruth Aguilera proposes an examination of the words in corporate governance research, which is rooted predominantly in the context of shareholder-value principles and challenges researchers to explore how words travel across corporate governance systems in countries, types of firms and industries. Tom Donaldson provokes a revision of the language used in the contemporary economic theory of governance and proposes to leverage the power of words by creating a modified “specialized” language in order to develop an ethically comprehensive corporate governance theory. Jared Harris claims that conversation should be viewed as central rather than supplementary to an understanding of ethics and proposes a research agenda for the role of conversation. Joseph Mahoney brings to attention that the attenuation of governance challenges resides less in the technical sharpe...

In this article, we contribute to understanding of country, industry and firm effects on performance by examining heterogeneity in the profitability of corporations from both emerging and developed...

This symposium addresses stakeholder engagement, social movements and activism, and examines how new forms of social constituent or stakeholder involvement can shape our societies and affect firm l...

Many social macro trends radically reshape the global landscape, and bring fundamental questions to center stage: How can we ensure that the means and ways we use for generating society’s wellbeing...

The article presents an introduction to an interview with writer Michael E. Porter published within the issue.

Background The poor in low and middle income countries have limited access to health services due to limited purchasing power, residence in underserved areas, and inadequate health literacy. This produces significant gaps in health care delivery among a population that has a disproportionately large burden of disease. They frequently use the private health sector, due to perceived or actual gaps in public services. A subset of private health organizations, some called social enterprises, have developed novel approaches to increase the availability, affordability and quality of health care services to the poor through innovative health service delivery models. This study aims to characterize these models and identify areas of innovation that have led to effective provision of care for the poor. Methods An environmental scan of peer-reviewed and grey literature was conducted to select exemplars of innovation. A case series of organizations was then purposively sampled to maximize variation. These cases were examined using content analysis and constant comparison to characterize their strategies, focusing on business processes. Results After an initial sample of 46 studies, 10 case studies of exemplars were developed spanning different geography, disease areas and health service delivery models. These ten organizations had innovations in their marketing, financing, and operating strategies. These included approaches such a social marketing, cross-subsidy, high-volume, low cost models, and process reengineering. They tended to have a narrow clinical focus, which facilitates standardizing processes of care, and experimentation with novel delivery models. Despite being well-known, information on the social impact of these organizations was variable, with more data on availability and affordability and less on quality of care. Conclusions These private sector organizations demonstrate a range of innovations in health service delivery that have the potential to better serve the poor's health needs and be replicated. There is a growing interest in investing in social enterprises, like the ones profiled here. However, more rigorous evaluations are needed to investigate the impact and quality of the health services provided and determine the effectiveness of particular strategies.

Many health service delivery models are adapting health services to meet rising demand and evolving health burdens in low- and middle-income countries. While innovative private sector models provide potential benefits to health care delivery, the evidence base on the characteristics and impact of such approaches is limited. We have developed a performance measurement framework that provides credible (relevant aspects of performance), feasible (available data), and comparable (across different organizations) metrics that can be obtained for private health services organizations that operate in resource-constrained settings. We synthesized existing frameworks to define credible measures. We then examined a purposive sample of 80 health organizations from the Center for Health Market Innovations (CHMI) database ( healthmarketinnovations.org ) to identify what the organizations reported about their programs (to determine feasibility of measurement) and what elements could be compared across the sample. The resulting measurement framework includes fourteen subgroups within three categories of health status, health access, and operations/delivery. The emphasis on credible, feasible, and comparable measures in the framework can assist funders, program managers, and researchers to support, manage, and evaluate the most promising strategies to improve access to effective health services. Although some of the criteria that the literature views as important – particularly population coverage, pro-poor targeting, and health outcomes – are less frequently reported, the overall comparison provides useful insights.