Summary Building on a Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson framework with factor price rigidities, this paper provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between trade, technical progress, and the labor market in West Germany for the period from 1970 until 1990. The analysis builds on relative...

Summary The rise of the East-German economy in the 1950s and 1960s and its decline in the 1970s and 1980s is difficult to explain by neoclassical economics. However; the observed life cycle may be explained by the inclusion of concepts from old and new institutional economics and from functional...

Purpose – Many organisations are operating in a dynamic competitive environment and experiencing increasing competition. As a result organisations in the service sector are continually seeking opportunities to remove waste and improve performance. Six sigma has been embraced by the service...

Purpose – Research has recognized the importance of middle management in the strategy process. Nonetheless, two questions raised by the involvement of middle management remain largely unexplored; they are central to this study. The first question concerns the conditions of this involvement....

The motive to manage impressions has been broken down into protective and acquisitive orientations. A protective orientation exists when an individual is concerned primarily with encountering disapproval, rather than approval, from the relevant audience. An acquisitive orientation exists when an...

Middle level managers, a typical feature of large hierarchical organisations, are a critical resource for ensuring performance and growth. Few studies, however, have specifically examined the nature of middle managerial roles, their causes and consequences for organisational performance and...

Employee participation is an important construct in contemporary organisations. Recently, the argument has concentrated on whether leader direction and participation can co‐exist. It is argued that leader direction is perceptually acceptable by employees at the strategic level of the decision...

Multiple initiatives have been taken to address the lack of managerial skills of MBA graduates since the Porter and McKibbin report. How effective or widespread these initiatives have been has been questioned. Before proceeding, 11 managerial skills were identified and tested for their relevance...

The shrinking supply of labour, the rising expectations of new entrants into the workforce, the trend towards corporate downsizing, and the growth in the number of plateaued middle managers will require corporations to develop innovative ways of recruiting, selecting, training, and developing...