In England, publicly supported advice to small firms is organized primarily through the Business Link (BL) network. Using the programme theory underlying this business support, we develop four propositions and test these empirically using data from a new survey of over 3000 English SMEs. We find...

This study defines an aspect of consultant knowledge that provides credibility without claiming unrealistic status for a field like consulting. Our focus is the "sector knowledge" that consultants accumulate which derives from repeated assignments in the industrial sector in which the client...

Management consultancy is seen by many as a key agent in the adoption of new management ideas and practices in organizations. Two contrasting views are dominant-consultants as innovators, bringing new knowledge to their clients or as legitimating client knowledge. Those few studies which examine...

This paper reports some empirical findings which appear to challenge the received wisdom prevailing in the operations management, service management, TQM and HRM literatures, namely, that employee satisfaction and loyalty are key drivers of productivity, efficiency and profit. An empirical study...

This article explores practical and competitive aspects of the role that technology plays in service firms. A review of resource based theory leads to a conceptual model describing how technology can contribute to sustainable competitive advantage (SCA). The pragmatic challenge of implementation...

This paper argues that OR, having reached its maturity, must now play to its strengths. in strategic terms this means competing in those areas where OR's core competences can be brought to bear. Using a competence model it is suggested that OR's core products are (i) the development and...

This paper reports on the results of an in-depth Study of how a top management team (TMT) puts strategy into practice in a UK university. A study of the top team in Warwick University was conducted to analyse how strategy was formulated and implemented. The results suggest that a combination of...

Adds to the stream of research concerned with understanding the relationship between good service and profit. Takes a broader perspective than recent studies and asks does the financial performance of those organisations with a reputation for service excellence differ markedly from those with a...

This article reviews recently proposed likelihood ratio tests of goodness-of-fit and independence of interval forecasts. It recasts them in the framework of Pearson chi-squared statistics, and considers their extension to density forecasts. The use of the familiar framework of contingency tables...

Quasi-Monte Carlo methods overcome the problem of sample clustering in regular Monte Carlo simulation and have been shown to improve simulation efficiency in the derivatives pricing literature when the price is expressed as a multidimensional integration and the integrand is suitably smooth. For...