Sales work is a key feature of the contemporary service economy which has prompted considerable academic debate. This has centred on the processes of standardization exemplified by sales routines and scripts. It is frequently suggested that these management devices are unproblematically embraced...

Over the last two decades there has been a substantial increase in the number and range of service sector SMEs. The management competence of the owner-manager and/or senior staff is crucial to their success. Developing appropriate competencies presents a particular challenge for professional...

There is much evidence in the literature that the volatilities of equity returns show evidence of asymmetric responses to good and bad news. At the same time, there is evidence that the unconditional distribution of stock returns is asymmetric as well. This paper examines the effects of...

Purpose: To show that the inability to adapt to a series of crises caused by business development is one of the principal causes of failure for all organisations and that one of the primary components in small business success must be the managerial competence of the principal actors, inevitably...

The majority of existing studies of small business failure tend to focus upon either the symptoms arising from problems within the firm or upon the reasons cited for failure. Comparatively little analysis of the root cause has been undertaken. Failure and success are usually defined in rational...

Company share options schemes have been the source of much debate over recent years. Critics have seen them as a significant component of the excessive compensation, and the "fat cat" rewards, received by senior executives. They further link this to the widening gap between the compensation...

This article reviews some of the applications of mathematical programming infinance. Of course mathematical programming has long been recognised as a vitalmodelling approach to solve optimization problems in finance. Markowitz’s NobelPrize winning work on portfolio optimization showed how...

In this article we argue that the common purchasing and supply management practice of evaluating supplier performance may be inappropriate in situations of supply partnerships, as it focuses on evaluating the performance of the supplier rather than the supply relationship. We explore a...

Purpose - To explore and identify the strategic approaches firms may follow in their pursuit of value transparency (VT) in inter-organisational relations in supply networks. Design/methodology/approach - Through the use of game theory an understanding of the difficulties of co-operation and...

This paper explains what ‘risk efficiency' means, why it is a key part of best practice project management, and why it may not be delivered by common practice as defined by some guidelines. This paper also explains how risk efficiency can be addressed operationally using comparative cumulative...