The 2008 crash has left all the established economic doctrines - equilibrium models, real business cycles, disequilibria models - in disarray. Part of the problem is due to Smith’s "veil of ignorance": individuals unknowingly pursue society’s interest and, as a result, have no clue as to the macroeconomic effects of their actions: witness the Keynes and Leontief multipliers, the concept of value added, fiat money, Engel’s law and technical progress, to name but a few of the macrofoundations of microeconomics. A good viewpoint to take bearings anew lies in comparing the post-Great Depression institutions with those emerging from Thatcher and Reagan’s economic policies: deregulation, exogenous vs. endoge- nous money, shadow banking vs. Volcker’s Rule. Very simply, the banks, whose lending determined deposits after Roosevelt, and were a public service became private enterprises whose deposits determine lending. These underlay the great moderation preceding 2006, and the subsequent crash.

The Economic Institutions of Capitalism

A computational model is a representation of some physical or other system of interest, first expressed mathematically and then implemented in the form of a computer program; it may be viewed as a function of inputs that, when evaluated, produces outputs. Motivation for this article comes from computational models that are deterministic, complicated enough to make classical mathematical analysis impractical and that have a moderate-to-large number of inputs. The problem of designing computational experiments to determine which inputs have important effects on an output is considered. The proposed experimental plans are composed of individually randomized one-factor-at-a-time designs, and data analysis is based on the resulting random sample of observed elementary effects, those changes in an output due solely to changes in a particular input. Advantages of this approach include a lack of reliance on assumptions of relative sparsity of important inputs, monotonicity of outputs with respect to inputs, or ad...

Factorial sampling plans for preliminary computational experiments

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Green supply chain management: A review and bibliometric analysis

https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/portal/files/26140333/Esfahbodi_et_al_Sustainable_supply_chain_management_Int_Journal_Production_Economics_Post_Print.pdf

Sustainable supply chain management in emerging economies: Trade-offs between environmental and cost performance

Supply Chains and Power Regimes: Toward an Analytic Framework for Managing Extended Networks of Buyer and Supplier Relationships

Purpose – This paper attempts to seek answers to four questions. Two of these questions have been borrowed (but adapted) from the work of Defee et al.: RQ1. To what extent is theory used in purchasing and supply chain management (P&SCM) research? RQ2. What are the prevalent theories to be found in P&SCM research? Following on from these questions an additional question is posed: RQ3. Are theory-based papers more highly cited than papers with no theoretical foundation? Finally, drawing on the work of Harland et al., the authors have added a fourth question: RQ4. To what extent does P&SCM meet the tests of coherence, breadth and depth, and quality necessary to make it a scientific discipline?

Design/methodology/approach – A systematic literature review was conducted in accordance with the model outlined by Tranfield et al. for three journals within the field of “purchasing and supply chain management”. In total 1,113 articles were reviewed. In addition a citation analysis was completed covering 806 articles in total.

Findings – The headline features from the results suggest that nearly a decade-and-a-half on from its development, the field still lacks coherence. There is the absence of theory in much of the work and although theory-based articles achieved on average a higher number of citations than non-theoretical papers, there is no obvious contender as an emergent paradigm for the discipline. Furthermore, it is evident that P&SCM does not meet Fabian's test necessary to make it a scientific discipline and is still some way from being a normal science.

Research limitations/implications – This study would have benefited from the analysis of further journals, however the analysis of 1,113 articles from three leading journals in the field of P&SCM was deemed sufficient in scope. In addition, a further significant line of enquiry to follow is the rigour vs relevance debate.

Practical implications – This article is of interest to both an academic and practitioner audience as it highlights the use theories in P&SCM. Furthermore, this article raises a number of important questions. Should research in this area draw more heavily on theory and if so which theories are appropriate?

Social implications – The broader social implications relate to the discussion of how a scientific discipline develops and builds on the work of Fabian and Amundson.

Originality/value – The data set for this study is significant and builds on a number of previous literature reviews. This review is both greater in scope than previous reviews and is broader in its subject focus. In addition, the citation analysis (not previously conducted in any of the reviews) and statistical test highlights that theory-based articles are more highly cited than non-theoretically based papers. This could indicate that researchers are attempting to build on one another's work.

Theoretical perspectives in purchasing and supply chain management: an analysis of the literature

This paper reports the findings of a two‐year EPSRC funded research project into relationship and performance strategies in power regimes. The findings from 12 very different industrial and service sector cases studies demonstrate that there is a correlation between the ability to improve the performance of suppliers and the power circumstances that exist between the buyers and suppliers. Buyers appear to be able to achieve improved performance from suppliers in situations of buyer dominance or interdependence. The research also demonstrates that whatever the objective power circumstance managers often subjectively misperceive the appropriate sourcing choices available to them. As a result business relationships can be aligned, but they are often misaligned. Furthermore, misaligned relationships may be “remediable” but they may not.

Managing appropriately in power regimes: relationship and performance management in 12 supply chain cases

The limiting distributions for the order statistics of $n$ successive observations in a sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables are shown to hold also when the sequence is generated by a stationary stochastic process of a certain moving average type. A sequence of random variables $\{x_i\}$ has been called $m$-dependent [3] if $| i - j | > m$ implies that $x_i$ and $x_j$ are independent. If the variables in a strictly stationary sequence are $m$-dependent and have a finite upper bound to their range of variation, the largest in a sample of $n$ successive members tends with probability one to this upper bound. This is a simple extension of Dodd's results [1] for the case of independence. The following theorem shows that when this upper bound is infinite, the asymptotic distribution of the largest in such a sample is the same as in the case of independence.

/pdf/extreme-values-in-samples-from-m-dependent-stationary-7rbhxvvrpl.pdf

Glyn Watson

Papers

Sustainable supply chain management in emerging economies: Trade-offs between environmental and cost performance

Supply Chains and Power Regimes: Toward an Analytic Framework for Managing Extended Networks of Buyer and Supplier Relationships

Theoretical perspectives in purchasing and supply chain management: an analysis of the literature

Managing appropriately in power regimes: relationship and performance management in 12 supply chain cases

Extreme Values in Samples from $m$-Dependent Stationary Stochastic Processes