Geoffrey Lightfoot

The use of quantitative and qualitative criteria in the measurement of performance in small firms

Concern has been expressed, over the years, about the financial management strategies adopted by small firms, but very little is known about these practices. Business performance measures are an important element of these financial management strategies. The paper discusses the findings from research carried out in the UK examining the quantitative and qualitative criteria in the measurement of performance in small firms. Semi‐structured interviews were carried out with 20 owner‐managers from both manufacturing and service sectors. Orthodox theory assumes that the objective of the firm is to maximise profits, and it follows that the performance measures advocated are largely based upon this theory. However, research has shown that small firms pursue a range of goals. It was, therefore, not surprising to find that owner‐managers of small firms used a variety of measures and indicators to assess business performance. Profit measures were found to be less important than conventional views suggest. In particular, cash flow indicators were considered to be critical. Other performance measures adopted by owner‐managers include the quality of inputs and outputs and intangible indicators.

Price Fluctuations and the Use of Bitcoin: An Empirical Inquiry

ABSTRACT Over recent years, interest has been growing in Bitcoin, an innovation that has the potential to play an important role in e-commerce and beyond. The aim of our paper is to provide a comprehensive empirical study of the payment and investment features of Bitcoin, and their implications for the conduct of e-commerce. Since network externality theory suggests that the value of a network and its take-up are interlinked, we investigate both adoption and price formation. We discover that its returns are driven primarily by Bitcoin’s popularity, the sentiment expressed in newspaper reports on cryptocurrency, and total number of transactions. The paper also reports on the first global survey of merchants who have adopted this technology, and we model the share of sales paid for with this alternative currency, using both ordinary and Tobit regressions. Our analysis examines how country-, customer-, and company-specific characteristics interact with the proportion of sales attributed to Bitcoin. We find that company features, use of other payment methods, customers’ knowledge about Bitcoin, and the size of both the official and unofficial economy are significant determinants. The results will be of interest to traders who seek to understand factors driving prices and will help to inform vendors as to the most favorable circumstances for adopting the currency for online transactions.

Performing the Past in Electronic Archives: Interdependencies in the Discursive and Non-Discursive Ordering of Institutional Rememberings

This paper examines interdependencies in the discursive and non-discursive ordering of institutional memory in organizational settings. Issues of what happens to historical consciousness in the time of modern technology are examined with reference to how the past is used in the context of electronic archiving of email in corporate cultures. Drawing from ideas in the work of Martin Heidegger concerning interdependencies between the use of technology and the arts of the mind, we examine how the truth of matters is more than an issue of correspondence between language and reality, and more than the rhetorical deployment of what counts as true in establishing stake and interest. We analyse how the work of ordering the archive, which is driven by current projects in the organizations studied, takes place alongside the discursive work of remembering. We illustrate how, without the non-discursive labour of forging relations between components, there is no possibility of playing out evidential strategies that dominate the rhetorical performance of the past. What we call ‘mind’ and what we call ‘society’ emerge in this dual ordering. This dual work of ordering occurs through the joint operation of discursive and non-discursive practices, which together produce remembering and forgetting in a way that draws upon cultural resources at the same time as making sense in the flow of interaction, experiences and events.

Insistent emplacement: Heidegger on the technologies of informing

Explores how the work of Martin Heidegger may be read alongside our contemporary understandings of information technology. It begins by considering the view of information as degraded knowledge, a position refuted by Heidegger’s account of truth as correctness. Information is thereafter treated as a form of availability, grounded in the relation between humans and equipment, which is characterised by its insistence. A differentiation between various forms of equipment is made by way of Heidegger’s later writings on technics, leading to a discussion of information technology in the shadow of enframing, or emplacement. The central place of “anxiety” in our relationship to new technologies is underscored, and offered up as a way of thinking beyond the escalation of calculative ordering.

Modelling customers' intentions to use contactless cards

Since their introduction in the USA in 2002, contactless card payment systems have been widely regarded as the pinnacle of current retail banking technology. However, the potential demand and usage of this innovation has hitherto received little attention from the academic community. Ours is one of the first papers that explore the factors that are likely to govern acceptance and intentions to take-up the technology. The analysis utilises the methodological framework of the technology acceptance model (Davis, 1989; Davis et al., 1989) and develops a range of empirical representations. Our results lend support to the TAM conceptualisation and also indicate that some demographic characteristics imprint upon the intentions of potential users.

Running To Stand Still: Late Modernity's Acceleration Fixation

That we live in a time of unprecedented and ever-increasing change is both a shibboleth of our age and the more-or-less explicit justification for all manner of “strategic” actions. The seldom, if ever, questioned assumption is that our now is more ephemeral, more evanescent, than any that preceded it. In this essay, we subject this assumption to some critical scrutiny, utilizing a range of empirical detail. In the face of this assay we find the assumption to be considerably wanting. We suggest that what we are actually witnessing is mere acceleration , which we distinguish as intensification along a preexisting trajectory, parading as more substantive and radical movement away from a preexisting trajectory. Deploying Deleuze’s (2004) terms we are, we suggest, in thrall to representation of the same at the expense of repetition of difference. Our consumption by acceleration, we argue, both occludes the lack of substantive change actually occurring while simultaneously delimiting possibilities of thinking of and enacting the truly radical. We also consider how this setup is maintained, thus attempting to shed some light on why we are seemingly running to stand still. As the Red Queen said, “it’s necessary to run faster even to stay in the one place.”

The End of the Shock of the New

‘Shock’ advertising is the new black and the subject of the reflection in which this article engages. We do this in particular through consideration of the (largely) British high-street fashion house French Connection’s seemingly endless ‘FCUK’ campaign. The obvious resonance between this abbreviation and perhaps the most popular word in the English language was at the heart of the campaign’s appeal and it continues today through various extensions on both slogans and logos on French Connection’s own goods and indeed those who seek to piggy back upon and/or subvert its market power. It is far from the only example of such ‘shock’ tactics. Whether discussing reproduction in graphic detail with children, joyously dismantling chastity, or merely fucking with fuck, it seems that traditional mores can no longer remain virgin territory, unsullied by rapacious marketing. Our mediated experiences of reaching ‘extremes’, it now appears, are not paralysing, mesmerising, fascinating or inspiring but simply a further prod down the path leading to (gleeful) purchase. In this paper we explore how, via a series of semiotic reversals, the new, the strange, the unfamiliar and the would-be shocking are rendered banal, and thus thoroughly comprehensible through brand association and the endless re-iteration of existing works.

The glass beads of global war: dealing, death and the policy analysis market

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to subject the short lived “Policy Analysis Market” (PAM) – “a Pentagon betting market on terror attacks” – and media and academic reactions to it, to some critical analysis.Design/methodology/approach – The paper engages sustained invocation of the relationship between simulation and representation, for the story of the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) and its demise is replete with the tension between the two. It interrogates a range of accounts of the (un)timely demise of PAM, from the fearful senators and the moralistic media who subsumed and buttressed their position to the market evangelists for whom the failure of this particular market was merely proof of the veracity of markets elsewhere.Findings – It is found that, inter alia, PAM was not really market‐like enough and, indeed, that it duplicated in impoverished form already existing markets that pertain to its objects of interest; that it was too much a market, given that its “goods” are seemingly inappropriate...

The Role of the University

Relevant practitioner research does not depend on the university for its existence, but the PhD does. Almost all universities define their relation to the PhD thesis in terms of it making an ‘original contribution to knowledge’

Research Ethics and Methods

Putting the quality of relationships at the heart of the practitioner PhD differs markedly from the way in which research is normally viewed within social studies. Underlying the difference is the distinction between thought and rationalization, which is crucial to us. Research that thinks is research that describes, examines, reflects, and theorizes the circumstances, conflicts and possibilities, which it studies. Bad research just rationalizes them.