Stephen Nicholas

Agency Problems in Early Chartered Companies: The Case of the Hudson’s Bay Company

The problem of controlling overseas managers confronts all multilocational firms. Historians have argued that because of the extreme time lags in communication, chartered companies were unable to control managerial behavior. We argue that not only did the Hudson’s Bay Company understand the agency problem but also put into operation strategies designed to attenuate opportunistic behavior. The company used employment contracts and control systems and established a social structure compatible with the company’s aims.

“Giants of an Earlier Capitalism”: The Chartered Trading Companies as Modern Multinationals

Much has been written about late-nineteenth-century multinationals and their relationship to the transnational firms of the present, but both historians and economists have largely discounted the relevance of the earlier chartered trading companies to this discussion. In an article emphasizing transaction cost analysis and the theory of the firm, Professors Carlos and Nicholas argue that the trading companies did meet the criteria of the modern MNE—the growth of a managerial hierarchy necessitated by a large volume of transactions and of systems to control those managers over space and time.

The Role of Openness to Cognitive Diversity and Group Processes in Knowledge Creation

This study examines how group member beliefs regarding cognitive differences influence ability to create knowledge. Specifically, this study explores whether the impact of openness to cognitive diversity on knowledge creation is a result of associated collaborative behaviors. To investigate this theory, it is assessed whether the behaviors of debate and decision comprehensiveness mediate the relationship between openness to cognitive diversity and knowledge creation. The results of a survey of 98 workplace teams support the hypotheses that the impact of openness is consequent to the emergence of behavioral patterns that facilitate open and rigorous discussion and contribute to the understanding of the psychosocial and behavioral variables underpinning knowledge creation.

Agency Contracts, Institutional Modes, and the Transition to Foreign Direct Investment by British Manufacturing Multinationals Before 1939

This paper analyzes the transition from agents to branch selling as alternative institutional modes for transacting abroad by pre-1939 British manufacturing multinationals. A model to explain the shift between alternative modes is specified in terms of transaction costs. Agent opportunism and contract monitoring costs are the major transaction costs. Besides transaction costs, the frequency of transactions and the accumulation of market-specific knowledge by the principal were found to be important variables.

Growing old before growing rich: inequality in health service utilization among the mid-aged and elderly in Gansu and Zhejiang Provinces, China

BackgroundChina’s recent growth in income has been unequally distributed, resulting in an unusually rapid retreat from relative income equality, which has impacted negatively on health services access. There exists a significant gap between health care utilization in rural and urban areas and inequality in health care access due to differences in socioeconomic status is increasing. We investigate inequality in service utilization among the mid-aged and elderly, with a special attention of health insurance.MethodsThis paper measures the income-related inequality and horizontal inequity in inpatient and outpatient health care utilization among the mid-aged and elderly in two provinces of China. The data for this study come from the pilot survey of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study in Gansu and Zhejiang. Concentration Index (CI) and its decomposition approach were deployed to reflect inequality degree and explore the source of these inequalities.ResultsThere is a pro-rich inequality in the probability of receiving health service utilization in Gansu (CI outpatient = 0.067; CI inpatient = 0.011) and outpatient for Zhejiang (CI = 0.016), but a pro-poor inequality in inpatient utilization in Zhejiang (CI = −0.090). All the Horizontal Inequity Indices (HI) are positive. Income was the dominant factor in health care utilization for out-patient in Gansu (40.3 percent) and Zhejiang (55.5 percent). The non-need factors’ contribution to inequity in Gansu and Zhejiang outpatient care had the same pattern across the two provinces, with the factors evenly split between pro-rich and pro-poor biases. The insurance schemes were strongly pro-rich, except New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) in Zhejiang.ConclusionsFor the middle-aged and elderly, there is a strong pro-rich inequality of health care utilization in both provinces. Income was the most important factor in outpatient care in both provinces, but access to inpatient care was driven by a mix of income, need and non-need factors that significantly differed across and within the two provinces. These differences were the result of different levels of health care provision, different out-of-pocket expenses for health care and different access to and coverage of health insurance for rural and urban families. To address health care utilization inequality, China will need to reduce the unequal distribution of income and expand the coverage of its health insurance schemes.

Theory and history: seventeenth-century joint-stock chartered trading companies

managers abroad. In those articles on managing the manager, we used archival sources to assess whether these companies recognized the problem of agency and to determine what mechanisms were implemented to attenuate the agency problems created by hierarchy. We concluded that the Hudsons Bay Company and the Royal African Company designed mechanisms well suited to controlling agent opportunism.2 In an attempt to reverse 20 years of revisionist history, S. R. H. Jones and Simon P. Ville assert that these seventeenth-century trading companies were inefficient organizations for

The transfer of human resource and management practice by Japanese multinationals to Australia: do industry, size and experience matter?

This paper examines management and HRM practices adopted by Japanese multinational enterprises (MNEs) and the transferability of Japanese HRM in the Australian host-country situation. It also compares HRM practices of Japanese MNEs in Australia with the experience in North America and Europe and attempts to map the typology of the human resource management utilized by a range of Japanese firms operating in Australia, including large and small firms; manufacturing and non-manufacturing companies; firms with differing levels of Japanese equity and with different levels of operational experience. This paper is based on survey data from sixty-nine Japanese subsidiaries operating in the Australian manufacturing and service sectors in 1994.

Weight and Welfare of Australians, 1890–1940

Views differ on whether living standards in Australia improved between 1890 and 1940. The pessimists, relying principally on product and incomes measures, argue that living standards stagnated; the optimists, using augmented measures of well-being, argue that living standards may have improved. This paper contributes to this debate between the pessimists and optimists by using alternative measures of living standards, namely the height and body mass index (BMI) of male Australian army recruits of World Wars I and II. The nature and usefulness of these measures is examined. The major findings are that the height data indicate an unequivocal improvement in living standards in the period under consideration. The BMI data tend to support a similar conclusion, but the results are ambiguous and there are difficulties in using them alone to determine exactly what happened to living standards.

Internal migration in England, 1818–1839

From indents of 10, 151 English men and women transported to the penal colony of New South Wales, Australia, it is possible to measure English intercounty migration between 1818 and 1839—a period of industrialization for which data on population movement are absent. Comparisons with the 1841 census indicate that transported convicts were broadly representative both of the English prison population and of the non-criminal working class. Almost one-third of the workers in the sample moved between counties. The working-class intercounty migrant was young, literate and skilled; the median distance travelled was 59 miles. Regional migration pathways are described. Rural workers moved more frequently than urban workers, but urban workers travelled a greater median distance than their rural counterparts. Estimating a gravity-flow migration model, migration is found to be highly sensitive to intercounty job opportunities and wage rate differentials, but relatively insensitive to distance (which acted as a deterrent to movement). While regional biases existed, the regression results imply that labour market signals were effective in transferring labour from rural to urban locations.

Knowledge creation through boundary-spanning

This paper contributes to our understanding of the process of knowledge creation in organisations. Based on a process model, the paper develops propositions relating to factors facilitating knowledge creation in cross-functional work teams. These propositions relate to the constructs of cognitive diversity, transactional memory, trans-specialist knowledge and their contribution to new knowledge development through knowledge boundary spanning.