Too Public Not To Be Private: Investigating Water Ownership as a Strategy
in a World of Economic Goods Under International Trade and Investment Laws

--Craig Macklin and Carolan Mclarney

Water has quickly moved from the realm of common and public control into private control as an economic good. Globalization and international investment trade laws, as well as overall trade laws, have helped encourage this shift. Water has strong ties to various sectors given its usefulness as well as the simple ability to sustain life. The UN, World Water Council, World Bank, WTO, IMF, GATT and GATS are all players in the world of water management. Much of the literature to date has been centered at the policy level and focused mainly on intercountry disputes. The paper argues that national interests are tied to water and can be supported by trade in water and water services. As we have seen, conflict and war can stem from water issues between countries, and where political laws have much variance in application as chosen by nations around the globe, trade and investment law appear to be more advanced in terms of enforcement. Here the argument is given that when water ownership is privatized, it can reduce the likelihood of water being withheld or destroyed in time of war due to global agreements governing trade and economies, thus, moving direct competition by nations through war into competition through trade and economic power. The paper posits that while both public and private ownership have both positive and negative elements, combining them can serve to promote interests of nations as well as the simple need for humans to have access to water as a basic human right. We conclude that where water supports necessary life functions for human beings, in a world of globalized trade and investment, it provides employment, tax revenue and opportunities for technological advancement, and serves the interests of nations, their private and multinational corporations and the people of those nations.

© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Group Dynamics: A Study of Joint Liability Groups of the Poor in Delhi/National Capital Region (NCR)

--Manisha Saxena and A S Kohli

The paper is a study of the working of groups (Joint Liability Group, JLG) of poor people and its members (beneficiaries) located in the region of Delhi/NCR. It captures group responses from a set of recipients of microfinance in the region mentioned. With the help of simple statistical inferences, it is observed that there was a change in their social condition as well as income generation. The study was motivated by the lack of research in the area of microfinance and financial inclusion in India, and also to see how effective these schemes are in impacting the lives of the beneficiaries.

© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Relationship Between Innovations, Capital Expenditures and Post-M&A Performance: Evidence from Vietnam, 2005-2012

--Quan Hoang Vuong, Nancy K Napier and Donaldine E Samson

The paper attempts to explore the plausibility and validity of theoretical relationship between determination of controlling an acquired firm’s capital, assets and brand values versus its capability of innovation, and ex post performance of Vietnam’s M&A industry amid the resurgence of the Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) wave from 2005 to 2012. The study mainly employs logistic regressions performed on a categorical data sample, consisting of 212 M&A cases. The results reported from this analysis suggest significant and plausible relationship between pre-M&A pursuit of innovation (versus capital/physical assets) of the acquired and post-M&A performance. In addition, pre-M&A expenditures tend to cause poor post-M&A performance. As a plausible reasoning, the paper concludes that creative performance can be a factor to pursue in M&As, which suggests the need to emphasize capable and willing human capital. However, in a wave of M&A where pursuits of capital resources, assets and brand value are overemphasized, the influence of innovation factor to the ex post success becomes negligible.

© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Crisis-Driven Strategy: A Case of Xerox Corporation

--Rajnandan Patnaik

Visualizing the future and making adequate provisions to deal with it objectively can be termed as strategy. Strategy is an exercise that visualizes or anticipates the future and acts accordingly to achieve some form of competitive advantage. Hence, strategy is an intellectual process, the conscious determination of course of action, the basing of decisions on purpose, facts and considered objectives. Moreover, strategy involves creating plans through alternative courses of action, with a view to implement the same in future to synchronize with the changing environment. Strategy can give results only after it is followed with considerable consistency. In other words, a strategy needs to be stuck with for a reasonable time, in order to get results. A strategic plan considers this long-term perspective and configures the actions to achieve the desired objectives. However, it is seen that strategic plan sometimes misses its mark completely. The reason for this radical miss is explained through the complexity of the elements that creates inertia in the organization. The framework proposed in this paper is crisis-driven strategy that brings in flexibility with the help of complexity theory, which holds the potential to aid strategic planning, explain the approach to strategy, and overcome the organizational inertia, as well as to indicate the idiosyncrasies that exist in achieving the turnaround objectives. The methodology considered is the analytic induction technique with the case of Xerox Corporation that has found some good turnaround CEOs internally, who happen to be women.

© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Application of the Resource-Based View: A Case of an Indian Pharma Multinational

--M Raja Shekhar Reddy and Venu Gopal Rao

The paper discusses how the Resource-Based View (RBV) can be used as a potential tool for analyzing the competitive advantage of a firm. Taking the example of a leading Indian pharma major, the authors discuss how firm-specific resources have contributed to sustainable growth over the years. The authors explain how this firm’s process of drug manufacturing using project management is evolving. Taking two specific sub-dimensions of RBV, namely, Social Complexity and Causal Ambiguity, the case describes the interplay of the two dimensions. In the highly competitive world of drug manufacturing, speed and cost are of essence, and it is this space that the firm under discussion has been able to exploit. The case goes on to describe the process of drug manufacturing in the organization and demonstrates the process of creating a superior competitive advantage for the client organization and for itself. For the prospective reader of strategy literature, this case demonstrates the importance of RBV in the pharma business and shows how firms in countries such as India are well placed over others in this business.

© 2014 IUP. All Rights Reserved.