Recent perspectives on a capabilities view of the firm often recognize the need for firms to develop an external organization. Within the IMP tradition, it is recognized that the external organization may include economic and non-economic exchange relationships. However, greater emphasis is given to the former. The relevance of relationships for firms and for industries can be linked to their r...

This paper proposes to extend current Knowledge Management Systems with functionalities that (1) support the organization in better managing its tacit knowledge; (2) help engage users in a continuous and dynamic knowledge exchange; (3) provide more tailored and active support to the users and in particular take into account their competence, their role in the organization, their social network,...

This article explores how the exchange of social resources delivered by service employees and economic resources provided through service operations creates social and structural bonds that enhance business-to-business relationships. It describes an empirical study of experienced business customers of a large telecommunications company. The study shows that social bonds created by employee-deli...

Services security is often assimilated to a set of software solutions (Firewall, data encryption.) but rarely consider the organizational security rules as a fundamental part of the Services security policy. With the increasing use of new Services architectures (Open Services architecture, distributed database, multi web server, multi-tier application servers) security leaks become crucial and ...

In a virtual organization, different business partners (individual organizations) cooperate in order to achieve a common goal. The coordination of the corresponding inter-organizational workflow is an important issue. In this paper an approach towards managing the operational embodiment of a manufacturing consortium is presented. This approach is conceptualized as a service within an Electronic...

Advance payment systems represent a pricing innovation, in which companies predict customers’ future consumption for the following year and then bill a series of monthly, uniform advance payments. Any difference between predicted and actual consumption gets settled at the end of the year with a refund or extra payment. Companies thus gain earlier access to funds and lower risk of customer defau...

Despite the large body of work on the work-family interface, hardly any literature has addressed the work-family interface in safety-critical settings. This study draws from social exchange theory to examine the effect of employees' strain-based work-to-family conflict on their supervisors' rating of their safety participation through job satisfaction. The sample consisted of 494 drivers from a...

A number of authors have argued that the divestiture of AT&T did not reduce the rates of long distance telephone companies as often believed. However, the literature has offered few explanations as to why competition has not lowered rates. This study argues that rates have failed to fall due to the importance of search and switching costs in the industry. Using a panel data set of rates for the...

This paper describes a discrete-time “high-level” controller, called a “supervisor,” capable of switching into feedback with a discretetime single-input/single-outpu (SISO) system, a sequence of linear twodegrees-of-freedom (2-DOF) set-point controllers. Each controller is selected among a family of candidates so as to cause the output of the system to approach and track a constant reference in...

In this paper, we propose an efficient authenticated key establishment scheme for self-organizing sensor networks. The proposed scheme has low communication cost and eliminates expensive operations required by most ID-based schemes, such as sensor nodes calculating bilinear maps. Additionally, the proposed scheme provides perfect forward secrecy.