Fungible Resources Research Articles

Robotic process automation and artificial intelligence capabilities driving digital strategy: a resource-based view

PurposeResearch of currently limited literature sees Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as an important tool at the tactical level. However, the literature has not considered its potential contribution to creating competitive advantages. This paper aims to link RPA and Resource-based view (RBV) literature, proposing a conceptual framework boosting RPA research as part of an organizational AI strategy.Design/methodology/approach This study applied a Systematic Literature Review (SRL), combining bibliometrics and content analysis. This study also built a new framework based on the updated RBV model that was transformed based on the RPA literature review results.Findings By bridging the two bodies of literature on RBV and RPA, this study manages to show the strategic side of the technology. Therefore, this study brought to light the most updated fundamental concepts of complementarity and scale-free fungible resources from RBV theory and AI technologies, applied to the domains of RPA, information systems and information technology (IS/IT) through the development of a new theoretical lens. Also, this study was able to elaborate on a new conceptual framework for AI strategy formulation to help organizations on their journey to AI utilization.Originality/value The authors did not find any research that has shown the strategic side of RPA, nor any that has used a theoretical lens based on the RBV theory to show this side. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study seems to be the first to make the case for RPA's strategic potential.

Task bottlenecks and resource bottlenecks: A holistic examination of task systems through an organization design lens

AbstractResearch SummaryUsing an organization design lens, we explore how key characteristics of both task systems and their associated resources may benefit firms. We unpack task system interdependencies by studying the interaction of decentralization and complexity, examining resource fungibility and resource slack, and exploring their joint alignment. Our context is the scheduled U.S. passenger airline industry over two decades. Results show that firm performance improves when (a) task system decentralization and complexity are aligned, either more or less of both; (b) having both resource fungibility and resource slack, not simply more of one or the other; and (c) aligning less decentralized and less complex task systems with fungible and available resources. Our findings underscore the importance of holistically managing tasks and resources to minimize bottlenecks within organizations.Managerial SummaryEliminating bottlenecks can help firms improve performance. Our study focuses on two types of bottlenecks—task system bottlenecks stemming from the design of activities and resource bottlenecks, created when necessary resources are already in use or available resources are not applicable. Our results show that firms benefit when task system properties of decentralization and complexity are aligned and when firms' resources are both fungible and available; these characteristics also reinforce each other. Thus, managers should be aware of both task system properties and resource characteristics to avoid bottlenecks, so that the tasks to which the resources are applied can be completed. In addition, managers should ensure to have available and fungible resources at their disposal, especially when organizations have a centralized and less complex design.

Costs of Resource Redeployment Strategy under Learning Effects for Diversified Firms

Diversified firms may benefit from fungible resources because they can give firms flexibility to adapt to changing environmental conditions. However, the benefits of fungible resources could be limited by costs associated with their reallocation, and also by the opportunity costs of excess fungible resource capacity without a use. In this article, we use two types of learning mechanisms to identify the two different cost impacts on performance: learning by diversifying at the organization level and learning by resource usage at the level of a specific resource. Using data from the Brazilian film industry from 1995 to 2017, we find that the performance of diversified firms with non-scale-free fungible resources increases the higher level of learning by diversifying. Conversely, the higher the level of learning by resource usage, the lower the performance of diversified firms with these resources.

Allocation of fungible resources via a fast, scalable price discovery method

We consider the problem of assigning or allocating resources to a set of jobs. We consider the case when the resources are fungible, that is, the job can be done with any mix of the resources, but with different efficiencies. In our formulation we maximize a total utility subject to a given limit on the resource usage, which is a convex optimization problem and so is tractable. In this paper we develop a custom, parallelizable algorithm for solving the resource allocation problem that scales to large problems, with millions of jobs. Our algorithm is based on the dual problem, in which the dual variables associated with the resource usage limit can be interpreted as resource prices. Our method updates the resource prices in each iteration, ultimately discovering the optimal resource prices, from which an optimal allocation is obtained. We provide an open-source implementation of our method, which can solve problems with millions of jobs in a few seconds on CPU, and under a second on a GPU; our software can solve smaller problems in milliseconds. On large problems, our implementation is up to three orders of magnitude faster than a commercial solver for convex optimization.

The Role of Development Aid in Agriculture in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa: A Panel Vector Autoregression Analysis

This paper assessed the impact of foreign aid on agricultural productivity and growth in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), using panel vector autoregressive methods. The results show a significant unidirectional causality from agricultural growth to foreign aid and thus confirming the theoretical dispositions of the developmental role of foreign aid. However, instead of complementing domestic resources in this regard, the results showed that foreign aid in the sector substitutes government financing, which effectively reduces its effectiveness. A mismatch in government resources and aid allocations to a sub-sector erodes the synergy that should typically exist between donor aid and government expenditure in a sector. A policy shift towards Result-Based (Aid on Delivery) approaches in aid disbursements will be critical to eliminating fungible resources. Misalignment of aid allocations that are inconsistent with the relative importance of subsectors in the sectoral development goals further undermines the potency of aid. A better understanding of the contribution of the various sub-sectors to the overall growth of the agriculture sector will be crucial for equitable resource allocation and enhanced aid effectiveness. Moreover, the higher impact of domestic resources compared to foreign aid calls for policies to increase domestic resource mobilization and a broader focus on reducing aid dependency.

Cashback Is Cash Forward: Delaying a Discount to Entice Future Spending

The authors examine purchase behavior in the context of cashback shopping—a novel form of price promotion online in which consumers initiate transactions at the website of a cashback company and, after a significant delay, receive the savings promised to them. Specifically, they analyze panel data from a large cashback company and show that, independent of the predictable effect of cashback offers on initial demand, cashback payments (1) increase the probability that consumers will make an additional purchase via the website of the cashback company and (2) increase the size of that purchase. These effects pass several robustness checks and are also meaningful: At average values in the data, an additional $1.00 in cashback payment increases the likelihood of a future transaction by .02% and spending by $.32—figures that represent 10.03% of the overall impact of a given promotion. Moreover, the authors find that consumers are more likely to spend the money returned to them at generalist retailers, such as department stores, than at other retailers. They consider three explanations for these findings; the leading hypothesis is that consumers fail to treat money as a fungible resource. They also discuss implications for cashback companies and retailers.

Not Only A Matter of Dynamic Managerial Capabilities

In recent years, the interplay of managers and resources, and their combined influence on organizational performance, have received considerable attention in management research. Surprisingly, empirical evidence within a corporate setting remains scarce. Building on the Dynamic Capabilities View, and the foundations of the Resource-based View, we take a configurational approach, and find that the degree of a resource’s fungibility alters the options and flexibility of managerial actions; depending on how fungible they are, corporate productive resources can either support or hinder dynamic managerial capabilities from materializing into firm performance. A dynamic fixed-effects model shows that highly fungible cash resources improve the relationship between dynamic managerial capabilities and the firm’s performance, whereas less-fungible human resources make that relationship worse. Similarly, bundles of abundant financial resources and constrained human resources enhance the value-creation potential of dynamic managerial capabilities. Additionally, we find that a dynamic environment is a positive combinative element for the synergistic interplay of dynamic managerial capabilities and resources, but only in the case of highly fungible resources. In conclusion, our study calls for a more holistic assessment of dynamic managerial capabilities by accounting both for a firm’s resources and the market environment.

Business group affiliation & corporate sustainability strategies: Role of fungible resources

In spite of an overwhelming importance of business groups in the economic development of many countries, systematic inquiry on how the business groups and their affiliated firms approach and contri...

Business Group Affiliation and Corporate Sustainability Strategies of Firms: An Investigation of Firms in India

In spite of an overwhelming importance of business groups (BG) in the economic development of many countries, systematic inquiry on how the BGs and their affiliated firms approach and contribute to shared value creation and sustainable development is rare. In this paper we address this research gap by investigating two related questions—do BG-affiliated firms differ from non-BG firms in their corporate sustainability strategy (CSS) and how does BG affiliation influence the relationship between stock of fungible resources and CSS of firms? Drawing from the BG literature we theorize that BG-affiliated firms tend to adopt of both environmental and social sustainability strategies more than non-BG firms. We also argue that although according to resource-based view, the stock of fungible resources of firms positively influences CSS, BG affiliation negatively moderates the relationship between stock of fungible resources and CSS of firms. Stock of fungible resources matters less for BG-affiliated firms in undertaking CSS as they have access to resources of the BG network. We test our theoretical predictions using a proprietary data set of 163 Indian publicly listed firms, out of which 76 are BG-affiliated firms belonging to 74 BGs. The data for corporate environmental and social sustainability strategies have been obtained by administering a survey instrument among the top level executives of the participating firms. We find support for our theoretical predictions that signify that BGs and their affiliates make important contributions to shared value creation and sustainable development in emerging economies like India.

The Strategic Role of Fungible Resources in Organizational Adaptation

This paper zeroes in on the specific role that fungible resources play in organizational adaptation. It delineates the processes of how fungible resources affect an organization’s evolutionary fitn...

Does experience help or hinder top managers? Working with different types of resources in Hollywood

Research summary: Research on the resource‐based view has begun to place more emphasis on the ability of managers to extract better performance from the resources that are available to them. In this paper, we show that prior experience can both help and hinder their ability to generate performance from various categories of resources. Further, we argue that the fungibility of each resource influences the opportunities managers have to use their experiences in order to find the best method to deploy them. We test our hypotheses by examining the ability of Hollywood film producers to generate results from financial, brand, and human resources. Our findings show that experienced producers can generate better performance from more fungible resources, but they actually achieve weaker results with less fungible resources.Managerial summary: Do more experienced top managers get better results from their resources? We examine this question for Hollywood film producers. Our results show that experience can really help when producers work with resources such as cash (budgets) and brand resources (such as film sequels). However, such experiences actually reduce performance when they work with some human resources, such as highly talented directors. We argue that experience can be most helpful when managers work with more fungible resources, which can be used in a variety of different ways but can actually hurt when they work with resources that are more constrained in how they can be deployed. Under ideal circumstances, we find that experienced producers can generate nearly 40 percent more revenue with the right mix of resources. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Beyond Fungible: Transforming Money into Moral and Social Resources

An essential characteristic of marketing practice and theory is the promotion of exchanges, many of which are funded by money. Marketing literature thus places great emphasis on determining what factors influence consumers to engage in the marketplace. Less understood, however, is how consumers allocate monetary resources to fund exchanges. Scholars have demonstrated that people employ earmarks to segregate money by source, meaning, or purpose. The ethnographic study of provisioning in the current research adds to prior scholarship with an explanation of how money, as a fungible resource, is transformed into moral and social resources by the behavioral process of ascribing earmarks and approaching provisioning. As part of this study, the author develops a typology that incorporates thrift provisioning and splurge provisioning approaches to categorize consumer goals derived from the use of prosaic and indexical earmarks. These goals are defined as economizing, sustaining, treating, and rewarding. The article closes with a discussion of implications for marketing managers and potential avenues for further research.

Social Capital as a Portfolio of Resources Across Multiple Microsystems: Implications for Middle‐School Students

Widespread approaches to the conceptualization and measurement of social capital have been subjected to critical examination in recent years; some argue that its meaning and impact have been diluted. Many authors have subsequently clarified the concept of social capital as fungible resources: social norms, rules, and obligations formed from youths' social networks that provide benefits to youth that further positive development. Using latent profile analysis on social capital data gathered from middle school students, the authors offer a measurement approach that more closely reflects this conceptualization by more effectively accounting for critical information about the varied sources and the aggregate effects of those sources of capital. The authors label the resulting multiple microsystem patterns of social capital “portfolios,” making explicit the conceptual connection of social capital to other forms of capital.

The Impact of a Firm’s Financial Flexibility on its Strategic Renewal: Key Concepts with Evidential Support from Businesses Across Industries

To propose a research agenda towards making an assessment of a firm’s practices of financial flexibility and their impact on its strategic renewal. The paper takes the form of a theoretical discussion on few major practices of financial flexibility that a firm can choose to exercise in its attempts to bring about strategic self-renewal on a sustained basis. The paper triggers a discussion on few possible takeaways for organizations in their attempts to integrate existing financial practices, generate new practices of financial flexibility and successfully exploit this new knowledge towards strategic renewal initiatives of the organizations. This is a developmental paper and many of its suggestions require rigorous testing through studies in a wider array of settings. Firms can inculcate the spirit of financial flexibility judiciously towards enhancing their strategic flexibility in their attempts to augment their prospects of strategic renewal. Finance being the most fungible resource that a firm possesses, every attempt should be made to leverage such a resource towards optimally managing the diverse portfolio of projects that a firm undertakes in its endeavor to fructify its strategic renewal goal, on an ongoing basis, while generating additional wealth for its shareholders. The paper provides a snapshot of various corporate practices of financial flexibility adopted by firms across industries and the respective success/failure stories the lessons of which when learnt properly can go a long way in the strategic self-renewal of many an organization.

Priority inversion with fungible resources

Priority inversion occurs when the execution of a task is unnecessarily delayed by the dispatch of a lower priority task. This anomaly can result in failure if it causes the delay of hard real-time tasks. Priority inheritance protocols have been developed to limit priority inversions during competition over shared resources. Such methods are designed for individually identifiable resource units. Other approaches are indicated when shared resources contain interchangeable resource units. Current practices with resource deadlock, a scheduling anomaly that has many characteristics in common with priority inversion, provide insight into the control of priority inversion with these fungible resources.

Transforming Human Resources into Human Capital

Human resource refers to the stock of productive skills and technical knowledge embodied in labor. It is tangible in nature. Many early economic theories refer to it simply as labor, one of the three factors of production, and consider it to be a fungible resource -- homogeneous and easily interchangeable. The goal of human resource management is to help an organization to meet strategic goals by attracting, and retaining employees and also to manage them effectively so that they deliver productive outputs. The key word here perhaps is "fit", i.e. a HRM approach seeks to ensure a fit between the management of an organization’s employees, and the overall strategic direction of the company. Human capital instead, refers to the intangible aspect of human resources. It enhances the value of employees by striking a win-win goal for employers and employees. It focuses on the intrinsic value of each employee, where any expenditure on employees is regarded as an investment rather than an expense. The varying talents and motivations of employees are given cognizance so that incentives and working arrangements can be created to enhance each employee's contributions to organizational performance. This paper distinguishes human capital from human resources and how human resource may be transformed into human capital.

Strategic competition in healthcare information services: an economic analysis

We investigate the investment practices and competitive strategies of a number of providers in the market for healthcare information services that have survived a volatile inception period to achieve some degree of revenue sustainability. We find that these firms continuously broaden and enhance their product lines by leveraging highly mobile and fungible digital resources and capabilities. In particular, we show that investments of a focal firm in organisational networks create higher switching costs relative to those in public networks, therefore, making revenue generation more sustainable. Our findings suggest that healthcare information providers pursue two key strategies to expand their economies of scope and scale. They first rely on complementarities among their internal resources in order to find new uses for existing products. M&A investments in external resources are primarily used when these firms intend to create new product offerings outside of their current capabilities.

Can Environmentalists Keep Two Ideas in Mind and Still Function

A New Yorker cartoon depicts a pair of Puritans in stiff collars, doublets, cloaks leaning over the rail of the Arbella as it made landfall in the New World. One says, My immediate goal is to worship celebrate His Creation, but long-term, I plan to get into real estate. cartoon presents two visions of the natural world. On the one hand, we may regard nature as sacred, as having a value in itself, a history, autonomy, diversity that commands our appreciation respect. On the other hand, we can regard the natural world as a storehouse of economically fungible resources to be developed for human benefit. With these two visions of nature come two conceptions of salvation. first is personal; if one learns to commune with Nature to study its meanings messages, one may become more secure decent in one's soul. second is collective. If humanity uses natural resources wisely over the long term, it can maximize wealth well-being. With the advance of science technology, humanity may escape from scarcity, where there is no want (as the philosopher David Hume argued) there is no injustice. An efficient economy can bring Heaven to earth. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, still retain the ability to function. I argue in this essay that an intelligent society can hold these two opposed ideas of nature or salvation in mind, balancing them as well as it may, without trying to make them commensurable or reducing or collapsing either into the other. Environmental Goals: Ethical or Economic? New Yorker cartoon points to an opposition or inconsistency between two ways of regarding nature--one as a source of religious inspiration, the other as an object of economic exploitation. For more than a century, environmentalism has lived within this contradiction. Historians often set the preservationist tradition of John Muir, who compared forests to cathedrals, against the Progressive tradition of Gifford Pinchot, who saw forests as sources of wood water needed by the economy over the long run. Muir often called on biblical images. God began the reservation system in Eden, he wrote, and this first reserve included only one tree. Yet even so moderate a reserve was attacked. For Pinchot, in contrast, The first great fact about conservation is that it stands for development. He added, Conservation demands the welfare of this generation first, afterward the welfare of the generations to follow. Environmentalists generally regard intrinsic properties of nature as sources of reverence obligation. Society has a duty to preserve the wonders of nature for what they are in themselves, that is, for the properties through which they appeal to moral intuitions aesthetic judgments. Biodiversity--the variety of living things--provides the standard illustration of the glories of nature that move us to feelings of curiosity respect. As the philosopher Ronald Dworkin points out, many of us believe that we have an obligation to protect species that goes beyond our own well-being; we think we should admire protect them because they are important in themselves, not just if or because we or others want or enjoy them. Economist Amartya Sen has written, Our living standards are largely--or completely--unaffected by the presence or absence of spotted owls, but I strongly believe that we should not let them become extinct, for reasons that have nothing much to do with human living standards. People tend to express their affection for nature in religious terms. In a survey, Americans by large majorities agreed with the statement Because created the natural world, it is wrong to abuse it. Many of the respondents who answered this way said that they did not profess a religious faith. anthropologists who ran this survey found that divine creation is the closest concept American culture provides to express the sacredness of nature. …

Globalfocusing: From Domestic Conglomerates to Global Specialists*

abstract Globalization is changing the competitive terrain on which companies develop their corporate strategy. On the global stage, key competitive advantages are gained through internationally fungible resources. Consequently, diversified conglomerates are converting to global specialists in narrower niche markets and competing with a small number of multinational enterprises operating worldwide. Their internationalization and their reduction of product diversification are opposite sides of the same coin: globalfocusing. I extend Penrosian resource‐based theory to analyse this change process, notably by distinguishing country and industry specificity of firms' core competences, and by integrating divestment as part of firm growth processes. Globalfocusing is driven by shifts in the relative importance of country‐specific and industry‐specific resources and capabilities due to changes in the internal and external environment, notably the globalization of markets and supply chains. The argument is developed using case studies of restructuring of two Danish manufacturing enterprises. On this basis, I analyse the forces driving globalfocusing processes and suggest propositions for empirical testing.

Mapping the Boosterist Imaginary: Colonial Williamsburg, Historical Tourism, and the Construction of Managerial Memory

Abstract With very few exceptions, existing scholarship on public memory in America has tended to script commercial-industrial “development” as the implacable adversary of legitimate collective remembering. Indeed, it has become a virtual article of faith that any attempt at commercially underwritten historical reconstruction involves, by definition, an act of historical falsification. This essay sets about to revise this longstanding conceit by pondering some of the specific ways that industrial and commercial development practices came during the early twentieth century to be imagined as technologies for producing new and viable models of a specifically white-collar history. To make this argument, I focus on the phenomenon of historical tourism, a movement that gained popularity in the 1920s and 30s (typified by such ventures as Henry Ford's Greenfield Village and John D. Rockefeller's Colonial Williamsburg), which dedicated itself to reconstructing vestiges of America's “bygone” past. Using Colonial Williamsburg as my case study, I explore how the planners and promoters behind this movement forged a discourse of historical reconstruction designed to make the tactics of industrial-commercial development compatible with the vaunted ideals of historical recovery and cultural conservation. More specifically, I show how this discourse labored to imagine the past itself as a useful and fungible resource: a raw material to be taken up, managed, and improved by the agents of the modern corporate-capitalist order.