Dissertationen zum Thema „Business in crisis“

De senaste årens naturkatastrofer, smittsamma sjukdomar och terroristattentat är exempel på en ökad hotbild vilken svenska researrangörer måste förhålla sig till. I syfte att skydda människor och företagets kommersiella värden gäller det därför att skaffa sig en beredskap för att hantera krissituationer. Hanteringen av kriser involverar ofta företagets förmåga att hantera förändringar. Researrangörerna i denna studie arbetar samtliga med någon form av Crisis Management. Krisberedskap och krishantering är en självklarhet för researrangörernas överlevnad på en konkurrensutsatt marknad. Dock har det under de senaste åren infunnit sig yttre faktorer som påtvingat researrangörerna nya sätt att agera och ibland till och med nya sätt att tänka. Den forskningsfråga som vi önskar besvara med denna studie sammanfattas enligt följande formulering. Vilka fördelar kan ett strategiskt och systematiskt arbete med riskbedömning, krisberedskap och krishantering medföra för reseföretagen i samband med en ökad yttre hotbild? Vidare är syftet med denna uppsats att genom fallstudier hos ett antal researrangörer öka förståelsen för de yttre faktorer och de inre processer som påverkar företagens verksamhet i samband med en ökad hotbild samt visa vilka fördelar ett strategiskt och systematiskt arbete med riskbedömning, krisberedskap och krishantering kan medföra för dessa organisationer. Resultatet av vår studie visar att ett strategiskt och systematiskt arbete med riskbedömning, krisberedskap och krishantering leder till ett ökat förtroende för researrangören hos dess kunder, allmänhet och media samt ett stärkt varumärke dock under förutsättning att detta arbete kommuniceras av företaget.

As a critical infrastructure, the US electricity grid supplies electricity to 340 million people within eight separate regions. The power infrastructure is vulnerable to many types of disasters capable of severing supplies of electricity. The impact on the employees and communities when small- and medium-size enterprises are shut down due to disasters can be severe. The purpose of the quantitative comparative study was to explore small- and medium-size enterprises crisis management strategies in the case of power infrastructure vulnerabilities. Perceptions of small business leaders were probed about crisis management planning relevant to three secondary factors: prior experience of crises, threat perceptions, and planning self-efficacy. Participants completed an adapted questionnaire instrument based on a five-point Likert scale for six sub-factors including resilience through planning, financial impact, operational crisis management, the perfect storm, the aftermath of survival, and atrophy. The instrument also measured three additional factors to include, prior experience of crises, threat perceptions, and planning self-efficacy, across seven types of crises. The results of this study indicated that of the 276 respondents, 104 had no crisis plans, but 172 did have crisis plans. Of those who had implemented crisis plans, 19% had specific provisions to address power outages or attacks on the electrical grid. Of the respondents who had not planned for power outages nor experienced significant losses of power, a statistically significant number acknowledged an external threat to their business. The majority of respondents indicated that long-term planning was related to resilience; however, the migration of crisis understanding into the planning process or implementation was not implemented. This heightened awareness of potential crises without the corresponding development and implementation of mitigation crisis plans requires additional research to understand drivers effecting the decision making process with crisis managers.

Global financial crisis, triggered by the U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis, is now the hot issue all over the world. The crisis has already slowed down the world economy and brought great shocks to almost every industry. For B2C companies all over the world, the crisis is more of an opportunity than a threat and therefore these companies should use marketing techniques to further boost their revenue and profit.

In view of this situation, this thesis is dedicated to discuss the price and promotion strategies used by B2C companies during the crisis. Through case studies of four B2C companies, that is, TaoBao.com, DangDang.com, EBay.com and Amazon.com, we conclude that discount, pricing leadership and penetration pricing are the universal price strategies used, while they also use nearly similar promotion strategies: advertising, public relation and sales promotion. Considering the current crisis, we also think that current price and promotion strategies are insufficient in face of global financial crisis in that they are not flexible enough to adapt themselves to the changing consumer behaviors and economic surroundings. Consequently, to seek to address these problems, we here bring forward three suggestions: strengthened segment-based pricing Strategy, innovative promotion strategy and flexible marketing mix.

Background/problem: Many business and industries have been hardly influenced of the occurrence of this financial crisis which is expected to be the worst financial crisis since 1929. Historically the luxury business has always been immune to uncertainties and crisis. It is of great interest to see how the luxury business reacts in the financial crisis from a marketing strategy perspective.

Purpose: To explain the impact of the financial crisis on the luxury business by using and identifying the nature of luxury and the suitable marketing strategies.

Methodology: A deductive philosophical approach and a positivistic and interpretative research approach are applied in this thesis.Findings: The luxury business has not been influenced by the financial crisis based on the interviews. The main reasons behind it are interpreted as the nature of luxury itself and its unique customers.

Conclusion: Based on our study and the involved companies, it is assumed that the luxury business is invulnerable to the financial crisis.

In the course of doing business in the modern world organizations often find themselves involved in negative situations which can only be categorized as crises. These crises have a wide variety of causes and often result in negative outcomes for the organizations involved. While crises have been studied from an organizational view, this research investigates the consumer's experience when exposed to a crisis. To do this, the current literature on marketing crises is expanded upon to create a definition of marketing crisis, and the theoretical lens of attribution theory is applied to identify why individual consumers may respond quite differently to the same marketing crisis. The three specific research questions investigated are: 1) How do consumers make causal attributions about marketing crises? 2) What factors influence how consumers make those attributions about marketing crises?, and 3) What are the consequences of causal attributions about marketing crises? These questions are tested with an experimental design manipulating exposure to a marketing crisis and measuring antecedents, causal attribution, and consequences associated with an attribution theory model of crisis perception. A major finding of this research is that the cause of the crisis matters to consumers, and that the perception of cause can vary greatly among consumers. Specifically, and counter-intuitively, this research suggests that consumers who are actually customers of organizations affected by the crisis may have a less dramatic response to a negative development than consumers who are less involved and more psychologically distant.

The purpose of this thesis is to compare and analyze the single curve and the multiple curve frameworks used to price interest rate derivatives and to discuss the advantages of the multiple curve framework. We also describe how the overall derivative market has been affected by the 2007 credit crisis.

Background: The Swedish life-insurance business has been extensively criticised lately due to broken promises to customers as well as due to scandals that some companies within the business have been involved in. The companies within the Swedish life-insurance business find themselves in a so- called crisis of confidence, something that is created in and by media. A company that finds itself in a crisis of confidence somehow have to manage the situation and crises of confidence can also result in different kinds of changes.

Purpose: The aim of this thesis is to explore and analyse how individual life- insurance companies manage crises of confidence. As a consequence, the aim is also to investigate in what way crises of confidence are initiators to change.

Procedure: The study has been conducted through seven qualitative interviews with individuals holding a managerial position within a Swedish life-insurance company.

Findings: Essential for managing crises of confidence is communication and information mainly to media, but also to customers and employees. Further, a higher level of clarity and transparency in products and activities, together with increased control of ethical policies, are aspects that have been shown to be of importance in managing the crisis of confidence within the Swedish life- insurance business. The crisis of confidence has generated changes, but it can not be decided with certainty if these changes have been initiated only by the crisis of confidence, or if the changes would have been carried through anyway. What can be established, is that the crisis of confidence has speeded up already planned changes.

In this paper, we investigate organisational responses to an economic

crisis within a group of seven subcontractors in the Swedish heavy

vehicle industry. Although the participating firms had similar exposures

to an abrupt and severe shift in demand, their performances during the

crisis varied extensively. One year after the crisis began, some firms were

still encountering financial problems threatening their survival, yet

others had orchestrated a recovery that was generating healthy cash

flows. Evaluation of in-depth interviews with key organisational

members and standardised financial indicators suggests that the

subcontractors' performances in the crisis were determined by their

ability to attain and evaluate 'deep knowledge' from stakeholders and

'wide knowledge' from other external actors. Hence, our findings not

only demonstrate an opportunity to extend existing research on crisis

management but also indicate that the subcontractors' performances in

the economic crisis were related to the implementation of dynamic

capabilities.

Crisis are extremely difficult to predict and according to Curtin, Hayman and Husein (2005) this is a problem that worsen by the trend in the 1970s and 80s where companies developed managers to be specialists. One example of this trend could be that a finance

director knows only about finance, likewise for the marketing director, the technology director and operations director who all have their specialist fields. This kind of approach will lead to gaps in the management structure, since a finance director who is

driven by profits and earnings per share would most probably lose sight of the bigger picture which will prevent the chances of predicting any crisis (Curtin et al., 2005). This kind of thinking began to change in the 1990s and a new approach came into vogue

where managers were produced to be far more rounded than they were previously, as a generalist (Curtin et al., 2005). Our purpose is to find out how crisis emerge in projects and investigate the role of emotion in crisis management.

The qualitative method is best suited to fulfil our aim since we are interested in individual’s personal experiences and personal reflections related to crisis management. The reason for us not choosing the quantitative method is that we do not wish to measure or create statistical generalizations about crisis management, it is rather to describe the essence of crisis management and issues related to crisis management, also how crisis is perceived from organizations. We therefore performed interviews with respondents that were of interest for our purpose.

With all the information and knowledge gathered throughout our research we believe that when it comes to the abilities of the project managers to predict and prevent crisis, it is correct that managers have different and perhaps better education than 30 years ago

but when everything comes around it is still next to impossible to completely be able to prevent crisis. We came to this conclusion after done our research and realized that even though every project manager who has been involved in any crisis can not completely

prevent the same crisis to happen again.

The economic downturn of 2008-2010 has encouraged many economists andpoliticians to reconsider the role of fiscal policy. Whereas there is a broadly acceptedmodel which describes the influence of monetary policy on the economy, there is noconsensus concerning the fiscal policy.This paper aims to study the effectiveness of fiscal policy actions in Sweden over thepast 15 years, starting from the end of the banking crisis of 1992-93 to date. It has aspecific focus on the measures which were introduced in 2007-2010 and employs bothqualitative and quantitative analyses.The qualitative analysis investigates different expansionary fiscal measures, inter alia,the earned income tax credit, the new legislation for crisis management of banks, theguarantee program and the establishment of stability fund.The quantitative analysis is based on a 4-variable Vector Autoregression model whichhelps to identify the influence of general government expenditure, revenue and centralgovernment debt on GDP fluctuations over the past 15 years. The results demonstrate apositive response of GDP to an increase in government expenditure, with the maximumvalue of response achieved after 8 quarters. GDP also grows in response to a positiveshock in the central government debt, which is in line with the macroeconomic theory ofexpansionary fiscal policy. The positive response to an increase of revenue is somewhatcontradictory, and can become a topic for a further in-depth research.The economic downturn of 2008-2010 has encouraged many economists andpoliticians to reconsider the role of fiscal policy. Whereas there is a broadly acceptedmodel which describes the influence of monetary policy on the economy, there is noconsensus concerning the fiscal policy.This paper aims to study the effectiveness of fiscal policy actions in Sweden over thepast 15 years, starting from the end of the banking crisis of 1992-93 to date. It has aspecific focus on the measures which were introduced in 2007-2010 and employs bothqualitative and quantitative analyses.The qualitative analysis investigates different expansionary fiscal measures, inter alia,the earned income tax credit, the new legislation for crisis management of banks, theguarantee program and the establishment of stability fund.The quantitative analysis is based on a 4-variable Vector Autoregression model whichhelps to identify the influence of general government expenditure, revenue and centralgovernment debt on GDP fluctuations over the past 15 years. The results demonstrate apositive response of GDP to an increase in government expenditure, with the maximumvalue of response achieved after 8 quarters. GDP also grows in response to a positiveshock in the central government debt, which is in line with the macroeconomic theory ofexpansionary fiscal policy. The positive response to an increase of revenue is somewhatcontradictory, and can become a topic for a further in-depth research.

As the world becomes more globalized, multinational corporations (MNCs) are obliged to spread and open subsidiaries in foreign countries. Unfortunately, some countries have unstable political systems that exist in a state of systematic crisis. For corporations whose subsidiaries are caught in the middle of a political crisis in foreign territories, this unrest presents high physical and economic risks. Thus, what types of threats do firms encounter, and how do they perceive them? Can their experience influence their perception of the crisis? The focus of this dissertation is to study the decision-making process of multinational corporations in times of political and economic crisis at a subsidiary level, utilizing the example of Mozambique. Two studies were conducted.

The first was drawn on prior literature on threat perception, social embeddedness and MNCs’ reaction to external threats. A conceptual model of MNCs’ response to political crises in frontier markets was developed. The antecedents or predictors of exit included influences on exit decision, past experiences, crisis perceptions and the moderator effect of social embeddedness between perception and exit.

The second study focused on MNCs that not only decided to stay in the foreign market, but seek for unique opportunities in an economic crisis. The conceptual model created is simple, and builds upon existing literature on social embeddedness, MNCs’ experience, and international staffing. Within the international staffing literature, it provides a strong contribution to the theories on parent country nationals and host country nationals, implementing new constructs such as parent company experience and subsidiary company experience.

Both models were tested using a survey data from managers of 108 MNCs’ subsidiaries in Mozambique, some of which exited due to the economic and political crisis, and some of which remained. The results indicate that both models are mostly supported. These studies contribute to the literature involving MNCs in host countries, including threat perception, social embeddedness, local content, international staffing, expatriates and past experiences. In practical terms, they provide a tool for both policymakers and private MNCs to act preemptively in times of political and/or economic crisis.