A new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement based on the capability approach

We propose a methodology based on the use of clustering techniques derived from data analysis and multi-attribute decision analysis methods aiming at purposeful multidimensional poverty measurement. Our contribution to methodological knowledge insists on the necessity to build “meaningful measurements” for policy making and policy implementation. Our standpoint underlines the necessity to consider the problem of poverty measurement as a decision problem and to tackle its measurement issue with that in mind. We also show that such an exercise can be useful to develop a better operational definition of poverty and to solve the aggregation issues.     

The Effect of Follow-up Mailings on The Response Rate and Response Quality in Mail Surveys

Numerous experts have demonstrated that the increase in the number of contacts produces a “lengthening” of the field work, although this lag in the analysis of the data is “compensated” by the increase in the response rate that is achieved through this second, third, and successive “contacts”. However, can it be said that these interviewees respond with the same dedication as those who responded from the initial contact? Or could it be that they will try to respond “hastily” so as not to be “harassed” further? The aim of this study is to try to find some answers to these questions by giving the results of the first ever research carried out in Spain using the TDM of Dillman in mail surveys.     

The Self‐Help Myth: Towards a Theory of Philanthropy as Consensus Broker

This article presents a theoretical and methodological approach to studying how philanthropic power is maintained through the process of negotiating consensus between greatly unequal partners such as wealthy funders and social movement leaders. It is proposed that grant agreements between private foundations and social movement organizations construct idealized spaces of public participation and discursive theories of change that draw attention away from structural inequality and antagonism, ultimately generating consent. Drawing upon archival and ethnographic research on philanthropic investments in addressing migrant poverty in California's Central Valley, the article shows how consensus between foundation staff and farmworker and immigrant organizers promote funding frameworks that exclude questions that challenge relationships of power and systems of agricultural production that contribute to enduring poverty across the region. The Gramscian conceptual frames of “discursive power,” “hegemony as politics,” and “strategic articulation” are presented as a theoretical framework from which to understand the power of private philanthropy as consensus broker during historical moments of crisis.     

A weighting approach to making inference with probabilistically linked data

Record linkage is the act of bringing together records from two files that are believed to belong to the same unit (e.g., a person or business). It is a low‐cost way of increasing the set of variables available for analysis. Errors may arise in the linking process if an error‐free unit identifier is not available. Two types of linking errors include an incorrect link (records belonging to two different units are linked) and a missed record (an unlinked record for which a correct link exists). Naively ignoring linkage errors may mean that analysis of the linked file is biased. This paper outlines a “weighting approach” to making correct inference about regression coefficients and population totals in the presence of such linkage errors. This approach is designed for analysts who do not have the expertise or time to use specialist software required by other approaches but who are comfortable using weights in inference. The performance of the estimator is demonstrated in a simulation study.     

Leading for Long‐Term Performance: Matching the Behavior to the Situation

Is there one right way to lead, or does it all “depend?” The right answer will inform the right leadership development strategy. A recent study by McKinsey & Co. using survey data collected from 165 organizations and over 365,000 respondents globally suggests that the answer is both. Two types of behavior sets emerged from organizations that enjoyed higher member perceptions of leadership effectiveness and attained higher levels of organizational health (the latter predicts long‐term financial and operational performance). We combined these into a model that prescribes a set of “baseline” behaviors that should always be evident, complemented by another set of behaviors (“situational behaviors”) that should be differentially emphasized depending on the level of organizational health. Both the content of the behavior and its relative emphasis are critical to either set. The current paper combines these into a model of organization‐wide leadership and concludes with action implications for organizations’ leadership development strategy.     

Contextualized Project Management Practice: A Cluster Analysis of Practices and Best Practices

The specificity of project management in different contexts and industries is recognized, but little empirical research encompasses a sufficiently broad range of contexts and project types to precisely identify these specificities. This article adopts such a wide perspective based on a large sample of data from an ongoing empirical investigation of project management practice. Contextual archetypes are identified (i.e., clusters of experienced practitioners that share similar organizational and project contexts). Archetypes of contextualized practice are then investigated through the study of the extent of use of empirically identified toolsets in each cluster. The results empirically confirm some well‐known assumptions about practice but also sharpen the knowledge and understanding of practice in real complex multidimensional contexts. A new concept of “performing‐maturity” emerged from the data. This concept sheds light on the entangled imbrications of maturity, competence, and success. Practices are regressed against performing‐maturity to reveal best contextualized practices.     

Does designing environmental sustainability disclosure quality measures make a difference?

Assessing the quality of information disclosed by companies is a complex task. Accounting studies usually rely on analysing the content of corporate reports using measures to obtain a proxy for the information reported by companies. However, there is no consensus about the best design for these measures. The objective of the current paper is to investigate if there are significant differences in the results generated from seven alternative measures for assessing the quality of FTSE100 environmental sustainability reporting. Seven measures/indices have been used to assess disclosure quality. The three unidimensional measures include two “quantity measures” and one “scope measure” that measure the volume and width/coverage of information, respectively. Three compound measures are adopted from the literature, and the final measure is a multidimensional quality model, based on the results of a questionnaire ascertaining the perceptions of 86 preparers and 177 users of annual report (AR) and/stand‐alone corporate responsibility report (CRR). Although the results of the empirical analysis indicate that the measures are significantly correlated, the choice of a specific method can result in the very different ranking of companies. The evidence presented indicates that the choice of measure is of key importance.     

The analysis of risk perception with fuzzy means-end approach

Visitors’ risk perceptions have been found to influence the on-site behavior of tourists and their intention to return to a destination or to recommend it to others. This study discusses how the uses of a means-end approach with fuzzy conceptualization in eliciting the perception of tourism risks in a better understanding of the visitors’ perceptual orientation toward the tourism values. We provide a hierarchy value map that fuses the attribute–consequence–value (A–C–V) and fuzzy linguistics to effectively and efficiently understand vacation risks and risk characteristics. Fuzzy logic is also adopted to deal with the ill-defined nature of the tourist linguistic judgments required in the proposed means-end chain. This research findings suggest that additionally to managing the most likely risks, tourist resorts should be prepared to cope with worst case scenarios such as “Thunderstorm”, “Bus accident”, “Food poisoning” and “Cable car accident”. From an overall risk perceptive, tourists are most concerned with dominant perceptual orientation of risk delivers being “Bus accident” → “Decrease of trust in the safety management as a result of the event of damage” → “Anger”.     

The urgent need for figures of merit in order to evaluate the performance of teaching and learning methodologies: constructive criticism from a scientific metrological discipline

An objective criterion for an a priori identification of which methodologies are more appropriate for dealing with the problem of teaching or learning science at a determined school level, in the case of education, are very lax or missed. Today it is difficult to objectively differentiate which is the best strategy for dealing with a determined teaching/learning problem. Objectivity can be achieved through modern logic taken from the formal sciences, such as statistics. In the case of metrological discipline such analytical chemistry, where as in education, there is a continuous development of new methodologies and the performance are always evaluated through which analytical chemist call “figures of merit”. In this article, we establish a guide for future research in education to develop objective parameters (figures of merit) to evaluate and compare different teaching and learning strategies following the example of other disciplines such as analytical chemistry.     

Promotion dynamics the Peter Principle: Incumbents vs. external hires

The “Peter Principle” (Peter and Hull, 1969; Fairburn and Malcomson, 2001; Lazear, 2004) suggests that individuals are “promoted to their level of incompetence”. A corollary of the “Peter Principle” prediction is that external hires should have an advantage when competing with incumbents for a higher position. Using five years of personnel records from a single large U.S. corporation, this paper contributes to the literature on internal labor markets and intra-firm job mobility by testing this prediction for career advancement. Results support the idea of differences in promotion dynamics among incumbents and external hires, since past career advancement within the firm result in a lower probability of subsequent promotion, even after controlling for workers' heterogeneity and tenure on the current job. The advantage for external hires does not hold once other job changes (lateral transfers, task reorganizations) are considered, highlighting that promotions are a very different job placement mechanism than transfers. Overall, the evidence points out towards declining performance following promotion, as opposed to alternative competing hypothesis of probation placement or “handicapping” external candidates.     

Post‐Stratification Weighting in Organizational Surveys: A Cross‐Disciplinary Tutorial

Post‐stratification weighting is a technique used in public opinion polling to minimize discrepancies between population parameters and realized sample characteristics. The current paper provides a weighting tutorial to organizational surveyors who may otherwise be unfamiliar with the rationale behind the practice as well as “when and how to do” such weighting. The primary reasons to weight include: [1] reducing the effect of frame, sampling, and nonresponse bias in point estimates, and, relatedly, (2) correcting for aggregation error resulting from over‐ and underrepresentation of constituent groups. We briefly compare and contrast traditions within public opinion and organizational polling contexts and present a hybrid taxonomy of sampling procedures that organizational surveyors may find useful in situating their survey efforts within a methodological framework. Next, we extend the existing HRM literature focused on survey nonresponse to a broader lens concerned with population misrepresentation. It is from this broadened methodological framework that we introduce the practice of weighting as a remedial strategy for misrepresentation. We then provide sample weighting algorithms and standard error corrections that can be applied to organizational survey data and make our data and procedures available to individuals who may wish to use our examples as they learn “how to weight.” © 2018 Wiley ­Periodicals, Inc.     

Thieves,thugs, and neighborhood poverty

This paper develops a model of crime analyzing how such behavior is associated with individual and neighborhood poverty. The model shows that even under relatively minimal assumptions, a connection between individual poverty and both property and violent crimes will arise, and moreover, “neighborhood” effects can develop, but will differ substantially in nature across crime types. A key implication is that greater economic segregation in a city should have no effect or a negative effect on property crime, but a positive effect on violent crime. Using IV methods, I show this implication to be consistent with the empirical evidence.     

Perceived and actual option values of college enrollment

An important feature of postsecondary schooling is the experimentation that accompanies sequential decision making. Specifically, by entering college, a student gains the option to decide at a future time whether it is optimal to remain in college or to drop out, after resolving uncertainty that existed at entrance about factors that affect the return to college. This paper uses data from the Berea Panel Study to quantify the value of this option. The unique nature of the data allows us to make a distinction between “actual” option values and “perceived” option values and to examine the accuracy of students' perceptions.     

Ellsberg’s two-color experiment,portfolio inertia and ambiguity

Results in this paper relate the observation of an interval of prices at which a decision maker (DM) strictly prefers to hold a zero position on an asset (termed “portfolio inertia”) to the DM’s perception of the underlying payoff relevant events as ambiguous, as the term is defined in [Econometrica 69 (2001) 265]. The connection between portfolio inertia and ambiguity is established without invoking a parametric preference form, such as the Choquet expected utility or the max–min multiple priors model. This allows us to draw an observable distinction between portfolio inertia that may arise purely due to first-order risk aversion type effects, such as those which could arise even if preferences were probabilistically sophisticated, and portfolio inertia that involves ambiguity perceptions.     

DATA GAPS,DATA INCOMPARABILITY,AND DATA IMPUTATION: A REVIEW OF POVERTY MEASUREMENT METHODS FOR DATA‐SCARCE ENVIRONMENTS

Questions that often come up in contexts where household consumption data are unavailable or missing include: what are the best existing methods to obtain poverty estimates at a single snapshot in time? and over time? and what are the best available methods to study poverty dynamics? A variety of different techniques have been developed to tackle these questions, but unfortunately, they are presented in different forms and lack unified terminology. We offer a review of poverty imputation methods that address contexts ranging from completely missing and partially missing consumption data in cross‐sectional household surveys, to missing panel household data. We present the various existing methods under a common framework, with pedagogical discussion on their intuition. Empirical illustrations are provided using several rounds of household survey data from Vietnam. Furthermore, we also offer a practical guide with detailed instructions on computer programs that can be used to implement the reviewed techniques.     

Cross-sectional surveys: Inferring total eventual time in current state using only elapsed time-to-date

We focus on snapshot surveying of sub-populations whose members are in a temporary state and where one of the questions asked is the elapsed time already spent in that state. From these answers we develop probabilistic and statistical procedures to estimate the distribution of total time that will eventually be spent in that state by any random individual who enters the state. The method relies on a selection bias often found in temporal sampling, sometimes called “random incidence” or “longevity bias.” We develop results for several types of sampling, including random and fixed times of surveying, random and fixed times of entering the state, and sampling only those who have already spent some minimal specified time in the targeted state. An example with post-doc data is included to demonstrate the steps.     

京津冀协同背景下环京津贫困带减贫途径研究

环京津贫困带是我国非常典型的紧邻大都市的“集中连片特殊困难地区”,且由于贫困与生态问题耦合,多年来难以脱贫。推动环京津贫困带减贫,成为贯彻实施“京津冀协同发展”国家战略过程中需要解决的一个重要问题。本文从承担生态涵养和生态安全功能、大城市“回波效应”大于“扩散效应”、区域开放较晚等角度,分析环京津贫困带形成与存在的多重原因,并探讨通过区域协同发展解决大都市周边生态抑制型贫困区域贫困问题的模式与路径。     

The perceived fairness of work–life balance policies: A UK case study of solo‐living managers and professionals without children

The ability to reconcile work and private life is a matter relevant to all employees, though not all may seek “balance.” Research indicates that organisational work–life balance policies and flexible working arrangements often focus on the needs of working parents, with one potential outcome being “family‐friendly backlash,” or counterproductive work behaviour from those without caring responsibilities. This paper analyses data from 36 interviews with childless solo‐living managers and professionals, exploring perceptions of fairness in relation to these policies. In contrast to previous studies, despite recognising a strong family‐care orientation in employer provisions, perceptions of unfair treatment or injustice were not pronounced in most cases, and thus there was little evidence of backlash/counterproductive work behaviour. The paper uses and develops organisational justice theory to explain the findings, emphasising the importance of situating individual justice orientations within perceived organisational policy and wider regulatory contexts. It also emphasises the importance of evaluating fairness of work–life balance policies and flexible working arrangements in relation to other aspects of the employment relationship, notably opportunities for career development and progression.     

Employee perceptions of HR practices: A critical review and future directions

Abstract

Scholars are directing more attention to employee perceptions of human resources (HR) practices and have explored issues such as whether and how employees’ idiosyncratic or collective perceptions of HR practices shape employee outcomes. To further this area of research, we seek to determine what authors mean when they refer to “employee perceptions of HR practices”. We review 105 articles from leading human resource management journals and find that employee perceptions of HR practices is not a monolithic concept. Rather, following previous scholars, we identify three distinct components of employee perceptions of HR practices: the ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘why’. We critically summarize extant literature on these three components of employee HR perception and propose future research directions, including enriching the theoretical foundations of HR communication, embracing cross-national contexts, and enhancing practical relevance.