Online boundary work tactics: an affordance perspective

Studies of work/life balance have focussed on offline settings, and even though technology is considered as a boundary‐influencing feature, social media have not been the focus. Social technologies challenge the relationship between work and private life in new ways, due to their identified affordances: visibility, persistence, association and editability (Treem and Leonardi, 2012). In this paper, we present the results of a study of social media use (Facebook and Twitter) by employees of non‐governmental organisations (NGOs), and show how, through their affordances, these technologies influence the relationship and boundaries between work and non‐work, increasing visibility and reducing individual privacy. Consequently, we observe boundary work tactics that aim to protect private life from both public and professional scrutiny, in prohibitive, reactive or active ways. Our results call for organisations to develop explicit policies or guidelines for social media use, in both their own interests and those of their employees.     

HR practices for enhancing sustainable employability: implementation,use, and outcomes

Abstract

With the aging of the workforce, organizations need to maintain or improve the sustainable employability of their workforce throughout their working life. This raises the question which HR practices increase workers’ sustainable employability at work. The aim of this study is to investigate the extent to which organizations implement HR practices for enhancing sustainable employability in terms of workers’ health, motivation, and skills and knowledge from the employer’s perspective. In total, 312 owners/directors or HR managers (response rate 13%) filled out the questionnaire. The findings showed that most organizations implemented a range of HR practices to improve the health, motivation, and skills and knowledge of their employees. Perceived effectiveness of these practices were dependent on the number of HR practices that were implemented, employees’ use of and participation in designing these practices. Implementation of HR practices was also related to higher satisfaction with the current employability of employees, and to increased productivity of the organization. Implications for practice and examples of HR practices to enhance sustainable employability are given.     

The complexity of exchange: Wheat markets,petty‐commodity producers and the emergence of commercial capital in colonial Punjab

This paper questions the orthodox Marxist view of merchant capital as “unproductive,” by highlighting the importance of traders in subsuming the countryside to the logic of capital. However, it also argues that in order to properly understand the role played by traders in agrarian change, critical Marxist scholarship on merchant capital needs to recognize the complex marketing systems in which traders and farmers operate. These markets have their own internal relations, organizational and institutional logic which in turn is tied to the specificity of the commodity. Using wheat markets in colonial Punjab as a case study, it then utilizes the framework of complex marketing systems to highlight the range of firms and farms that operated in these markets; the importance of personal relations and informal institutions of family, caste, and religion for establishing trust; and the class stratified nature of market participants. It was from within these informally organized markets that commercial capital first emerged in colonial Punjab. By creatively combining the concept of commercial capital with markets as complex systems, it hopes to provide a richer framework for the study of agrarian change in diverse contexts.     

Measuring Discontinuities in Time Series Obtained with Repeated Sample Surveys

A key requirement of repeated surveys conducted by national statistical institutes is the comparability of estimates over time, resulting in uninterrupted time series describing the evolution of finite population parameters. This is often an argument to keep survey processes unchanged as long as possible. It is nevertheless inevitable that a survey process will need to be redesigned from time to time, for example, to improve or update methods or implement more cost-effective data collection procedures. It is important to quantify the systematic effects or discontinuities of a new survey process on the estimates of a repeated survey to avoid a disturbance in the comparability of estimates over time. This paper reviews different statistical methods that can be used to measure discontinuities and manage the risk due to a survey process redesign.     

What risks do corporate bond put features insure against?

Corporate bond prices are known to be influenced by default and term structure risk in addition to non‐default risks such as illiquidity. Putable corporate bonds allow investors to sell their holdings back to the issuer and may thus provide insurance against all of these risks. We first document empirically that embedded put option values are related to proxies for all three. In a second step, we develop a valuation model that simultaneously captures default and interest rate risk. We use this model to disentangle the reduction in yield spread enjoyed by putable bonds that can be attributed to each risk. Perhaps surprisingly, the most important reduction is due to mitigated default or spread risk, followed by term structure risk. The reduction in the non‐default component is present but rather small.     

Knowledge translation through expatriates in international knowledge transfer

Studies of international knowledge transfer usually focus on the transfer of knowledge without loss between organizational units. However, this research has frequently been inconclusive because of the tacit nature of knowledge and the difficulties of measuring the results of knowledge transfer. Therefore, we suggest a paradigmatic shift of research from knowledge transfer without loss, to knowledge translation as a matter of modification of knowledge when transferred from one context to an other. According to this perspective, the knowledge transfer between the MNE HQ and foreign subsidiaries is a socio-cultural process in which expatriates can be expected to play an important role.In this paper, we study the impact of expatriates in knowledge translation from MNE HQ to foreign subsidiaries. Through an empirical analysis, we examine how the characteristics of expatriates influence the usefulness of knowledge transferred internationally. An important result of the study is that the expatriation experience and, in particular, the relationship development capability has significant positive effects on the international knowledge translation process. However, we did not find any statistical evidence that an expatriate's experience of the particular industry or the particular country has a significant effect.     

How information processing and mobile channel choice influence product returns: An empirical analysis

The mobile internet is starting to overtake the desktop device‐based internet as a purchase channel. Its impact on consumer behavior is therefore increasingly important to understand. This study seeks to understand and measure, if usage of mobile devices for online purchases leads to a lower decision quality and, in effect, to more product returns. In doing so, the impact of information environments on the end‐to‐end consumer purchase decision‐making process is better understood and it is investigated, if the information environment of mobile devices leads consumers to take more error‐prone purchase decisions. An exclusive data set spanning more than 140 million transactions of a European online retailer is used to empirically analyze changes in product return behavior after mobile channel adoption. The results show that mobile channel usage is positively related to product returns, overall and for both, purchases made with mobile devices and purchases made with desktop devices, although prior literature predicts that returns from desktop purchases should not increase. These findings suggest that through new channels, consumers’ information environment is altered sufficiently to affect their decision accuracy. Moreover, the results indicate that previous research may be overestimating the positive effect of mobile channel adoption on sales by disregarding changes in product return behavior.     

Listen to the voice of the customer—First steps towards stakeholder democracy

Recently, calls have grown louder for more stakeholder democracy that is, letting stakeholders participate in the process of organizing, decision‐making, and governance in corporations, especially in the area of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. Despite the relevance of the subject, the impact of customer involvement in CSR on their company‐related attitudes and behaviors still represents a major research void. The paper at hand develops a conceptual framework of consumer involvement in CSR based on the existing literature, theories of stakeholder democracy, and organizational boundaries as well as drawing from the qualitative focus group interviews (N = 24). The framework is tested on a large scale, two‐time point field‐experimental study (N = 3,397). More specifically, consumer reactions to three degrees of customer involvement (i.e., information, feedback, and dialogue) are tested in two different CSR domains (i.e., company‐internal business process vs. company‐external philanthropic CSR). Results indicate that the customer involvement in CSR has a more beneficial effect in terms of strengthening customer outcomes in CSR domains that directly affect external stakeholders of the company (i.e., philanthropic CSR) than in domains that mainly concern company‐internal stakeholders (i.e., business process CSR).