Traumberuf oder Verlegenheitslösung?

So far relatively little is known about the situation of Ph.D. students in media and communication research. The main purpose of this study is, therefore, to shed light on the employment and working conditions for young scholars on their way to their doctoral degrees. We conducted a survey of 281 Ph.D. students in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The results show that, on the one hand, young scholars are intrinsically highly motivated to do their jobs. On the other hand, they perceive an academic career as a very uncertain venture with many obstacles. Furthermore, several types of Ph.D. students can be distinguished: idealists, careerists and waverers. It is shown that only the idealists conform to the concept of a productive and interested scholar. The results are discussed in terms of their importance for the future development of the field.     

Enterprise Risk Management and the Cost of Capital

Enterprise risk management (ERM) is a process that manages all risks in an integrated, holistic fashion by controlling and coordinating any offsetting risks across the enterprise. This research investigates whether the adoption of the ERM approach affects firms' cost of equity capital. We restrict our analysis to the U.S. insurance industry to control for unobservable differences in business models and risk exposures across industries. We simultaneously model firms' adoption of ERM and the effect of ERM on the cost of capital. We find that ERM adoption significantly reduces firm's cost of capital. Our results suggest that cost of capital benefits are one answer to the question how ERM can create value.     

What Causes the Positive Price-Turnover Correlation in European Housing Markets?

This paper examines what determines the correlation between prices and turnover in European housing markets. Using a panel vector autoregressive model, we find that there is a particularly strong feedback mechanism between prices and turnover. Momentum effects are another important reason why prices and turnover are correlated. Common underlying factors, such as GDP and interest rates, also explain part of the price-turnover correlation. The results in this paper imply that, to understand price and turnover dynamics, it is important to model prices and turnover as two interdependent processes. There is a considerable bias in the coefficient estimates of standard house price models if this dependency is not explicitly taken into account.     

Translating sustainable and smart city strategies into performance measurement systems

This paper shows how sustainable and smart strategies can be implemented in cities and how these strategies influence, and are influenced by, performance measurement systems. Drawing upon the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, the authors present the case of Gothenburg in Sweden, where they interviewed the key actors involved in a new sustainability strategy. Translating strategy into performance measurement systems requires collaboration across organizational boundaries and considerations of financial goals and social and human aspects.     

Can Foreigners Improve the Profitability of Emerging Market Banks? Evidence from the Vietnamese Strategic Partner Program

Foreign ownership and foreign management are often assumed to improve the efficiency of emerging market banks. Our article examines this relationship for the Vietnamese strategic partner program, where foreign banks have been allowed to take minority stakes in local banks. We add to the existing literature by distinguishing between ownership by foreign strategic and non-strategic investors, and between foreign management sent by the strategic partner and independent foreign executives. We show that only the presence of independent foreign executives has a positive impact on banks. We interpret these results as the consequence of conflicts of interest and power struggles between local shareholders and the strategic partner, which prevent efficiency in enhancing technology transfer.     

Examining the relationship between strategic HRM and hospital employees’ work attitudes: an analysis across occupational groups in public and private hospitals

Abstract

As human resource challenges have increased, strategic human resource management (SHRM) in hospitals has evolved into an important management task. Accompanying its growing relevance, there is an evolving research stream on the impact of SHRM on organizational and individual-level outcomes in the hospital context. We aim to address two remaining research gaps by investigating variations in the use of SHRM across organizations (public vs. private ownership types) and differences in the relationship between SHRM and employee attitudes within organizations (for the occupational groups of nurses and physicians). This study is based on a sample of 179 German acute care hospitals. We employ ANOVA and logistic regression analyses, and our results corroborate previous research findings showing that SHRM has positive effects on employee attitudes. However, the effects vary in significance and magnitude, depending on whether nurses or physicians are targets. Further, we reveal significant SHRM differences in public- vs. private-sector organizations.     

Factual and modal notions in social research

The article discusses a distinction between factual and modal notions, and corresponding generalizations, in social research. The discussion starts from the suggestion, made by Charles Ragin, that theoretical statements in social research most often can be formulated as statements about sets of cases and relations between such sets. In contrast to this view, it is argued that theoretical statements in social research often require modal notions referring to possibilities and probabilities which cannot be formulated as statements about sets of cases. In order to show this, the article reformulates Ragin’s set-theoretic approach in the conceptual framework of statistical variables. It is shown that this can be done for both crisp and fuzzy set versions of Ragin’s approach. The article then goes on to argue that social research is often interested in modal generalizations (probabilistic and deterministic rules) which require a fundamentally different conceptual framework. The article shows how such a framework can be defined, and finally indicates its usage for causal interpretations.     

Good Cop–Bad Cop: Trust,Control, and the Lure of Integration

Based on a longitudinal case study of four interorganizational product development collaborations, this paper identifies a lure to cross‐functional integration that has hereto been neglected. In particular, findings suggest that when the buyer firm separates the Research and Development (R&D) Department from the Procurement Department, the two departments play a good cop–bad cop strategy toward the supplier. Thereby, they are able to foster a high level of goodwill trust between R&D personnel of the collaborating firms, while procurement personnel maintain a high level of formal control. Using an intricate sample design with polar cases, the study shows that cross‐functional integration of the two departments hampers interorganizational goodwill trust at the benefit of formal control. The findings offer a way forward for managers seeking to reap the benefits of collaboration, while limiting their exposure to the associated risks.