Work and Volunteering: Longitudinal Relationships between Work‐Related Experiences and Volunteering Behaviour

This study examines the effect of work‐related experiences on employees’ engagement in community volunteering, using data from a British longitudinal panel of employees. Using a novel analytical approach that separates variation in volunteering due to within‐person changes in work conditions from variation due to between‐person work differences, we more robustly test existing and new hypotheses about the effects of work on volunteering. New to this literature, we find that commuting and satisfaction with job experiences are significant predictors of community volunteering, both the likelihood to volunteer and volunteering frequency. In turn, volunteering determinants previously explored with cross‐sectional data, such as managerial and professional jobs, employment sector and hourly paid contracts, are no longer statistically significant in the within‐person models. We discuss a number of important theoretical and practical consequences of these findings.     

Revisiting the trans-situationality of values in Schwartz’s Portrait Values Questionnaire

Quality & Quantity - Schwartz in his famous theory of basic values follows Parsons and Rokeach in arguing that human values are trans-situational or context free. For any individual, the same...     

Temporary Migration and Foreign Direct Investment

The question of complementarity or substitutability of FDI and international labour mobility has not yet been answered. The substitutability assumption does not take into consideration the technological spillover of FDI in the host countries. Moreover, migration flows reveal cultural characteristics and labour force properties of their native country which may stimulate bilateral business networks, strengthening the complementarity assumption between capital and labour flows. In this paper we build a continuous time dynamic model where these offsetting forces are at work. We analyze whether, and to what extent, the increase in labour mobility might affect FDI outflows. A numerical simulation is performed showing that a higher income growth rate corresponds to a higher labour mobility. Some policy implications and further research direction are suggested.     

How Useful Are the Strategic Tools We Teach in Business Schools?

Strategic tools are indispensible for business and competitive analysis. Yet we know very little about managers' internal logic as they put these tools into practical use. We situate our study in a business school context using action learning prior to the manifestation of practice to complement our understanding of practice. Using Personal Construct Theory and Repertory Grids, our mid‐range theorizing showed that, contrary to current thinking about strategic tools, managers think in dualities (often paradoxically) and have a preference for multiple‐tools‐in‐use, tools that provide different perspectives, peripheral vision, connected thinking, simultaneously help differentiate and integrate complex issues, and guide the thinking process. These findings are important for designing better tools and the nurturing of critical managerial competencies needed for a complicated world. Our study's focus also has wider implications for scholars as we see our own material evaluated by those who will put these lessons into practice.     

Dynamic Interplay of Visual and Textual Identification Strategies in Employees’ Magazines

This article explores how an organization’s identity is strategically communicated through texts and images in the employees’ magazines of a global Danish company with a worldwide readership of over 18,000 employees. Drawing on an interdisciplinary methodological framework related to organizational identification theory and social semiotics, it proposes a multimodal analysis model through which several identification strategies are explored at the level of each semiotic mode and at the level of their interplay. The article explains how identity is strategically communicated in accordance with the potential and constraints of texts and images. It claims that by exploring how these semiotic modes reinforce, complement or subvert each other, the identification strategies can be more thoroughly addressed. Shedding light on how the multimodal interplay contributes to communicate identity, this model can also be employed by communicators in order to nuance and improve their strategic communicative practice. By examining the semiotic modes’ complex interconnectivity and functional differentiation in the strategic communication of identity, this article expands the existing research work as the usual textual focus is extended to a multimodal one.     

Elasticity of substitution and the stagnation of Italian productivity

The aim of this paper is to investigate the roots of the stagnation in the Italian total factor productivity (TFP). The analysis focuses on the specific pattern of technical progress in determining the dynamics of the TFP. This analysis cannot be done with Cobb-Douglas technology, but requires the employment of a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function that allows distinguishing between the direction and the bias of technical progress. We employ a CES specification embodying both labor- and capital-augmenting technical change, with a σ less than 1. We obtain three main results. (1) There seems to have been a structural break around the mid-1990s in the direction and bias of technological change; (2) The first half of the sample features a labor-augmenting technical change and a capital bias; and (3) In the second part of the sample, both these characteristics seem to disappear, and the evolution of factor endowments assumes a key role. This fact may be seen as one of the potential causes of the stagnation in Italian productivity.     

Factors Influencing Corporate Environmental Disclosure

In this paper, we have studied the factors that influence the environmental disclosures of Italian listed companies. We also aimed to verify the effects produced by the introduction of specific legislation (albeit of a voluntary nature) on environmental disclosures. The analysis has the advantage of including all of the informational documents produced by the company. The analysis shows an (excessively) low level of disclosure of environmental information by the companies examined. The econometric analysis then shows, contrary to our hypothesis and the results of previous analyses carried out in other countries, a negative and statistically significant relationship between environmental disclosures, the presences of minority shareholders and large auditors and the listing of the company, including in foreign markets. We lastly observed that the introduction of ad hoc legislation as purely voluntary only affects the contents of quantitative environmental disclosures, which are unsuitable for a highly industrialized developed country. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Electronic Finance: Reshaping the Financial Landscape Around the World

In recent years, the emergence of electronic finance—especially online banking and brokerage services, and new trading systems—has reshaped the financial landscape around the world. This paper reviews these developments and finds that they are greatly impacting the structure of and competition in financial services industries and will have a large impact on incumbents. Its assessment of how e-finance, and globalization more generally, affects countries highlights the need for changes in four financial sector policy areas—safety and soundness, competition policy, consumer and investor protection, and global public policies—to mitigate risks and reap as much as possible the potential benefits of e-finance.