Managerial Sensemaking and Occupational Identities in Britain and Italy: The Role of Management Magazines in the Process of Discursive Construction

Processes of discursive construction in a British and an Italian personnel management magazine are analysed to show the ways in which the magazines, both as genre forms and providers of narratives and discursive resources, provide ‘story boards’ for their readers which are helpful to them when it comes to making sense of the tensions and dilemmas associated with their managerial roles. Tensions and occupational dilemmas generally associated with personnel management work are identified and variations found in the discursive constructions associated with the two magazines are related, with reservations, to cultural and institutional differences between British and Italian human resource management     

Urban rail systems investments: an analysis of the impacts on property values and residents’ location

Light rail, metro and other urban rail transit systems can play a significant role in improving the attractiveness and quality of urban public transport. They can influence the attractiveness of locations near the stations and improve accessibility for these locations. Furthermore urban rail can improve a location’s attractiveness by its image effect: it makes a station appear modern and dynamic, and thus raises the status of this location.This paper summarises findings on the land-use and economic impacts of the urban rail system of the city of Naples over time and space. It examines changes in residential and non-residential (offices and retail) property prices around the newly built stations between 2001 and 2008 as well as the changes in the number of residents for the same station catchment areas. Ad hoc station control areas have been specified in order to compare the results of these changes. Results show that values in station control areas are lower than those of those of the stations catchment areas.     

Linking Knowledge to Productivity: A Germany-Italy Comparison Using the CIS Database

This paper employs micro-aggregated data from the FirstCommunity Innovation Survey for assessing the contribution of the level and type of R & D spending, the purchase of new machinerywith embodied technological change, economies of scale, and information sharing with client and suppliers to productivity(total sales per employee) in German and Italian firms in 20 manufacturing industries. The regression analysis confirms theresults of previous studies that R & D and technological change embodied in new machinery and capital equipment aremajor factors affecting productivity at the firm level. However, the elasticity of productivity to both R & D and embodiedtechnological change is higher in Germany than in Italy. Conversely, information sharing with clients and suppliersrelated to innovation projects does not result in higher productivity, with the exception of a few industries (inparticular those producing traditional consumer goods) in Germany.     

Alternative paths for the growth of e-commerce

Electronic commerce promises to be the drive behind a new wave of economic growth. Yet, the actual achievement of the prospected benefits and their allocation will depend on the features of the business models driving the diffusion of the new sales channel. The paper rejects the existence of a deterministic relation between e-commerce technological features and the structure of future electronic markets. Accordingly, alternative growth paths are explored and different scenarios are sketched depending upon the prevailing nature of the economic relations among the involved actors. For each scenario, the paper discusses the implications in terms of e-commerce diffusion speed and benefits allocation. The analysis of possible growth paths reveal that public intervention plays a non-negligible role in shaping the business model(s) that will eventually emerge, hence the impact of e-commerce on social welfare.     

Endogenous incompleteness of financial markets: The role of ambiguity and ambiguity aversion

Incompleteness of financial markets has been widely questioned in the literature, but traditional research has been mainly focused on the role of transaction costs and asymmetric information in determining such incompleteness. This paper, instead, focuses on agents’ preferences, showing that the introduction of ambiguity and ambiguity aversion may induce investors to restrict their trading to a simpler set of assets, relative to which they are less likely to make errors.     

Does the professionalism of management practices in nonprofits and for-profits affect job satisfaction?

This paper examines workers' satisfaction related to the level of professionalism of managerial practices in the French services sector. The data used are from the original survey conducted by the French Institute for Demographic Research and include both workers' responses on their satisfaction level, individual characteristics, job conditions, etc. and employers' responses on managerial practices implemented. We construct an index of workers' overall satisfaction and an index of ‘managerial professionalism’. In our model of workers' overall job satisfaction, the index of managerial practices is treated as an endogenous variable using two-stage least squares regressions. We show that the index of managerial practices is strongly and positively associated with workers' overall workplace satisfaction. Overall workplace satisfaction is found to be strongly associated with wages and individuals' perceptions about work environment. Finally, working in nonprofits is positively associated with greater overall job satisfaction.     

Cultural technology district: a model for local and regional development

The urgency to cope with the international economic crisis has led to efforts to identify innovative tools and frameworks that are capable of regenerating local and national economic development. The enhancement of the cultural heritage sector can be a strategic factor in improving the competitiveness of country systems. In Italy, the nation's rich cultural heritage is not managed in an efficient and effective manner, even though it embodies a tremendous opportunity to enhance local economic growth, especially in light of the role of new cultural technology districts (CTDs). This article intends to present the CTD business model aimed to promote local and regional development in Italy, to attract domestic and international tourist flows and spread them out more evenly across all regional territories and to verify the CTD's opportunity through the Lazio Region experience.     

The minority game unpacked:

We conduct an experiment on a minority-of-three game in which each player is a team composed of three subjects. Each team can freely discuss its strategies in the game and decisions must be made via majority rule. Team discussions are recorded and their content analyzed to detect evidence of strategy co-evolution among teams playing together. Our main results show no evidence supporting the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium solution, and provide evidence more consistent with reinforcement learning models than with belief-based models. Exhibiting level-2 rationality (i.e., reasoning about others’ beliefs) is positively and significantly correlated with higher than average earnings in the game. In addition, teams that are more successful tend to become more self-centered over time, paying more attention to their own past successes than to the behavior of other teams. Finally, we find evidence of mutual adaptation over time, as teams that are more strategic induce competing teams to be more self-centered instead. Our results contribute to the understanding of coordination dynamics resting on heterogeneity and co-evolution of decision rules. In addition, they provide support at the decision process level to the validity of modeling behavior using reinforcement learning models.     

Do cooperative enterprises create social trust?

This article contributes to the literature by carrying out the first empirical investigation into the role of different types of enterprises in the creation of social trust. Drawing on a unique data set collected through the administration of a questionnaire to a representative sample of the population of the Italian Province of Trento in March 2011, we find that cooperatives are the only type of enterprise where the work environment fosters the social trust of workers.