Outcome,process and support: analysing aspects of innovation in public sector organizations

ABSTRACT

The authors present an analytical model to distinguish between different aspects and modes of innovation. By showing how innovation in the public sector differs from the private sector, this paper is an important stepping-stone to understanding and supporting innovation in the public sector.     

Gender,productivity, and the nature of work and pay: evidence from the late nineteenth‐century tobacco industry

Women have typically been paid less than men throughout history. We investigate earnings in Swedish cigar making around 1900. Strength was unimportant, yet the gender wage gap was large. Differences in characteristics, such as age and experience, and different jobs within firms, account for two‐thirds of the gap overall, and the entire gap for piece‐rate workers. Firms were as willing to employ women as men in the better‐paying piece‐rate section, and women were willing to take those jobs. In contrast, discrimination was extensive in the time‐rate section. Men in this section benefited from greater outside opportunities and customary wages elsewhere. Theory holds that labour market discrimination will reduce profitability, and make firm survival harder, a proposition that has never been tested historically. We find that cigar firms that feminized their workforces most extensively were most likely to survive. Product market competition prevented firms employing (overpaid) men to any great extent. We argue that economic historians must interpret industry‐specific gender wage differentials in the context of workers' outside opportunities, and in the context of product markets, which can—and in this case did—limit firms' room for manoeuvre.     

Big is Beautiful when Exporting

This paper starts out from the observation that the export ratios of firms (export to sales ratios) vary greatly among firms and that they are systematically higher for larger exporters. We relate the difference in export ratios to firm‐level differences in transport costs. In accordance with the data, we assume that freight rates are a function of firm‐level export volumes. We test our model using Japanese manufacturing firm‐level data. We first estimate the elasticity of the freight rate with respect to firm‐level export volumes at the sector level. When feeding these estimates back into the model, it can explain more than 50% of the variation in firm‐level export ratios.     

The brand personality dimensions of business-to-business firms: a content analysis of employer reviews on social media

ABSTRACT

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the brand personalities that employees are creating of their employer brands, in particular business-to-business (B-to-B) brands, when describing these brands on social media. We examine how the brand personalities, based on written online reviews, differ between high- and low-ranked, and high- and low-rated brands.

Methodology/Approach: 6,300 written employee reviews from a social media platform, Glassdoor, are used for content analysis in DICTION, to determine the brand personality dimensions they communicate (J. L). An independent B-to-B brand ranking data source, Brandwatch, is used as a reference to various brands’ level of ranking, while an ANOVA test is used to determine whether there is a difference in the brand personality trait means when comparing high and low-ranked, and high- and low-rated brands.

Findings: Our findings suggest that a strong social media presence does not equate to a strong employer brand personality perception among employees, since there are no significant differences between B-to-B firms based on their rankings.

Research Implications: Extant literature has mostly explored the impact of either critical reviews or favourable customer ratings and reviews on company performance, with very little research focusing on the B-to-B context. In addition, research employing DICTION for the purposes of content analysis of reviews is sparse. The methodology used in this study could thus be employed to further compare and contrast the reviews from a single company, dividing top and low starred reviews to compare discrepancies.

Practical Implications: The results of this study show how online shared employee experiences of employer brands contribute to the formation of a distinct employer brand personality. From a managerial viewpoint, engaging with current and past employees and being cognizant of the online narratives that they share on social media, may be an early indicator of where the firm is lacking (or showing strength) in its’ employee engagement. This would offer a way for firms to both understand their employer brand personality as well as gauge how they compare to top employers in a specific sector or industry.

Originality/Value/Contribution: The study attempts to grow the literature of employee brand engagement in a B-to-B context, by recognizing the important role that employees play in engaging with their employer brand online. Two main contributions are offered. The first contribution relates to the finding that employees perceive highly-rated B-to-B brands as being more competent, exciting, sincere and sophisticated than low-rated B-to-B brands. Second, the methodology used in this study proves to be a novel and accurate way of comparing employee reviews and perceived employer brand personality, with the employer-created intended brand image.     

Effects of social capital on processes in a regional strategic network

Understanding the role of social capital is vital for implementing cluster policies as regional strategic networks and cluster initiatives are influenced by the local socio-economic context and its social capital. Social capital can create value for companies by closure of the network structure (bonding), which maintains internal mutual trust but bonding can also over-embed companies in their social context, whereas sparse networks that provide links to other parts of relevant business networks (bridging) often provide greater innovation benefits. We provide a conceptual framework applied to a case study of a Swedish regional strategic network, and examples mostly of positive effects of bridging social capital and negative effects of the bonding form are identified. This is interpreted against the background of the regional dependence-oriented culture.     

Preconditions for public sector e-infrastructure development

Interoperability in e-government has been recognized as a key factor in the quest of administrations at national, local and international level to achieve the provision of one-stop services to citizens and businesses. Interoperability in e-government should enable efficient information exchange between applications from different agencies with the help of IT-services. Interoperability in networked IT-service delivery is accomplished by e-infrastructures. However, knowledge of how to develop e-infrastructures in the public sector is still limited. In this paper we report a design science case study of the initial stage of the design of a public sector e-infrastructure in the social welfare sector, especially addressing the bootstrap problem, i.e. the initial problem of starting-up the development of an e-infrastructure. Six types of preconditions for the development of the e-infrastructure are examined and explained: legal, economical, organizational and the installed base of the as-is e-infrastructure consisting of technical, informational and contractual preconditions. From a design and action oriented perspective we claim that a basic understanding of the design context, within which the six types of preconditions have to be analyzed and understood, are essential for e-infrastructure development in an e-government context. The paper highlights the fundamental role of regulations as a precondition for the design, and the fundamental role of lawyers as designers of e-infrastructures in the public sector.     

Was Keynes a Realist?

Lawson (1989a) has interpreted Keynes as a philosophical realist, adhering to the view that the economy has a constant inner structure. Against this it is claimed below that, although Keynes speaks about realism, it is not in this sense, but in the common sense way of referring to actually observable entities of an economic model. In addition, it can be shown that Keynes's views can be interpreted as instrumentalist—he emphasises characteristics such as usefulness and convenience, besides and instead of truth. Thus, truth and truthlike concepts do not, in Keynes's thinking, have the paramount position that they have in realist philosophy.     

A RARITY SHOW OF MODERNITY: Sweden in the 1920s

This paper redresses a gap in the study of travel literature. It explores a geographical area—Sweden—that has received little scholarly attention, particularly during the period that the paper focuses on; the interwar years. The paper uses ideas of dirt and cleanliness to examine tourist constructions of difference between themselves and other people, as well as to conceptualize modernity. Cleanliness and dirt are themes that have been much discussed in contexts of colonial discourse, but their meanings and functions in a non-colonial setting have not been adequately explored. This paper argues that tourist perceptions of cleanliness and dirt can be used to mediate modernity, race, and the authenticity of cultural experiences.     

Increased sorting and wage inequality in the Czech Republic

This paper makes use of a linked employer–employee dataset to examine the evolution of wage inequality in the Czech Republic during 1998–2006. We find evidence of slightly increasing returns to human capital and diminishing gender inequality and document sharp increases in both within‐firm and between‐firm inequality. We investigate several hypotheses to explain these patterns: increased domestic and international competition, decentralized wage bargaining, skill‐biased technological change and a changing educational composition of the workforce. Domestic competition is found to lower within‐firm inequality whereas we find no evidence that increased international trade at the industry level is associated with higher between‐ or within‐firm wage inequality. The key factors driving the observed increase in wage inequality are increased educational sorting and the inflow of foreign firms to the Czech Republic.     

Contingent work in the UK and Sweden: evidence from the construction industry

This article explores the use of contingent forms of employment in two diverse country contexts—the UK and Sweden—and investigates the influence of changing regulatory and economic conditions over a period that covers the current economic downturn. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data for the construction sector, the article addresses three questions. How do employers balance their flexibility preferences in the context of regulatory constraints? How has the global recession influenced employer behaviour? And to what extent can the Swedish experience be explained by convergence on other country models? While the UK employment model encourages employers to externalise the risk of unpredictable market conditions through the use of contingent contracts, the more supportive welfare regime in Sweden underpins a resilient preference of employers for open‐ended employment contracts. Ongoing changes in labour market regulation pose challenges to the strongly regulated Swedish model, yet we find only a shared direction of travel with the UK rather than convergence in the use of contingent employment.