Public service motivation and public sector employment preference: Comparing Italian and British students

ABSTRACT

Previous research has suggested that an individual’s public service motivation (PSM) is positively linked to a preference for public sector employment. The authors explore this link using a sample of British and Italian undergraduate students. They found a positive relationship between PSM and public sector job preferences among Italian students but not with the British students. The UK has implemented more NPM-style reforms than Italy and this could be impacting on public sector recruitment. Implications for recruitment and retention the public sector are discussed.     

An exploration of actor-network theory and social affordance for the development of a tourist attraction: A case study of a Jimmy-related theme park,Taiwan

Differing from traditional approaches to exploring issues of tourist attractions, this article uses insights from actor-network theory (ANT) and social affordance to conceptually examine how a postmodern tourist attraction, a Jimmy-themed tourist attraction, has been enacted into a relational network composed of multiple and heterogeneous actors/actants. The paper scrutinizes the transformation of figures from Jimmy-related picture books into the social affordances of a postmodern tourist attraction via evolving mechanisms of ordering and valuating attractiveness to connect human and nonhuman actors into a relational web. It is argued that the conceptual application of ANT and social affordance may help provide an alternative approach to the study of tourist attractions.     

Workplace romance across different industries with a focus on hospitality and leisure

Workplace romance is not a new phenomenon; yet, not many studies have investigated this matter in organizational behavior research. Leisure and hospitality industry holds the highest rate of workplace romance (57%) among different industries. In this study, following the theory of love, we have defined workplace romance as a romantic relationship among organization employees that is hypothesized to be determined by interpersonal solidarity, interpersonal attraction, physical attraction, motivation, perceived value, and attitude towards workplace romance. Using a sample of 603 employees from 13 industry categories, the proposed hypotheses were tested by employing both variance- and covariance-based structural equation modeling. Furthermore, the moderation impacts of organizational factors of injustice perception, culture and policies, organization size, and autonomy, as well as individual factors of previous experience, gender, and marital status along with the industry factor were tested. The results supported all the hypotheses except the hypothesis concerning the impact of attitude towards workplace romance. Findings also provide some interesting differences among moderating variables.     

关于推进地方招商引资工作的几点看法

招商引资作为推动各种经济资源的投入以促进地方经济振兴和发展的作用正逐渐被各地政府所认识,并成为各地推动经济发展所采用的重要手段。随着招商工作的日益开展,各地政府为推动招商引资穷尽方法,由此进入了招商引资的误区,出现了许多怪现象,造成了不好的影响。本文即是对政府在招商过程中出现的问题进行分析探讨,并提出一些改进的思路和方法。     

湖南上市公司投资吸引力分析

运用因子分析法,对湖南省46家上市公司2007年的财务报表进行分析;选取9个原始变量,提取了两个公共因子,得出上市公司投资吸引力的综合得分和排名,以期为上市公司和投资决策者提供一定参考。     

企业外部雇主品牌吸引力因素的实证研究

本文首先采用因子分析法从潜在雇员的角度对企业外部雇主品牌吸引力因素进行了实证分析，得出工作价值、文化氛围、企业实力、管理制度、工作特性五个公因子；其次通过独立样本T检验和单因素方差检验，发现不同性别、年龄、婚姻状况、工作年限的求职者对外部雇主品牌吸引力因素的感知存在显著性差异，并对产生差异的原因进行了分析。     

Startup Success Factors in the Capital Attraction Stage: Founders’ Perspective

Only a small percentage of startups attract capital from venture capital investors. To determine the factors which owners of startups consider the most important for attracting seed venture investments, the founders of 40 startups in Latvia and Russia were questioned. The researchers compared organizational and financial factors’ importance for two groups of entrepreneurs: those who succeeded and those who failed in attracting funding. The results of the study indicate certain differences between the viewpoints of founders and investors regarding success factors. Based on the factor and regression analysis, the authors developed a model to forecast success in capital attraction.     

On additivity of tail comonotonic risks

ABSTRACT

As perceived from daily experience together with numerous empirical studies, the multivariate risks demonstrate a strong coherence in the extremal dependence structure especially over the course of financial turmoil or industrial accidents and outbreaks. Under this motivating paradigm, we show the universal asymptotic additivity under upper tail comonotonicity, as the probability level approaching to 1, for Value-at-Risk and Conditional Tail Expectation for a portfolio of fixed number of risks, in which each marginal risk could be any one having a finite endpoint or belonging to one of the three max domains of attraction. Our obtained results do not require the tail equivalence assumption as needed in the existing literature. This resolves a lasting problem in quantitative risk management and covers most distributions commonly encountered in practice.     

An agent-based learning-embedded model (ABM-learning) for urban land use planning: A case study of residential land growth simulation in Shenzhen,China

A forward-looking urban land use plan is crucial to a city’s sustainability, which requires a deep understanding of human-environment interactions between different domains, and modelling them soundly. One of the key challenges of modelling these interactions is to understand and model how human individuals make and develop their location decisions by learning that then shape urban land-use patterns. To investigate this issue, we have constructed an extended experience-weighted attraction learning model to represent the human agents’ learning when they make location decisions. Consequently, we propose and have developed an agent-based learning-embedded model (ABM-learning) for residential land growth simulation that incorporates a learning model, a decision-making model, a land use conversion model and the constraint of urban land use master plan. The proposed model was used for a simulation of the residential land growth in Shenzhen city, China. By validating the model against empirical data, the results showed that the site-specific accuracy of the model has been improved when embedding learning model. The analysis on the simulation accuracies has proved the argument that modelling individual-level learning matters in the agent’s decision model and the agent-based models. We also applied the model to predict residential land growth in Shenzhen from 2015 to 2035, and the result can be a reference for land-use allocation in detailed planning of Shenzhen. The ABM-learning is applicable to studying the past urban growth trajectory, aiding in the formulation of detailed residential land and public service facility planning and assessing the land use planning effectiveness.     

The role of local government and the private sector in China's tourism industry

For many less-developed regions in China, cultural and natural attractions are often used by local governments as regional economic drivers. However, the expectation is that income generated from the direct use of culture and nature will only provide the initial round of working capital to facilitate development of other industrial sectors. One strategy in recent years is to separate government from business operations in these attractions to improve the economic performance of businesses and better conserve cultural and natural resources. This paper examines the impact of these policies on resource-dependent tourism companies (RDTCs) for the period 2003–2012. Data on economic performance are derived from listed companies. It is shown that RDTCs have better performance than other tourism sectors because of their monopoly status on high-quality natural and cultural resources. Yet local governments still have a role in tourism operation. Their involvement tends to lead to the reduction of the economic effects of RDTCs and results in discernible overcrowding at sites, thus resulting in negative ecological consequences. The implications for policy and companies are discussed.