Migrants' Home Town Associations and Local Development in Mali

We explore the impact of migrants' Home Town Associations (HTAs) on the provision of public goods in Mali. We combine an original dataset on all the HTAs created by Malian migrants in France from 1981 with census data on public goods in all Malian villages since 1976, and we run double‐difference estimations to compare villages with and without an HTA, before and after the creation of the HTAs. We find robust evidence that the provision of schools, health centers, and, to a lesser extent, water amenities has increased significantly faster in villages targeted by an HTA between 1987 and 2009 than in control villages.     

Do Migrants Insure Those who Stay Behind? Evidence from the Kayes Area (Western Mali)

This article uses recent household survey data from the Kayes area (western Mali) to analyse the determinants of remittances from both internal and international migration. The underlying assumption is that remittances are part of an insurance contract between the migrant and his family. Although this idea is not new, few tests have appeared in the recent literature. After a discussion of various measures of crop income shocks, we employ Powell's censored least absolute deviation (CLAD) estimators in addition to more standard parametric estimators to assess the influence of shocks on remittance behaviour. In contrast to Heckman's two-step or the Tobit estimator, Powell's estimator is consistent in the presence of heteroscedasticity and is robust to violations of the normality assumption for the residuals. Regression results bring some support for the view that insurance is an important motivation for remittances. This welfare function should be taken into account by policy-makers in the design of migration policies.     

Microfoundations for stakeholder theory: Managing stakeholders with heterogeneous motives

Instrumental stakeholder theory proposes a positive relationship between fairness toward stakeholders and firm performance. Yet, some firms are successful with an arms‐length approach to stakeholder management, based on bargaining power rather than fairness. We address this puzzle by relaxing the assumption that all stakeholders care about fairness. Empirical evidence from behavioral economics and social psychology suggests that firms face a population of potential stakeholders that consists not only of so‐called ‘reciprocators,’ who do care about fairness, but also of self‐regarding stakeholders, who do not. We propose that a fairness approach is more effective in attracting, retaining, and motivating reciprocal stakeholders to create value, while an arms‐length approach is more effective in motivating self‐regarding stakeholders and in attracting and retaining self‐regarding stakeholders with high bargaining power. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Transition programs for internationally educated nurses: what can the United States learn from the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada?

It is critical to conduct competency assessments of internationally educated nurses (IENs) to ensure public safety, as well as uphold accountability to nursing as a regulated profession. Transition programs are needed because of the required proficiency of the working language, as well as differences in nursing education, national health care systems, nursing practice and culture, etc. Transition programs in the United States are grossly under-developed because of lack of recognition of their importance, lack of funding and standardization, and decentralized regulation in nursing. United States can learn from the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada regarding how to best transition IENs. Its current hit-and-miss approach is inadequate and inconsistent with the emerging global trend to systematically deal with the transitional challenges of IENs at the national level.     

Training and commitment in a German manufacturing company during the post-2008 crisis: a case of internal flexicurity

Studies on the links between training and organizational commitment have only looked at professional and managerial workers, mostly in the U.S. This paper focuses on a German manufacturing company that employed many blue-collar workers and offered generous training opportunities during short-time work in the post-2008 crisis. In an analysis based on employee survey data, only training in job-specific skills and training in skills usable outside of work were found to be associated positively with organizational commitment. The findings suggest that employer-provided training programs may be part of a model that achieves internal flexicurity in economies such as Germany.     

Consumers' choice among peer‐to‐peer sharing platforms: The other side of the coin

Many peer‐to‐peer sharing platforms are transforming their business model from sharing for free to renting with or without in‐person interactions. How will these changes affect consumers’ participation in peer‐to‐peer sharing of personal items? The work studies consumers’ choice among three business models that vary on two dimensions: “free versus renting” and “with or without in‐person interactions.” The novelty is to consider that consumers’ choice can be driven by their perceptions of relationships among peers, which are shaped by the business models of sharing platforms. Perceptions of communal sharing (CS) relationships among peers are found to differ across business models and to predict consumers’ choice among the platforms above and beyond the economic and social benefits that consumers seek. Interestingly, perceptions of CS are not only found to explain the choice of a sharing for the free business model over the two others, but also the choice of renting with in‐person interactions over renting without in‐person interactions. For managers of peer‐to‐peer sharing platforms, this means that renting does not make sharing completely similar to traditional market exchanges as long as in‐person interactions are involved. For scholars, this calls for more work on the factors that bring about perceptions of CS.     

Heterogeneous social motives and interactions: The three predictable paths of capability development

Research summary : Limited attention has been paid to the crucial role of individuals' motivation and social interactions in capability development. Building on literature in social psychology and behavioral economics that links heterogeneity in individual social motives to social interactions, we explain how the variation, selection, and retention processes underlying a group's deliberate capability development are affected by the composition of the group in terms of individuals' social motives in interplay with the organizational‐level motivational levers designed by managers. Our multilevel theoretical model suggests that individual‐level heterogeneity leads to the development of capabilities along different paths. For practice, this implies that, according to the composition of the group in terms of social motives, capabilities are more or less technically and evolutionary adequate and a source of business process performance. Managerial summary :We propose that when a group of employees engages in developing one of the firm's capabilities, capability development will follow a different path according to what motivates most of the employees composing the group. We identify and discuss three paths. Two of these paths (convergence and congruence) can help improve business process performance in a stable environment, the third one (open‐ended) in a dynamic environment. Our work invites managers to not only think in terms of more or less capability development, but also in terms of capability development path(s): the path(s) in which groups in the firm are currently engaged and the one(s) that are desirable given the firm's objectives and the nature of the environment(s) the firm faces in deploying its business processes. © 2016 The Authors. Strategic Management Journal published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The formation of risk sharing networks

This paper examines the formation of risk sharing networks in the rural Philippines. We find that geographic proximity–possibly correlated with kinship–is a major determinant of mutual insurance links among villagers. Age and wealth differences also play an important role. In contrast, income correlation and differences in occupation are not determinants of network links. Reported network links have a strong effect on subsequent gifts and loans. Gifts between network partners are found to respond to shocks and to differences in health status. From this we conclude that intra-village mutual insurance links are largely determined by social and geographical proximity and are only weakly the result of purposeful diversification of income risk. The paper also makes a methodological contribution to the estimation of dyadic models.     

Telework: a challenge to knowledge transfer in organizations

Over the last decade, teleworking has gained momentum. While it has been portrayed as both employer- and employee-friendly, we question the positive normativity associated with teleworking by showing how it may endanger an organization's knowledge base and competitive advantage by threatening knowledge transfer between teleworkers and non-teleworkers. Drawing on the literature on knowledge we present the cognitive and relational components of organizational socialization as key facilitators of knowledge transfer and we demonstrate that teleworking may negatively affect these cognitive (shared mental schemes, language and narratives, and identification with goals and values) and relational (quality of relationships) components, depending on its frequency, location(s), and perception. Finally, we suggest some managerial avenues for addressing these potential negative side effects of teleworking.