Human capital in the Dubai hotel industry: A study of four- and five-star hotels and the HR challenges they face

Dubai brands itself as an international leisure and business center and home to the luxury hotel market. While hotel growth has been, and continues to be rapid, little is known about hotel employees, their demographics or how they feel about working in this industry. This article reports the findings of what is the first review of Dubai hotel human capital, noting there are significant difference in workforce demographics to other countries, for example, it is male dominated, highly educated, and employees note positive levels of organizational social capital. It also highlights potential challenges going forward.     

Digital insurance brokers—old wine in new bottles? How digital brokers create value

This article analyzes digital brokers in the countries of the DACH region, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, from a business model perspective. We argue that the potential to create new value for insurance customers has not yet been fully realized. Our analysis has identified two strategic action areas. The first concerns the exploitation of the wealth of customer data available. Those digital brokers who will succeed in generating new content and services using data analytics have the potential to take customer centricity and individuality to new bounds. The second centers around introducing aspects of community, such as connecting peers and enabling them to interact. The critical success factors are volume, a high degree of automation as well as leveraging the infrastructure and data to delivering new, value-adding content and services that go beyond traditional intermediation.     

Sustainability Northwest: An Integrative Case of a Not‐for‐Profit Organization

Sustainability Northwest (SNW) is a fictional not‐for‐profit organization (NPO) that seeks to develop thought leaders for a sustainable future. This instructional case allows professors to assign students with up to six different roles, including SNW's chair of the board, executive director, volunteer treasurer, and the external auditor. Unique learning objectives include (i) the application of the CPA Canada Handbook, Accounting—Part III to prepare an NPO's financial statements using fund accounting, (ii) the development of recommendations to improve an NPO's board of directors, (iii) the analysis of system flow documents to identify control weaknesses, and (iv) the preparation of an audit planning memo. Instructors can use this case in several milieus. First, professors can foster a student's ability to integrate technical knowledge by (i) assigning students all six roles in a capstone course to promote integration within an individual course or (ii) assigning multiple roles across multiple courses to promote integration across a program of studies. Second, instructors can focus on a particular technical skill by assigning specific roles. This case is ideal for senior‐level undergraduate students or graduate students.     

Online customer experience in e-retailing: implications for web entrepreneurship

Providing consumers with unique experiences and immersing them in original contexts are the goals of web entrepreneurs. Researchers and web entrepreneurs have expressed a particular interest in the online customer experience, agreeing on its importance in creating satisfaction, revisiting intention, e-trust and e-loyalty. This paper explores customer experience in the online retail context. The online customer experience is central in forming customers’ perceptions of expectations of online retailers because this experience is highly personal. However, empirical research on the online customer experience remains scarce. The objectives of this unique study are twofold. The first is to compare the effect of online customer experience on the responses of Romanian and Tunisian customers. The comparative analysis is based on two dimensions of the online customer experience assessment tool. These dimensions are cognitive experiential state (flow) and affective experiential state. The second objective is to examine the contribution of each of these two dimensions in explaining overall perceived value, e-satisfaction, e-trust and repurchase intention in the online context, as well as their effects on web entrepreneurial initiatives. The findings reveal the impact of cultural influences on the constructs embedded in the research framework. The implications for practice relate to the increasing importance of online customer experience in tailoring online marketing campaigns. The implications for web entrepreneurship are clearly emphasised by the pathways from online customer experience to entrepreneurial initiatives. These pathways capture the value of customer-generated content in designing innovative business models.

     

Potential Impact of Climate Change and Armed Conflict on Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa

This study investigates the potential impact of climate change and armed conflict on inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The system-GMM for a panel of 35 SSA countries is employed using annual data from 1997 to 2018. The empirical results indicate that armed conflict and climate are major drivers of inequality in SSA. The direct impact of the two determinants is more than the indirect impact. Also, the impact of armed conflict is more than the climate change. The coefficients of population growth, output growth, unemployment, natural rent, exchange rate and inflation rate are significant positive predictors of inequality in the SSA. The study advocates for a multidisciplinary inclusive growth strategy that prioritises the climate change reversal, de-escalation of armed conflict, population control, reduction of the unemployment rate and increasing informal sector productivity, to promote inclusive growth and reduce inequality. However, sequencing the policy targets relative to the magnitude of their impact on inequality is extremely crucial.     

Extending the determinants of currency substitution in Nigeria: Any role for financial innovation?

Existing literature suggests that macroeconomic and institutional factors are the drivers of currency substitution. The persistent and significant incidence of currency substitution during the period of mixed performance of macroeconomic variables suggests the existence of a knowledge gap on the drivers of currency substitution during the era of rapid technological innovation. To contribute to this literature, we augmented the traditional money demand model of the determinants of currency substitution to introduce financial innovation. We use Nigerian data from 2005Q1 to 2019Q4 and Pesaran et al. (2001, https://doi.org/10.1002/jae.616 ) autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bound test approach to cointegration to estimate the models. The results confirm the presence of short-run and long-run relationships between financial technology and currency substitution in Nigeria. In effect, the deployment of financial technology in developing payment system infrastructure creates additional incentives for economic agents to hold foreign currency deposit. Economic managers must, therefore, mainstream credible monetary and fiscal policies to moderate the effect of financial innovation on currency substitution.     

Taking services to foreign markets: A taxonomy of Brazilian service firms

This study develops a taxonomy of international service firms from an emerging market, Brazil, and assesses whether there are significant differences in international performance between the groups. After an extensive literature review, a survey was carried out with a sample of international service firms located in an emerging economy, Brazil. Using as a departure point two theoretical perspectives, the internationalization process theory and industrial organization theory, in addition to service dimensions extracted from the empirical service management literature, the study identifies four groups—large traditionals, generalist neophytes, solitary traditionals, and daring differentiators—based on firm characteristics, international services delivered, internationalization process characteristics, and international strategies adopted. The findings suggest that there are significant differences in performance between the groups.     

SHIFTING BOUNDARIES IN ECONOMICS: THE INSTITUTIONAL COGNITIVE STRAND AND THE FUTURE OF INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS

This paper aims at contributing to the debate on the future of institutional economics and of the field as a whole by starting from the literature that discusses the relationship between Old‐Original Institutional Economics and New Institutional Economics. It suggests that the process of reunifying OIE and NIE (and evolutionary economics) prompted by part of the literature could be improved by the contribution of the Cognitive Institutional Economics. The paper follows a two‐stage pathway: first, it frames the debate on the relationships between NIE and the OIE and it concentrates on a subset of the literature that shows that NIE's recent developments complicate the distinction between NIE and OIE, and it explores the possibility that NIE and OIE may merge so that an amalgam of NIE, OIE and Evolutionary Economics becomes the next economic paradigm. Secondly, the paper argues that a step forward in the direction outlined by the literature has been made by CIE, which is a research stream that developed from cross‐fertilization among NIE, OIE and the Hayekian contributions to the analysis of institutions. In the concluding remarks, the possible emergence of a single institutional paradigm is discussed in the light of the literature about change in economics.     

From global start-ups to the borderless firm: Why and how to build a worldwide value system

Although the original concept of international new ventures included the geographic configuration of value activities, the subsequent development of the literature has gradually abandoned the concern about the geographic configuration of both input sourcing and output marketing to concentrate almost exclusively on the latter. Therefore, this paper argues that there is a need to re-focus the research so as to figure out how and why some companies are borderless. Borderless firms are defined as the result of the combination, early on, of geographically dispersed resources and capabilities, defying the home-base logic. A borderless firm presents the following characteristics (or a combination of them) from inception (or shortly thereafter): (i) value-added activities dispersed across different countries and regions; (ii) entrepreneurs not bounded by a home base; (iii) multinational founders and/or management teams; and (iv) a multinational workforce. To enquiry into this issue, the study uses five case studies of borderless firms. The results advance the understanding of the motives and processes behind the development, early on, of a borderless configuration of value activities.