COVID-19 and business renewal: Lessons and insights from the global airline industry

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected the fortunes of multiple companies around the globe. Accordingly, questions are increasingly being asked about how organizations can revitalize during and after a crisis. Yet, we have limited understanding of how organizations renew themselves during crises over time. We explore this question through the lens and examination of two South-Asian airlines: Pakistan International Airlines and Sri Lankan Airlines. The cases offer important insights into the reasons behind underperformance of state-controlled enterprises and renewal activities. We shed light on strategic renewal (SR) in the wake of increasing liberalization and deregulations in the global airline industry. To this end, we propose a four-stage approach towards renewing such underperforming organizations to respond effectively to black swan events and external shocks.     

External pressure or internal culture? An innovation diffusion theory account of small retail businesses’ social media use

COVID-19 put unprecedented external pressure on small businesses to adopt or increase use of social media while not all small businesses are internally ready for this rapid change. This study investigated the roles of external pressures and organizational culture of openness and learning in driving small retail business owners'/managers' social media use decisions by impacting their perceived usefulness and barriers, based on the innovation-decision process model from the diffusion of innovations theory and the theory of reasoned action. An online survey with structured measurements was administered to 411 U.S. small retail business owners/managers. Results from structural equation modeling revealed that external pressures positively influenced small business owners'/managers’ perceived usefulness and barriers and social media use intention. In addition, the culture of openness and learning positively influenced the perceived usefulness while mitigating the perceived barriers, thereby directly and indirectly influencing the social media use intention. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.     

Merit versus maleness: How strategic positioning can mitigate external gender bias

Despite the proactive efforts of many firms to combat gender bias within their organizations, societal prejudices still disadvantage women leaders and the firms who employ them. This external gender bias shapes outside stakeholder evaluations of women leaders’ efforts in various ways, and firms need strategies to cope with this external gender bias. We examine the conditions that might alleviate this burden of external bias and what women leaders and top executives can do to leverage these conditions—from a strategic positioning perspective—that will effectively allow female leaders to differentiate their work. To do this, we synthesize and build upon evidence that the external gender bias against women leaders diminishes when they lead in areas that are unconventional rather than mainstream. We then propose a two-step process based on (1) identifying the likely threat of external gender bias, which is stronger in some industry contexts than others, and (2) leveraging unconventionality to circumvent male prototypical comparisons, thereby reducing the hazards of external gender bias.     

Foreign inflows and economic growth: An emiprical study of the SAARC region

The study examines and highlights the impact of selected foreign inflows (aid, trade, FDI, debt and remittances) on the economic growth of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries. The existent literature lacks a comprehensive analysis of the SAARC countries as countries like Afghanistan, Bhutan and the Maldives have largely been ignored due to the shorter time periods of available data. The study is empirical in nature and utilizes panel data techniques on macroeconomic data for the period 2008–2015. Foreign aid and foreign direct investment are found to impact economic growth positively. Foreign debt and trade flows are found to adversely affect economic growth. No relationship is established between the flow of remittances and the economic growth of these countries. The obtained results are robust to different proxy variables and the addition of macroeconomic variables. For the first time, the study provides policy implications based on the data of all SAARC countries. The study recommends focusing on increasing the inflows of resources in the form of aid and foreign direct investment (FDI) from the developed world to achieve higher economic growth.     

Unfolding institutional plurality in hybrid organizations through practices: The case of a cooperative bank

This paper provides a theoretically informed analysis of how institutional pluralism unfolds in hybrid organizations through practices. Building on Quattrone's (2015) procedural model, the paper studies institutional plurality in the case of an Italian cooperative bank that has experienced enduring success. By reversing the usual approach to logic, defined as a stable set of beliefs, this paper shows that this hybrid organization uses a recursive system of practices in search of social order. This hybrid organization interrogates its organizational imperatives and defines adequate ways to achieve them. This paper then observes that this system of practices is permeable to external pressures, i.e., inspections by the central bank, a reform of cooperative banks, political pressure for mergers and acquisitions, and Italy's sovereign debt crisis. While such an organization appears to be ongoingly accountable to its multiple stakeholders, external pressures undermine its community accountability system and push this hybrid organization towards compliance accountability. Based on our findings, this paper develops a process model for hybrid organizations to navigate institutional plurality and to explain the potential limitations of the accountability system.     

A graduates ’ satisfaction index for the evaluation of the university overall quality

In the higher educational setting, students provide a relevant contribution to the quality of educational services. In such a context, the measurement of the perceived quality and related satisfaction for the university experience are of primary interest to evaluate the efficiency and efficacy of the learning processes. In this contribution, we aim at assessing the overall quality of the graduates’ university experience in terms of internal and external efficacy by applying the ECSI (European Customer Satisfaction Index) methodology, based on structural equation models and primarily developed in the context of customer satisfaction. For this aim, we propose a modified ECSI model tailored for the higher educational setting, explicitly taking into account the differences among groups of degree program. The study is carried out on data collected by the AlmaLaurea surveys at the University of Florence (Italy) in the period 2014–2017 and concerns a sample of more than 2,000 graduates. We find out eight latent variables that contribute to define the overall quality of university experience. These variables are differently affected by the type of degree program, with the highest levels of external efficacy observed for degree programs belonging to the educational, health, and engineering groups. It also turns out that interventions on the internal efficacy (i.e., quality of hardware and quality of humanware) have a direct positive effect on the university (i.e., loyalty) and an indirect positive effect on the society (i.e., external efficacy).     

Volatility in the knowledge economy

Summary. We seek to explain the economic volatility of the last 6 years, in particular the rapid expansion and contraction of the knowledge sectors. Our hypothesis is that these sectors amplify the business cycle due to their increasing returns to scale, growing faster than others in an upswing and contracting faster in a downswing. To test this hypothesis we postulate a general equilibrium model with two sectors: one with increasing returns that are external to the firm and endogenously determined - the knowledge sector - and the other with constant returns to scale. We introduce a new measure of volatility of output, a real beta, and derive a resolving equation, from which we prove that the increasing return sectors exhibit more volatility then other sectors. We validate the main results on US macro economic data of real GDP by industry (2-3 digits SIC codes) of the 1977-2001 period, and provide policy conclusions.Received: 18 March 2002, Revised: 16 February 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D5, D58, E10, L50, L52, O38, O51.Correspondence to: Graciela Chichilnisky     

融资成本、寻租行为和企业内部资本配置

本文构造了一个两层次委托代理模型,强调了外部资本市场和内部资本市场之间的相互作用,分析表明,资本配置扭曲和资本使用效率低下的关键是外部资本市场运作不完善对企业内部管理者的寻租行为的影响。本文的分析表明,融资成本偏低的外部资本市场不仅会促使企业CEO过分扩大融资规模,而且会加剧企业内部管理者的寻租行为,导致资本配置不当、投资缺乏效率的不良后果。本文的政策含义是,必须改变融资成本偏低的现状,并加强公司治理结构建设,才能解决我国企业融资过热、资本使用效率低下等一系列问题。     

中国经济改革与增长中的金融支持

中国的金融制度变迁也服从了渐进改革的“过渡性”逻辑 ,渐进战略较好地支持了中国 2 0年的经济增长。但是 ,由于“双轨”体制的固有矛盾 ,使中国的金融改革在今天聚集到了深层次的金融改革上 ,而这一问题的核心是多元化的金融产权关系。中国加入WTO成为中国金融深化改革的契机。摆在面前的来自外部世界的竞争 ,成为推进中国金融业“对内开放”的巨大的外部冲击     

Is there a pecking order? Evidence from a panel of IPO firms

We test the pecking order model of capital structure by examining the financing of firms that went public in 1983. We estimate a logit to predict external financing, and a multinomial logit to predict the type of financing using data on the IPO firms' security offerings during 1984–1992. Our results indicate that the probability of obtaining external funds is unrelated to the shortfall in internally generated funds, although firms with cash surpluses avoid external financing. Firms that access the capital markets do not follow the pecking order when choosing the type of security to offer.