‘… and politics?’

This article illuminates the relationship between the increased importance management has gained in public institutions, and political reality in everyday work lives. It attempts to gauge the rationalities behind the managerial and the political system and derives a heuristic structure from them. On the basis of this discussion, an analysis is conducted of the origins of new public management, using Switzerland as an example. It is concluded that NPM reforms started as managerial reforms of public institutions, but that they developed into de facto political reforms. Thus the managerial background of project managers, consultants and public management scholars is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for a successful implementation of NPM in the politico-administrative system. The contribution which public management is able to make to the governance debate must not be underestimated. Not least, it leads to a clarification of the sources of legitimacy of government action. The rationality model introduced in this article is designed to make systemic differences between management and politics visible – and to improve communication between politicians and public managers.     

Macroeconomic factors and firm’s cross-border merger and acquisitions

This study investigates the impact of macroeconomic variables on the wealth effects of cross-border acquisitions by Malaysian multinational companies. The sample consists of 159 cross-border acquisitions by Malaysian MNCs bidding in 22 countries around the world from 2000 to 2007. The macroeconomic variables examined in this study are foreign economic condition, GNP correlation between countries, and level of economic development of target country. The findings indicate that, foreign economic condition affects the wealth effect negatively, while the level of economic development of target country affects the wealth effect positively. Aside from the macroeconomic variables, we also find that English or non-English language, government’s rules index and the telecommunication infrastructure all play certain roles in the Malaysian cross-border acquisitions. Implied from this study is that, value creation of the Malaysian cross-border acquisitions is a function of the foreign economic condition and the level of economic development of the target foreign country.     

De-industrialization and the ‘disappeared workers’

Hong Kong has undergone a remarkable process of a complete cycle of industrialization and de-industrialization within the lifetime of one generation of workers. This paper explores the impact of this swift economic progress and examines the adjustment problems and difficulties experienced by workers displaced from their jobs in a rapidly de-industrializing society. It addresses the issue of what has become of these displaced workers. It was found that, while a proportion of the displaced workers were able to find alternative employment in the expanding services industries, many became discouraged workers who joined the ranks of the hidden unemployed, partly as a result of discrimination which compounded their problem and further hindered their search for work and employment. The data show that many of these people eventually (in)voluntarily withdrew completely from the labour market. Suggestions have been made regarding the role which can be played by the government in particular to ease the transition of displaced workers into other employment positions.     

The ‘textual attitude’ and new technology

One of the most important tasks information systems executives face is making sense of emerging opportunities for organizational innovation through information technology. However, the parlance of information systems practitioners yields a variety of metaphors suggesting that this crucial task is a perilous one, in which success is far from assured. This paper reports on an interpretive study of these metaphors, using data from field interviews. Five images are identified, which evoke certain hazards and illuminate aspects of a successful executive response. The subsequent analysis of these images reveals how they serve constructively in promoting rationality in sensemaking, against a background that includes an ontologically problematic innovation and belief formation under institutional pressure. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the wider role of discourse in innovation sensemaking.     

Managers’ Corporate Entrepreneurial Actions and Job Satisfaction

Through the development and extension of theories and scholars’ subsequent empirical analyses of significant, theoretically grounded research questions, the knowledge about corporate entrepreneurship (CE) and its successful use continues to advance. Moreover, the literature suggests important relationships between the corporate environment, managers’ entrepreneurial behavior and successful implementation of corporate entrepreneurship actions. In an attempt to test some of those relationships, we describe an empirical study of 523 managers that examines the relationships among the antecedents to managers’ entrepreneurial behavior, a decision to implement entrepreneurial actions, and resulting job satisfaction and reinforcement practices.     

Defining the ‘Social’ in ‘Social Entrepreneurship’: Altruism and Entrepreneurship

What is social entrepreneurship? In, particular, what’s so social about it? Understanding what social entrepreneurship is enables researchers to study the phenomenon and policy-makers to design measures to encourage it. However, such an understanding is lacking partly because there is no universally accepted definition of entrepreneurship as yet. In this paper, we suggest a definition of social entrepreneurship that intuitively accords with what is generally accepted as entrepreneurship and that captures the way in which entrepreneurship may be altruistic. Based on this we provide a taxonomy of social entrepreneurship and identify a number of real cases from Asia illustrating the different forms it could take.     

Bias of distance functions estimates and Primont and Primont’s homotheticity test

The question of whether a technology exhibits particular properties such as radial input or output homotheticity is a crucial one for a producer since it should strongly impact on its reactions to market changes. Primont and Primont (Econ Lett 45:191–195, 1994) established that it can be tested using only weak assumptions. They further used their results to test for input homotheticity of an educational production technology (Primont and Primont, Can J Econ 29:587–591, 1996). In this paper, it is shown that if not implemented properly, the test can lead to biased results. Some ways to obtain unbiased results are also suggested.

Bank Relationships and Private Firms’ Financial Reporting Quality

Private firms with relatively high (proprietary) costs of disclosure may benefit from a close relationship with a bank. Relationship lending is based on intertemporal contracting that assumes that the bank is able to acquire private information about the firm and, moreover, to keep this information private. For both reasons, we expect and find that private firms with fewer bank relationships exhibit lower levels of financial reporting quality. Controlling for many other factors, firms with a single bank relationship disclose their financial reports about 14 days later. The size of such firms’ financial reports is also smaller, containing approximately 8% fewer words than the median report. Firms with a single bank relationship also exhibit more earnings management, exceeding the median value of the three-year sum of absolute discretionary accruals by about 20%. The results are robust to different econometric specifications, including endogeneity concerns. They indicate that private firms choose to be opaque in the presence of fewer lending relationships.     

Modeling and simulation of the quality’s entropy

The aim of the present study is to define quality entropy as well as to illustrate some of its properties. The simulation of the mathematical model for quality entropy shall be performed by means of specialized software for mathematical problem simulation, such as Microsoft Excel that we have employed for this particular study. Our aim is to prove that quality entropy may be expanded to the notions of Markov source of quality and Bernoulli source of quality, by analogy with the Markov and Bernoulli sources employed in information theory. Likewise, the present study delineates some aspects regarding tolerance to quality entropy. The subject of entropy and its application of the management of quality has been approached by other authors as well (Dinu and Vod?, Revista Calitatea-acces la succes, anul 8(4): 60–61, 2007; Dinu, Revista Calitatea-acces la succes, anul 8(5): 62–63, 2007; Georgescu-Roegen, Legea Entropiei ?i Procesul Economic, 1979; Stamatiu, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Quality, Reability and Maintainabilty, 2000; Stamatiu, Proceeding of the 18th International Conference on Quality, Reliability and Maintainability, 2002). Through our transdisciplinary approach, we would like to contribute to the development of this subject.     

Durbin’s random substitution and conditional Monte Carlo

Durbin (Biometrika 48:41–55, 1961) proposed a method called random substitution, by which a composite problem of goodness-of-fit can be reduced to a simple one. In this paper we provide a method of finding the p-value of any test statistic, for a composite goodness-of-fit problem, based on the simulation of a large number of conditional samples, using an analog of Durbin’s proposal in a reverse-type application. We analyze a Bayesian chi-square test proposed in Johnson (Ann Stat 32:2361–2384, 2004) which relies on a single randomization and relate it with Durbin’s original method. We also review a related proposal for conditional Monte-Carlo simulation in Lindqvist and Taraldsen (Biometrika 92:451–464, 2005) and compare it with our procedure. We show our method in a non-group example introduced in Lindqvist and Taraldsen (Biometrika 90:489–490, 2003).     

Some reflection on research ‘Schools’ and geographies

Reflecting on real and perceived differences between European and North American research cultures, I challenge views that ‘European’ research is under appreciated or discriminated against, and caution against isolationist European positions. Instead, I argue that although no distinctive and coherent European tradition or culture really exists, there may be elements of the prevalent research culture that can be turned into an advantage for Europe-based and/or European-trained researchers in helping to influence and improve one, global research conversation. Of course, a range of sub-communities and sub-conversations will and should exist, but there is no reason for these to be based on geography.     

Balance sheet effects and original sinners’ risk premiums

This paper describes an empirical model of country risk premiums and their determinants, relying on recent theories of balance sheet effects. We approach the latter by introducing a novel approach to country risk premiums that assumes that nominal exchange rates can move away from or towards equilibrium exchange rates, which allows exchange rate movements towards equilibrium to stimulate favourable competitiveness effects as opposed to adverse balance sheet effects. We investigate eight European emerging economies that suffer from “original sin” over the period 2001–2013, using the pooled mean group estimator of the dynamic panel error correction model. This methodology improves estimation efficiency and model performance, but also allows differentiation between long- and short-run country risk premium determinants. We find that, in the long run, country risk premiums increase in response to higher inflation and a higher total debt-to-GDP ratio, while they move in the opposite direction when the real GDP growth rate rises. Our results suggest that, in the short run, higher external debt service caused by exchange rate depreciation, i.e. the balance sheet effect, and market volatility tends to raise risk premiums, while higher international reserves and the federal funds rate tend to decrease them. Moreover, we show that the negative balance sheet effect is much stronger than the potentially favourable competitiveness effect, and that the rise in risk premiums is not due to the increase in the size of external debt, but to the larger debt burden represented by balance sheet effects.     

‘Recession push’ and ‘prosperity pull’ entrepreneurship in a rural developing context

In this paper, the ‘recession push’ and the ‘prosperity pull’ hypotheses are used to analyse the effect of growing non-farm wage employment on entrepreneurship in a rural developing context. Data are collected in a rural household survey in 110 communes in central Vietnam which includes subjective owner assessments of reasons for starting non-farm businesses. This way it is possible to separately test the two hypotheses by distinguishing opportunity and necessity entrepreneurs. We use clustered probit regression analyses and control for possible endogeneity in order to predict participation in entrepreneurship. The results show that better access to non-farm wage employment increases the likelihood of becoming an opportunity entrepreneur but has no effect on necessity entrepreneurship. This, therefore, supports the ‘prosperity pull’ hypothesis but not the ‘recession push’ hypothesis. The growing non-farm economy is likely to accelerate the emergence of opportunity entrepreneurship in rural areas. However, necessity entrepreneurs are suffering from a lack of individual and household assets which pushes them into entrepreneurship regardless of non-farm job opportunities in the surrounding area.     

Ellsberg’s two-color experiment,portfolio inertia and ambiguity

Results in this paper relate the observation of an interval of prices at which a decision maker (DM) strictly prefers to hold a zero position on an asset (termed “portfolio inertia”) to the DM’s perception of the underlying payoff relevant events as ambiguous, as the term is defined in [Econometrica 69 (2001) 265]. The connection between portfolio inertia and ambiguity is established without invoking a parametric preference form, such as the Choquet expected utility or the max–min multiple priors model. This allows us to draw an observable distinction between portfolio inertia that may arise purely due to first-order risk aversion type effects, such as those which could arise even if preferences were probabilistically sophisticated, and portfolio inertia that involves ambiguity perceptions.     

Franchising and intellectual capital: A franchisee’s perspective

Various studies have focused on the reasons for franchising. Most studies have concentrated principally on the franchisors’ motivations for franchising, with only a few exploring franchising as a route to self-employment. This paper seeks to provide a conceptual framework which examines the value of franchising to franchisees, employing an intellectual capital perspective. It is suggested that the (perceived) value of the franchise system is unlikely to remain static over time, and that the perceived benefits of franchise systems will vary according to both system and franchisee attributes.

Retaining and satisfying project managers – antecedents and outcomes of project managers’ perceived organizational support

Although theory and research from the domains of organizational behavior and human resource management suggest that individuals’ perceived organizational support (POS) plays a crucial role in enhancing job satisfaction and in reducing turnover intentions, there is a lack of research applying Organizational Support Theory to the realm of project management. Project-based organizations have an increasing demand for highly qualified project managers who feel supported by their employing organization and intend to remain in their positions. Therefore, the primary objective of the present study was to investigate predictors of project managers’ POS (both from a career management and from a project portfolio management perspective) and to examine how this variable related to their job satisfaction and intention to quit their project manager position. Using a sample of 541 project managers and 135 project portfolio coordinators nested in 135 firms, the analysis revealed that POS related positively to project managers’ job satisfaction and negatively to their turnover intention. A career path for project managers was positively associated with POS, especially when it was accompanied by adequate qualification opportunities. Results further stress the significance of top management involvement and the support of project management offices for project managers’ POS.     

Support for contracting-out and public-private partnership: exploring citizens’ perspectives

ABSTRACT

Many studies have evaluated the merits and challenges of contracting-out and public-private partnership (PPP). However, few studies have examined citizens’ views of these alternative service-delivery mechanisms and what factors influence their views. Using results from a citizen survey of a mid-sized US city, the present study investigates how consumerism, the citizenry framework, and symbolic institutionalism influence public support for contracting-out and PPP. Our findings show that symbolic institutionalism provides the most significant and consistent explanation of public support for the mechanisms. Implications for public management practices and future research, especially on creating and capturing value through PPP, are discussed.     

Wealth effects of banks’ rights to market and originate annuities

We examine wealth effects, for banks and insurers, of bank rights to sell and underwrite annuities. The stock-price reactions to four court and regulatory decisions are consistent with expectations of bank gains at insurers’ expense. Cross-sectionally, smaller, riskier insurers with higher distribution costs and substantial annuity business sustain larger wealth losses. Larger, riskier bank-holding companies with fee-based and consumer business gain most, consistent with the extension of federal safety-net guarantees as a source of gains. Banking stock-price reactions to the Supreme Court’s decision are opposite other findings, possibly reflecting unfulfilled expectations of a broader mandate for expanded bank rights.     

‘Intended’ and ‘implemented’ HRM: the missing linchpin in strategic human resource management research

We argue that inconclusive findings in the SHRM literature regarding the relationship between HRM systems and organizational performance may result primarily from methodological weaknesses and a failure of researchers to distinguish between HR practices intended by the organizations and those actually implemented. Rather than relying upon a single respondent per organization as is the norm, we contrast reports of both managers and non-managers from inside and outside HR departments to highlight differences between intended and implemented HRM. The findings, arrived at with the help of 195 interviews, 508 questionnaire responses and several company documents, support our expectation: implemented HRM may be substantially different from intended HRM; consistent implementation increases employee satisfaction with HRM, which is positively related to organizational performance. The current study thus highlights new factors that require attention in developing HR–performance analyses and also suggests that a mere imitation of HRM in the hopes of improving organizational performance creates no value. It is crucial that HR departments and managers remain committed and supportive to the development of effective HRM systems by focusing upon actual ‘implementation’ within their organizations.