Multinationals and human resource practices in Ireland: a rejection of the 'new conformance thesis': a reply

This paper reports on a study of 398 people employed in two UK service organizations: a hospital and two divisions of a high street bank. The main purpose of the study was to determine the degree to which dispositional factors (predisposition to trust and trait anxiety) and situational factors (seven aspects of the job environment) predicted a person's reported trust in their managers. Two types of managers were investigated: a person's immediate line manager and ‘senior managers in their industry’. It was hypothesized that the dispositional factors would have a greater influence on trust in managers in the industry and that situational factors would have a greater influence on trust in one's immediate line manager. The first hypothesis was supported, but the second was not. It was found that trust in both types of managers was best predicted by a combination of general disposition to trust (not trait anxiety) and situational factors: five of the seven situational factors had a role in predicting intention to trust. This reflects the complexity involved in predicting trust at work and the managerial challenge of creating a trusting culture.     

A financial accelerator in the business sector of a macroeconometric model of a small open economy

We have incorporated a financial accelerator mechanism operating through investments in the business sector in a dynamic macroeconometric model of the Norwegian economy. In this new and amended model aggregated credit and equity prices are determined simultaneously in a system characterized by a two-directional contemporaneous causal link, which has been designed and estimated by a new procedure for simultaneous structural model design. Combined with a mechanism where credit and asset prices are mutually influenced by real investments, this creates a financial accelerator amplified by a credit-asset price spiral. Simulations illustrate how the introduction of a financial accelerator significantly reinforces and extends the economic cycles in projections and forecasts, in particular when confronted by a severe shock. Furthermore, monetary policy has a markedly stronger effect in the short and medium term, while the impact of fiscal policy is affected to a relatively small degree as it is more remotely linked to financial markets.     

HRM and Indian epistemologies: A review and avenues for future research

India is emerging as a super power, slated to be among the world's five largest economies and viewed by international investors, business conglomerates and tertiary education providers as a land of opportunity. A database search since the opening up of the Indian economy in 1991 reveals a slowly increasing number of scholarly articles on HRM, with a steep rise from the year 2000 onwards. While it is acknowledged that the field of HRM is a broad area, there is currently a dearth of research in specific HRM practices and policies in India to warrant a focus on only one area. Hence the primary objective of this article is to present a scholarly survey of important research literatures in the area of HRM in India, and to offer avenues for future research. To this end this article garners, integrates and discusses research on HRM in India with a focus primarily on the past fifteen years. It is within this complexity that research on India and its workforce is presented by illuminating HRM as embedded in the Indian environment with its intricate epistemologies and transitions in a period of dynamic change.     

Exploring preconditions for open innovation: Value networks in industrial firms

The open innovation model embraces the purposive flow of internal and external ideas as a foundation for innovation and network formation. While the open innovation paradigm has been successfully applied in high-tech settings, there is a lack of research on adopters of open innovation in other settings. We describe a case study conducted in a process industry setting, focusing on the LKAB mineral group as it makes a transition from a closed to a more open innovation context by adopting remote diagnostics technology. This process has resulted in the creation of new value networks. By tracing the reasoning behind the organizational transformation and studying the technology used to carry it through, we seek to explore the preconditions for open innovation and provide insight into the role of IT in the process. Our findings show that adoption of the open innovation model is grounded in developing organizational environments that are conducive to innovation, including expertise in creating a culture for knowledge sharing, building a trustful environment, and a resourceful use of IT.     

Community leadership cycles and the consolidation of neighbourhood coalitions in the new local governance

The success of the new patterns of local governance depends on engaging communities in a range of partnerships at various geographic scales and administrative levels. In practice, this usually falls to a handful of community leaders in any given locality. Our research on area regeneration partnerships in the UK reveals a community leadership cycle, which proceeds through five phases. The first phase consists of the emergence of a first generation of leaders early on in a partnership, in the second phase their position in the partnership is consolidated and loyalty to the partnership developed, followed by a third phase of the cultivation of a second generation of leaders. Then comes a fourth phase in which the new generation of leaders raise their voices to challenge the established patterns of representation in the partnership. In the final phase, individual leaders exit from the partnership. This community leadership cycle is part of building multi-sector leadership coalitions in the neighbourhoods through strategies combining loyalty, voice and exit.     

Stochastic labelling of biological images

Many hypotheses made by experimental researchers can be formulated as a stochastic labelling of a given image. Some stochastic labelling methods for random closed sets are proposed in this paper. Molchanov (I. Molchanov, 1984, Theor. Probability and Math. Statist. 29 , 113–119) provided the probabilistic background for this problem. However, there is a lack of specific labelling models. Ayala and Simó (G. Ayala and A. Simó, 1995, Advances in Applied Probability 27 , 293–305) proposed a method in which, given the whole set of connected components, every component is classified in a certain phase or category in a completely random way. Alternative methods are necessary in case the random labelling hypothesis is not reliable. A different kind of labelling method is proposed that considers the environment: the type of every connected component is a function of its location.
Two different biphase images are studied: a cross section of a nerve from a rat, and a cross section of an optic nerve from a lizard.     

转型期的企业战略

本文通过对某大学设计院的发展历程,对企业成长中遇到的困难和问题进行深入剖析,阐述企业 转型期的战略对企业的飞跃的重要性以及对转型期企业战略的制定规则,并通过对企业的SWOT分析,利 用迈克尔·波特五力模型分析,制定出企业转型期的战略及战略目标,并提出具体的实施措施,以期对处于 转型期的科研院所有一定的借鉴意义。     

Tenure choice and the riskiness of non-housing consumption

This paper analyzes a household's choice of housing tenure within a dynamic utility maximization model that yields simple analytical results under uncertainty of income, housing prices, and rents. Given a housing consumption plan, we show that a decrease in the covariance between a household's earnings and housing rents increases the likelihood of ownership. A household who plans to remain in its home over a long period is more likely to own; a household who plans to remain in its home over a short period is more likely to rent. The higher the covariance between the user cost of a home and that of other properties a household is likely to consider in the future, the more likely the household is to own this home. These predictions of our model find support in recent empirical studies.     

Casinos,casino size,and crime: A panel data analysis of Michigan counties

Growth in legal gaming in the United States over the past quarter century or so is well-documented. One important factor fueling this growth was the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, which permitted Native American tribes to establish, under agreements or “compacts” with the states in which they are located, casinos offering what is known as Class III gaming: slot machines, blackjack, roulette, and other games. Since the passage of the Act, there have been 21 Native American casinos established in Michigan. Also, three non-Native American casinos opened in Detroit in 1999 and 2000. This growth in the number of casinos has sparked a wide-ranging debate over the social and economic impacts of casino development.The purpose of this research is to focus on the crime issue in the broader casino debate. We investigate the impact of these Michigan casinos on the rates of burglary, robbery, larceny and motor vehicle theft (property crimes) in casino host counties as well as in nearby counties. We employ a panel data set with annual observations on all 83 Michigan counties for the period 1994–2010. The dataset includes crime rates taken from the FBI crime data series, variables for the presence of a casino in a county or in a nearby county, the scale of a casino's operations as measured by revenues, and a variety of control variables suggested by the broader literature investigating the factors that determine crime rates generally.Our results suggest that in most cases the property crime rates studied are not affected by the presence or size of a casino in a county or in a nearby county. The largest such impact, which is negative, is for motor vehicle theft. The size of a casino does have a small positive effect on the motor vehicle theft rate.     

WORLD OUTLOOK

Clear signs that the world recovery is underway have e merged in the first half of 1983. We have revised our forecast upwards and predict an increase of 1 3/4 per cent in OECD GNP in I983 and a further 3% per cent in 1984. By hirtorical standards such a recovery would be extremely modest and would not be expected to trigger off a resurgence in inflation. If so GNP could advance a further 2% per cent in each of I985 and 1986. However, there is a danger that the relaration of monetary policy in the US in conjunction with the expansionary fiscal stance will bring about a very rapid upswing in the second half of 1983, thereby generating upward pressures on US interest rates. If, as the Presidential election approaches, these pressures are resisted and US monetary growth maintains its recent rapid expansion, an increase in the rate of inflation would be likely in 1984. If this were met with a tighter policy response (higher interest rates both in the US and elsewhere) after the election, the prospects would be for a sharp slowdown in the world economy in 1985.     

Metaphors and organizational identity in the Italian public services

This article calls in question the stereotyped image of the lazy and idle employee, lacking motivation or a sense of responsibility. In analysing three case histories in the secretarial offices of a major university department, in a registry office and in a specialist ward in a medium-size hospital, we discovered an unexpected world of cooperation, commitment and initiatives. In this research attention focuses on the operators’ point of view, i.e. the complex interactions with the public, the symbolic frames created to justify one's own role and routine, the metaphors used to explain the dilemma of a difficult everyday life. Running a service means offering a non-material product in which personal attitudes, organizational abilities and communication codes all play a decisive role. Perhaps the observation of small communities at work may help us to find that lost way out of the labyrinth of the Italian public administration.     

An Investigation of Justice in supply chain relationships and their performance impact

Justice is important in improving performance of supply chain relationships. However, the role of justice in improving performance in supply chain relationships is an under-investigated subject in the literature. In studying the joint impact of justice dimensions, the traditional assumption is that the three forms of justice interact with each other in a multiplicative manner. However, this assumption creates a managerial problem as discussed in this paper. We outline a different view of how the justice dimensions interact with one another utilizing the constraining factor model (CFM). We show that the CFM resolves some of the problems arising from the choice of multiplicative interaction of justice measures on performance. Specifically, we demonstrate that an increase in procedural, distributive or interactional justice results in a significant and positive improvement in performance only if the specific justice dimension is the constraining factor in the relationship. Overall, our analysis suggests that all three dimensions are important and a high level of one of the justice elements will not compensate for a low level of another, a view that is put forward by a number of past research studies in justice. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.     

The relational structure of human services planning: an input-output analysis.

The relationship between human needs and human services can be quantified in terms of service standards and service units. A service standard is defined as the adopted norm for the minimum number of service units per person. The relationship between need, service (or care) and service standard is similar to the relationship between demand, supply and price in economics. Of particular interest in planning is the case where service units are given in terms of service providers per person. In a population where each person is considered to be a receiver of n categories of service and a provider of one category of service, the relationship between needs and services can further be presented in a service standard matrix. Examination of such a matrix shows that it fulfills a function analogous to the input-output matrix in economics. The principal eigen-vector of the ser-vice standard matrix expresses ratios of activity levels for a human service system in an equilibrium. Another, related equilibrium is identified for a human service system in which there are providers as well as nonproviders. Application of the two equilibria identifies optimum planning conditions for the provision of human services when service standards and population are known.     

Modelling the spatiotemporal distribution of the incidence of resident foreign population

Many European countries have recently experienced a substantial increase in the proportion of immigrants in their populations. The incidence of resident foreigners calculated at a national level does not provide information on the local spatial and temporal distribution of the phenomenon. This information may be of crucial importance for planning local policies. In this article, we suggest a tool for practitioners to provide spatiotemporal maps representing the local distribution of the incidence of resident foreigners in the territory, and changes in spatial trends over time. We illustrate this with Italian data at a municipal level, for the period 2003–2008. To account for spatiotemporal interactions in the data, we propose using a generalized additive model incorporating a smoother of the time and space dimensions. Specifically, we set up a tensor product smoother combining a cubic regression spline basis for time and a soap film spline basis for space. This approach provides a consistent framework to produce spatiotemporal maps which could be effectively used by policy makers to decide the allocation of economic resources at a local level.     

The Industrial Relations Journal and the European Community

British entry into the European Community creates the conditions in which, for good or ill, the country's political, economic and social arrangements could be transformed. This observation applies at least as strongly to industrial relations as to other aspects of the national life. Indeed, it may even be argued that change in industrial relations in itself not only encompasses and reflects the broader patterns of socio-cultural and economic change occurring in society as a whole, but also, on occasion, is instrumental in initiating far-reaching changes outside the immediate concerns of industrial relations. Hence, the study of industrial relations could reasonably be seen as a study of society itself, in that both are concerned with the myriad of adjustments, large and small, which need to be made in the continuous task of reconciling, or providing a framework for reconciling, conflicting interests. Certainly, the study of industrial relations in a European Community context offers academics a practical and definable way of understanding the processes of integration in the organization of which Britain is now an important member. As far as managements and trade unions are concerned, short of some unusual catastrophe befalling multinational corporations, there must increasingly be a need to understand industrial relations systems and ideologies in countries other than our own for the severely practical business of negotiating viable agreements. In short, for the purposes of academic work and the requirements of the practitioner, industrial relations needs increasingly to be researched and discussed in a transnational as well as a national context, even though the latter must remain a large part of the reality for a long time to come.     

大国最优出口关税的计算--对现有文献中一个臆断的更正

在目前的国际贸易理论文献中，普遍有大国最优进口关税的计算公式及其证明，但却很少有大国最优出口关税的计算公式。在偶见载有大国最优出口关税的文献中，大国最优出口关税的计算公式却是根据大国最优进口关税公式推断出来的，没有经过严格的证明。本文根据通常的线性供给、需求函数假设，应用局部均衡方法，证明了大国最优出口关税的计算公式。本文的结果表明，现有文献中根据对称方法推断出来的大国最优出口关税公式是错误的。     

Entrepreneurship and the prospects of development in the West Bank

The study is a survey research designed to find out how a specific group of people perceives entrepreneurship and its relationship to economic growth. The group, composed entirely of economics and business administration majors in their last semester of the undergraduate programme, represents a crucial segment of the resource pool of future entrepreneurs iri the country. Hence, their perceptions of and attitude towards entrepreneurial activity is a significant determinant in the decision to launch business ventures should the opportunity arise.

The results of the study reveal a reserved managerial perception of entrepl:eneunhip among the majority of the respondents. The general reaction indicates a lack of readiness to take risks in an uncertain environment. The implication is that a change in perception, spurred on by a re-design of the academic programme in economics and business, is called for if there is to be any serious attempt to enhance the chances of economic growth in the region.     

Temporal Orientation and Corporate Social Responsibility: Global Evidence

There has been a growing emphasis on the importance of a long-term perspective in academia and practice. Yet understanding of the interdependency of those factors – the temporal preferences embedded in organizations and in societal values as well as the influence of temporal orientation of investors – remains limited. We theorize whether and how a firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) is affected by the societal temporal orientation, its time horizon, and its investors' time horizon. Using a global sample, we confirm that CSR activity is higher when a country has a long-term orientation culture, when the firm has a long-time horizon, and when the controlling institutional investor has a long-term investment horizon. We also find that the national culture's long-term orientation heightens the effect of a firm's long-time horizon on its CSR. Further, our results show that the effects of temporal orientation are more pronounced in environmental than in social CSR.     

Running on the spot? A review of twenty years of research on the management of human resources in comparative and international perspective

Research using a comparative and international perspective on the management of human resources is examined, drawing on articles published in leading human resource management, management/organizational behaviour and related social science journals between 1977 and 1997. In total a little under 2 per cent of the articles under review focused on the management of human resources in a comparative and international perspective. The largest group of these articles was comparative in nature (44 per cent), followed by those with an international perspective (35 per cent). A smaller number adopted a combined approach (17 per cent) and a few were separately classified as foreign national studies (4 per cent). Over time, there has been some progress made in terms of the number of articles published and the scope of topics covered. However, many of the articles displayed similar shortcomings to those noted in earlier reviews of cross-national management/organization studies: in particular, an over-reliance on a small number of primarily Anglo-Saxon countries, a lack of a longitudinal perspective, a loose specification of culture, an ethnocentric bias and a frequent failure to explain observed differences and similarities.