Barriers to outsourcing household services to small business

It is popularly assumed that the main barrier that prevents household services from being outsourced to the small business sector is household disposable income. This paper evaluates critically whether this is the case. Reporting survey results from 418 households in the UK city of Sheffield, the finding is that cost is the main barrier in just 38% of instances. Nearly two‐thirds of household services are undertaken in other ways either out of choice or due to the poor availability, quality and reliability of provision by small businesses. How these barriers to outsourcing household services might be tackled is then addressed.     

Moral and Amoral Conceptions of Trust, with an Application in Organizational Ethics

Across the management, social science, and business ethics literatures, and in much of the philosophy literature, trust is characterized as a disposition to act given epistemic states—beliefs and/or expectations about others and about the risks involved. This characterization of trust is best thought of as epistemological because epistemic states distinguish trust from other dispositions. The epistemological characterization of trust is the amoral one referred to in the title of this paper, and we argue that this characterization is conceptually inadequate. We outline and defend an alternative conception of trust as a moral phenomenon: when A trusts B to do something, A invites B to acknowledge and accept an obligation; when B accepts the invitation, B takes on an obligation; in that way trust creates an obligation. We conclude with an application, drawing out the difference between the epistemological conception of trust and our own in the context of Ghoshal et al.’s (Sloan Management Review 40:9–20, 1995, Academy of Management Learning & Education 4:75–91, 2005) critique of transaction cost theories of the firm.     

Investment liberalisation and firm selection process: A welfare analysis from a host-country perspective

We set up a theoretical model to analyze the implications of coordination of immigration policies among destination countries. The model contains two types of spillovers between destination countries: a terms-of-trade externality and a welfare-policy externality. We show that while coordination unambiguously increases welfare of the destination countries, the effects on the level of immigration and on the income distribution of natives are ambiguous. Thus, coordination among destination countries does not necessarily solve the global coordination problem of inoptimally low levels of migration.     

It’s a matter of congruence: How interpersonal identification between sales managers and salespersons shapes sales success

In recent years, marketing research and practice have recognized the importance of managing frontline employees’ identification. However, investigations so far have focused on identification at the collective level of the self, such as organizational identification, thereby largely neglecting important interpersonal identification processes at the relational level. Using a large-scale dataset comprising information from sales managers and salespeople as well as company data on customer satisfaction and sales performance, the authors make a first attempt to address this neglect by exploring important phenomena of interpersonal identification in the sales manager–salesperson dyad. Results show that initial increases in the level of identification congruence between sales managers and their respective salespeople yield positive incremental effects on sales performance and customer satisfaction. Findings also show that interpersonal over-identification and identification incongruence are negatively related to both outcomes. Results demonstrate how sales managers could mitigate these negative effects.     

Beyond Ethnic Stereotypes – Identities and Outdoor Recreation Among Immigrants and Nonimmigrants in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

Studies on immigrants' recreational use of greenspace have tended to focus on ethnic groups as homogeneous entities. In a qualitative study based on group interviews, this article focuses on the cultural diversity among and within ethnic groups. We used an identity perspective to study outdoor recreation of young Dutch adults with Chinese, Turkish, or nonimmigrant backgrounds. Results show that primarily personal identities, age, and ethnicity inform recreational behavior. The multiplicity of peoples' identities results in more heterogeneity between and within ethnic groups, as well as more homogeneity between immigrants and nonimmigrants, than commonly described. When immigrants are considered as a homogeneous group that underparticipates in outdoor recreation, individual immigrants who frequently participate in outdoor recreation are overlooked. Furthermore, we show that acculturation does not progress at the same rate among all ethnic groups, and that ethnic identity may be sustained among second and subsequent generations through certain recreational activities.     

Serious leisure among older gardeners in Australia

Activities such as gardening are fast becoming acknowledged as a much desired health management strategy in later life. However, few studies have examined gardening as a serious leisure pursuit. The aim of this study was to apply the concept of serious leisure to the context of leisure gardening by older adults in Australia. Casual, participant and devotee gardeners were compared with respect to the relative importance of the characteristics of serious leisure, using self-administered questionnaires (n = 514). Findings indicated that characteristics of serious leisure varied significantly across the three groups. The most powerful discriminating characteristics were Identity, Unique Ethos and Significant Effort; with Identity particularly important for devotee gardeners. The deeper the level of engagement, the more gardening was perceived as contributing to overall life satisfaction. Findings indicated that gardening could be a serious leisure pursuit that assists in the development of a positive leisure identity and contributes to a more mobile and active life for older adults.     

Internalising the costs of fragmentation and nutrient deposition in spatial planning: Extending a decision support tool for the Netherlands

The Land Use Scanner (LUS) is a decision support system for land use planning that is widely used in the Netherlands. The model yields solutions that have a high resolution (500×500 m) and reflect economic equilibrium in the land market, in which eighteen types of land use and nine aggregated habitat types competitively bid for locations. Here, an extension to the LUS is presented that enables the internalisation of environmental externalities. The focus in this study is on two important externalities, namely ammonia emissions from agriculture and habitat fragmentation. We simulate four IPCC-based land use scenarios and assess the level of fragmentation of the nine habitat types. We also perform sensitivity analyses in the most market-oriented scenario on the effectiveness of market-based instruments in promoting more efficient land allocation. The simulation results suggest that particularly the habitat type ‘rain-fed mires and bogs’ is susceptible to fragmentation. The sensitivity analyses show that internalising the damage costs of fragmentation resulted in smaller changes in land allocation than internalising those of nitrogen deposition. For both instruments, the policy effort was large in relation to the efficiency gains in land allocation.     

Contract farming: opportunity cost and trade‐offs

An important literature has established that participation in contract farming leads to higher incomes and has a number of other beneficial effects on the welfare of participating households. Yet no one has looked at the opportunity cost of and the various trade‐offs involved in participating in contract farming. I look at the relationship between participation in contract farming and income from (i) livestock, (ii) labor markets, (iii) nonfarm businesses, and (iv) agricultural sources other than livestock and contract farming and (v) unearned income. Using data from Madagascar, I find that participation in contract farming is associated with a 79% decrease in how much income per capita the average household derives from labor markets and a 47% decrease in how much income per capita it derives from nonfarm businesses, but also with a 51% increase in how much income per capita the average household derives from agricultural sources other than livestock and contract farming, possibly due to technological spillovers. Thus, even though contract farming has been shown to improve welfare in multiple ways in this context, it looks as though those gains come at the cost of an “agricultural involution” on the part of participating households, who seem to turn away from non‐agricultural activities. This has important implications for structural transformation narratives.     

Revisiting the socioeconomic determinants of exclusive breastfeeding practices: evidence from Eastern Indonesia

This paper attempts to fill several important research gaps on the socioeconomic determinants of exclusive breastfeeding practices. In contrast to previous studies that have focused on the timely initiation and duration of breastfeeding, this article examines exclusive breastfeeding practices. Using data on 1138 children from the Indonesian Family Life Survey East 2012, we revisited to what extent mothers’ education levels and work in non-traditional sectors influence exclusive breastfeeding patterns. Furthermore, we investigated to what extent health-care demand and supply factors influence exclusive breastfeeding practices. Controlling for a wide range of individual, household, and community characteristics, our findings suggest that exclusive breastfeeding practices are affected positively by mothers’ education and negatively by mothers’ labour market participation in non-traditional employment contracts. Moreover, our results indicate that a higher availability and quality of health-care supply does not necessarily lead to better exclusive breastfeeding practices. Only when health-care supply was matched with a significant demand for such services, did we observe a higher chance for optimal exclusive breastfeeding.