Services vs. Manufacturing – How Does Foreign and Domestic Sales Impact on Their R&D?

While the distinction between manufacturing and services becomes increasingly blurred to some observers, we find, using a panel of Swedish firms, clear evidence that foreign sales (exports) are more important than domestic sales for stimulating R&D. This is particularly clear for manufacturing and this importance of foreign sales has increased over time, simultaneous to an opening up of the Swedish economy. Even though service industries have seen an increase in both R&D and trade over time, it is thus mainly manufacturing that has benefited from increased possibilities for absorptive capacity. This result suggests a clear dichotomy between manufacturing and services in terms of how they react to trade and how they turn towards the foreign market vs. the domestic market to find stimuli for innovation.     

The Politics of Socio-technical Intervention: An Interactionist View

In this article, we apply concepts from symbolic interactionism - a well-established tradition of interpretivist sociology - to investigate the social and political processes involved in a sociotechnical intervention. The intervention was designed to elicit operator involvement in an experimental trial of an advanced manufacturing system at an industrial site in Australia. The interactionist concepts of social worlds, boundary objects and trajectories are used to explore the interrelationships among the theoretical, practical and contextual elements of intervention. We believe that these concepts are flexible intellectual resources that can extend and enrich our understanding of the politics involved in the shaping of work and technology. Such an understanding is necessary if the fields of user participation and sociotechnical design are to move beyond the production of normative discourses and methods into effective interventions in the complex social environments in which technical decisions are made.     

ADVERSE SELECTION,LEARNING, AND COMPETITIVE SEARCH

I develop a model that allows for an analysis of the effects of time on adverse selection in the presence of search frictions. I find that, as a firm takes longer to adjust a worker's contract in response to learning about his type, inefficient overwork during the time before wage adjustment (probation) decreases. This provides a rationale for an optimal (minimum) probation period of about one month in the baseline scenario. Optimal probation duration varies with the degree of search frictions, the cost of effort, the relative productivity of different types of workers, and minimum wage regulations.     

On the Discursive Construction of Social Entrepreneurship in Pitch Situations: The Intertextual Reproduction of Business and Social Discourse by Presenters and Their Audience

Journal of Business Ethics - This study explores the discourse of social entrepreneurs and their audiences in pitch situations. Adopting a practice perspective on social entrepreneurship, we...     

Similarities and differences in international and comparative human resource management: A review of 60 years of research

In this article, we review similarities and differences in articles in the research field of international and comparative human resource management (HRM), published in Human Resource Management over the past 60 years. The extensive review and analysis, based on 189 conceptual articles, reviews, and empirical studies, identified several trends. First, the two distinct research streams in this research field (HRM in MNEs and comparative HRM) have grown over the decades and moved from conceptual articles in the beginning to almost exclusively empirical studies in more recent years. Second, in addition to the two research streams, in more recent years we identified a third research stream that combines elements of HRM in MNEs and comparative HRM research. Third, the research field has become more feminized, with an increasing number of female (first) authors, and has become more international, with more authors affiliated with non‐US universities in the more recent time periods. Finally, while the research streams show some differences in the content of their research, we do not find evidence that the streams developed in isolation. Based on our analysis, we provide suggestions for future research on international and comparative HRM and identify current implications for HR practitioners.