Sector fragmentation and aggregation of service provision in the water industry

This study analyzes the structure of the water industry in Peru. It investigates economies of scale and cost inefficiencies in 43 water providers during the years from 1996 to 2005. Different water sources in different geographical regions directly affect the production technology of the sector, making a regional cost frontier model appropriate. In 2005, 48.7% of the population of Peru lived in poverty, and 43.87% of the water produced was lost. These large proportions support the assumption that water producers allow water to be lost as a way to satisfy the water demands of the poorest segment of the population. Findings indicate a cost rise of 0.10% for each 1% increase of joint production of both outputs: water lost and produced. This result may be suggestive of a price the utility pays for allowing unauthorized connections in the network. From the perspective of the board of directors, this cost increase is the political cost of gaining municipal votes from the poorest segment of the population. Economies of scale are larger for utilities operating in the forest than in other regions. This has important implications for any future consolidation process that may be undertaken when the sector is opened to private participation.     

Workaholism versus work engagement and job crafting: What is the role of self‐management strategies?

Job crafting refers to the proactive actions employees take to redesign their jobs in order to get a better fit with their competencies, expectations, and wishes. So far, little is known about job crafting's underlying mechanisms. In this study, we examine how two different states of affective well‐being (workaholism and work engagement) relate to job crafting 3 months later and how these well‐being states steer different self‐management behaviours, which ultimately lead to job crafting. Structural equation modelling on a heterogeneous sample (N = 287) revealed that work engagement and workaholism both relate to expansive job crafting through different self‐management strategies. Work engagement relates to challenge and resource seeking via self‐goal setting and self‐observation strategies, whereas workaholism associates with challenge and resource seeking only through self‐goal setting. In addition, the results show a strong relationship between workaholism and self‐punishment. Altogether, the findings suggest that self‐management strategies can function as an explanatory mechanism for different job crafting behaviours.     

Consecrating video games as cultural artifacts: Intellectual legitimation as a source of industry renewal

The video games industry, one of the fastest growing creative industries and now engaging larger proportions of populations as smartphones and tablets achieve wider use, seeks to enhance its institutional legitimacy in order to further exploit the new economic possibilities provided by, for example, portable digital media and their market penetration. This strategy is based on a form of consecration, a portrayal of video games as cultural artifacts, i.e., objects carrying a wider cultural and aesthetic significance than merely being a form of entertainment. In order to consecrate the video game, the industry relies on video game reviewers and journalists. This strategy, rooted in market opportunity recognition, challenges some of the conventional wisdom of the industry, the gamer community, and the inherited mainstream media view. As a consequence, institutional legitimacy is not easily acquired or earned since historical conditions and path-dependencies also matter in high-pace industries such as the video game industry.     

Repatriates and reverse knowledge transfer in MNCs

There is widely held assumption that knowledge is one of the most important drivers of firm’s performance. Multinational companies (MNCs) have the potential advantage of acquiring and utilizing knowledge across borders. But for this potential advantage to become real, the knowledge generated in any of their units around the world should be transferred to their other units. This paper adopts an innovative approach for the study of intra-MNC knowledge transfer by focusing on the role of repatriates as transferors of knowledge from foreign subsidiaries to the headquearters, which is an under-researched topic. In particular, the paper studies the impact of repatriates’ abilities and motivation to share knowledge (disseminative capacity) on the transfer of knowledge from subsidiaries to headquarters (reverse knowledge transfer). In addition, the paper examines the determinants of repatriates’ disseminative capacity. After reviewing the relevant literature and proposing the hypotheses, this paper presents an empirical research with a sample of Spanish MNCs. The findings provide evidence that repatriates’ disseminative capacity is positively associated with reverse knowledge transfer. The paper also identifies some drivers of this: the knowledge the repatriates acquired during the expatriation and the firm’s international assignments policy.     

Fostering employees' proactive strategic engagement: Individual and contextual antecedents

Proactive strategic scanning is an important aspect of employee proactivity and contributes to engaging employees in the organisation‐wide strategy process. It also contributes to strategic renewal and innovation by helping to identify potential strategic opportunities and threats. However, little is known about its antecedents and how HRM may support this valuable resource. To address this gap, we develop and test a model of individual and contextual antecedents of proactive strategic scanning. We hypothesise and find a positive effect of future‐focused personality on strategic scanning which is mediated by promotion‐focused self‐regulation at work. Moreover, we investigate how work design functions as a contextual boundary condition of this mediated effect. The effect is strengthened under high social support but is not influenced by the level of decision‐making autonomy. Our findings point to specific variables which can be targeted by HRM to enhance employees' strategic engagement and innovative behaviour.     

An Updated Literature Review of Distance Correlation and Its Applications to Time Series

The concept of distance covariance/correlation was introduced recently to characterise dependence among vectors of random variables. We review some statistical aspects of distance covariance/correlation function, and we demonstrate its applicability to time series analysis. We will see that the auto‐distance covariance/correlation function is able to identify non‐linear relationships and can be employed for testing the i.i.d. hypothesis. Comparisons with other measures of dependence are included.     

National versus supranational bank regulation: Gains and losses of joining a banking union

We ask how the structure of international banking affects the decision of a national regulator to join a banking union and to transfer regulatory powers to the supranational level. The focus is on bank supervision and bank resolution. A national regulator ignores possible gains or losses, which accrue to other jurisdictions if banks are internationally active. A supranational regulator takes these regulatory external effects into account. While supranational regulation improves total welfare, this is not necessarily the case for welfare in single countries. By analyzing the size and determinants of spillover effects we show how they constrain a country’s willingness to participate in a banking union. Our results may explain why some member states of the European Union currently hesitate to join the European Banking Union.     

Mapping Business Model Research: A Document Bibliometric Analysis

Today, the business model (BM) is one of the most studied concepts within managerial and innovation literature. Although scholars have shown a growing interest in understanding and analysing the BM, a theoretical conceptualization is still lacking. This paper provides a systematic review of the current state of BM research by mapping the research landscape to identify key research publications, journals that had relevance in developing the BM literature, and the main areas of research. Using the ISI Web of Knowledge “core collection”, this study conducts a document bibliometric analysis of 3,604 publications in the fields of management and business that were published between 1985 and 2017. The use of quantitative methods allowed us to overcome the shortcomings of the past subjective literature reviews. We clustered the selected articles on the basis of two distinct perspectives. First, we identified the founders of the discipline, creating a map of co-cited articles (co-citation analysis); this enabled us to identify five major research clusters, formed on the basis of similar co-citations, that characterize the historical evolution of the BM studies. Second, throughout the bibliographic coupling analysis, which aggregates articles sharing a similar bibliography, we captured the main emergent research sub-fields of the most recent BM literature.