Housing Reform to 'Create'Jobs

Analyses of state intervention in the housing market often ignore its crippling effects, as a cause of massive unemployment Professor Patrick Minford (top), Paul Ashton (centre) and Michael Peel, of the University of Liverpool's Department of Applied Economics, call for wholesale removal tof state-imposed rigidities in housing to increase the demand for labour, restore incentives, reduce distortions in the price of land and housing     

Knight on Religion and Ethics As Agents of Social Change: An Essay to Commemorate the Centennial of Frank H. Knight's Birth

Abstract . A paradigm is developed in this essay based upon Frank H. Knight's thought in order to provide a foundation for analyzing contemporary moral philosophers’efforts to influence public policy. In honor of Knight's 100th birthday in 1985, the role of religious doctrine and ethics in determining social policy is examined in terms of the exegesis which could have been expected of Frank Knight. Knowledge of Knight's views on religion and ethics provides a provocative means of interpreting and evaluating moralism as a force of social change in today's world.     

Soft and Hard Models of Human Resource Management: A Reappraisal

Two of the most widely adopted models of human resource management are the hard and soft versions. These are based on opposing views of human nature and managerial control strategies. The hard model is based on notions of tight strategic control, and an economic model of man according to Theory X, while the soft model is based on control through commitment and Theory Y. We argue that because these assumptions are so divergent, they cannot both properly be incorporated within a single model of human resource management. Eight in-depth case-studies were carried out, involving questionnaires, interviews and focus groups in order to find out whether organizations were practising either form of HRM. We found that no pure examples of either form existed. The paper concludes that the rhetoric adopted by the companies frequently embraces the tenets of the soft, commitment model, while the reality experienced by employees is more concerned with strategic control, similar to the hard model. This distinction between rhetoric and reality needs to be taken into account in conceptualizations of human resource management.     

Blue smoke and seers: measuring latent demand for cannabis products in a partially criminalized market

Business Economics - Cannabis, otherwise known as hemp or marijuana, is one of the nation’s fastest growing cash crops. In the late 1990s, proponents of legalization began a successful effort...     

Transformational leadership,group affective tone,and group member social inferences: A leadership complementarity perspective

We investigated how the complementarity between transformational leadership behaviours and group potency predicts changes in group affective tone and subsequent group members' social inferences (job satisfaction, trust in supervisors, and turnover intentions). We analyzed two waves of data from 135 skilled professionals working in 29 groups within a Canadian government agency. Transformational leadership behaviours did not directly relate to changes in group affective tone. However, group potency moderated the relationship between transformational leadership behaviours and group affective tone, as well as the indirect relationships between transformational leadership behaviours and group members' social inferences via group affective tone, such that the relationships were stronger for low-potency groups. These results suggest transformational leadership may work best when complementing a group's sense of its own perceived capability.     

The Effectiveness of Social Media Storytelling in Strategic Innovation Communication: Narrative Form Matters

Storytelling is widely believed to be an effective strategy in innovation communication. The use of high-quality narratives in particular is recommended to facilitate the understanding of an innovation, facilitate trust in it, and promote the perception of innovative strength as well as the development of positive attitudes. However, to date virtually no empirical evidence has been presented to support these assumptions. Therefore, we conducted an experiment in which participants were exposed to messages about an innovation that varied in narrative quality (low vs. medium vs. high), and the messages were told in different forms that are typical of social media (nonserial vs. serial) to take account of the ever-increasing importance of these channels in innovation communication. The results show that the understanding of an innovation increases linearly with a message’s narrative quality, serial storytelling impedes understanding, and narrative quality is conducive to the attitude towards the innovator when the story is told in nonserial form and has a detrimental effect when told in serial form. Thus, the results show that the current view on storytelling’s potential is overly optimistic and that using high-quality narratives can, under certain conditions, also have adverse effects. The practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

The future revisited: Looking back at The next 25 years by the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR)

Looking back at futures studies in the past (past futures) is perhaps the second nature of futures researchers. In this article we look back at a study that was conducted by the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy in 1977. We considered it interesting to assess its value 25 years later since many changes have taken place in technology, society, economy, and in the science of futures research as well. From our analysis we have drawn the following conclusions: (1) instead of giving every topic the same time horizon more diverse time horizons should be included because of the different dynamics, (2) more attention for people and opinions outside the mainstream discourse, (3) more attention for thinking in multiple futures instead of predicting just one future outcome, (4) do not only look at the (possible) future of a specific topic, but assess if this topic in its whole will be relevant in the future important (meta-forecast), and (5) more attention for integrating topics for futures studies, but not fulfilling the impossible ambition to link everything to everything.     

Has Distance Died? Evidence from a Panel Gravity Model

The estimated coefficient of distance on the volume of tradeis generally found to increase rather than decrease throughtime using the traditional gravity model of trade. This distancepuzzle proved robust to several ad hoc versions of the modelusing data for 1962–96 for a large sample of 130 countries.The introduction of an "augmented" barrier to trade functionremoves the paradox, yielding a decline in the estimate of theelasticity of trade to distance of about 11 percent over the35-year period for the whole sample. However, the "death ofdistance" is shown to be largely confined to bilateral tradebetween rich countries, with poor countries becoming marginalized.