Managing the duality of IHRM: unravelling the strategy and perceptions of key actors in South Korean MNCs

This research aims to extend our understanding of the duality between global integration and local responsiveness in multinational corporations (MNCs) by exploring the perceptions of corporate HR actors regarding the intra-organisational factors that alter the balance between these pressures. It examines the perceptions and actions of key actors in the context of two Korean MNCs. The study shows the importance attributed to a range of socio-procedural factors by corporate actors and which, therefore, inform the practical management of the dual forces, notably: HR expertise, social ties, trustworthy relationships and co-involvement in decision processes.     

Sustainable Development and Resilience in Ecosystems

Two new important developments in environmental and resource economics is presented—non convex dynamics of ecosystems and wealth as an indicator of sustainable development. Non convex dynamics imply existence of resilience, that is the robustness of systems to withstand exogenous perturbations. Resilience can be regarded as an insurance against flips of the system into different basins of stability. Sustainable development, according to the Bruntland report, is the provision of productive resources to future generations to make it possible for them to live as well as the present generation. Thus, the value of changes in productive assets is therefore an index of whether an economy is on a sustainable path or not. Resilience can be regarded as one such productive asset and the paper discusses how one can define the value of this asset.     

Competitive supply behavior when price information is fuzzy

The theory of fuzzy sets is applied to the output decisions of a price-taking firm facing imprecise information about expected future prices. Accepting risk resulting from the randomness of prices, the manager is interested in expected profits only. Since the set of possible expected-price vectors is fuzzy, a suitable defuzzification strategy is defined in analogy to the pessimism-optimism index proposed by L. Hurwicz. It depends on the manager's willingness to accept surprises resulting from a deviation of the true expected prices from the values that guided output decisions. Despite a linear cost function, well specified solutions to the optimization problem are possible without resorting to capacity constraints.     

Wealth and sustainable development: the role of David Pearce

Green net national product was thought to be one way of measuring sustainable income. However, David Pearce understood that a better measure of sustainable development was to look at what a generation is leaving in form of capital assets to later generations. In this article, his arguments and insights are highlighted against recent theoretical advances.     

Parallel Neutrality

This paper develops the notion of parallel-neutral technical change for inputs and outputs. It is shown that parallel-neutral technical change generalizes existing radial notions of neutral technical change. A taxonomy of the structural consequences of parallel-neutral technical change is developed.