Are freelancers a breed apart? The role of protean and boundaryless career attitudes in employability and career success

Recent economic and organisational changes have fostered an increasing diversification of the workforce, among whom freelancers are an under‐represented population in the literature. This study aimed at examining the role of protean and boundaryless career, professional commitment, and employability activities in fostering freelancers' subjective career success. Data were collected via an online survey among a sample of 425 Italian freelancers and analysed through structural equation modelling. Results partially confirmed several hypotheses: higher self‐directed career management and boundaryless mindset predicted higher employability activities and professional commitment; moreover, employability and professional commitment acted as mediators between career attitudes and subjective career success. The study provides support for the importance of such variables to freelancers' career success, as well as for the significance of protean and boundaryless careers among nontraditional occupational groups. Interventions aimed at fostering such attitudes could support freelancers in improving their attainment of professional progress and perception of career success.     

Entrepreneur subsidiary of business groups from emerging markets: a multi-level perspective

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - This study examines the effects of firm resources on entrepreneur subsidiaries of business groups. Resource-based theory is the foundation...     

China-Africa Trade Enjoys Solid Foundation and Promising Prospect(Ⅱ)

China's exports to Africa have upgraded the value chain China's exports to Africa have undergone a structural change.In 2000,Chinese exports to Africa were almost evenly distributed in textile and garments(accounting for 28%of the country's total exports to Africa),machinery and transport equipment(27%),and other manufactured goods(26%).Since then,the structure of Chinas export     

Evaluating the Tourism Potential of Public Museums in Hangzhou: A Supply-Side Perspective

This is a qualitative study to evaluate the tourism potential of public museums from a supply-side perspective. Nine specialized public museums in Hangzhou were evaluated based on six criteria: cultural, physical, product, experiential, marketing, and leadership. The overall tourism potential was rated as moderate for the museums in Hangzhou. Poor accessibility, isolation from tourism nodes, lack of complementarity with peripheral attractions, and limited carrying capacity impair the museums' appeal to tourists. The local government's proactive intention to develop cultural tourism and the innovative marketing efforts adopted by a few museums certainly help to enhance the museums' tourism potential.     

Exploring the interaction between incubators and industrial clusters: the case of the itri incubator in Taiwan

This article aims to explore the interaction between incubators and industrial clusters, which is an important linkage for local development but has not been analyzed in the literature. A model is proposed to describe this interaction. The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) Incubator within the Hsinchu industrial cluster, the core of Taiwan's technology industries, is considered to be an empirical case. This case is investigated with the proposed model and methods including data analysis, in–depth interviews, manager surveys and stakeholder analysis. It was found that the clustering effect in the Hsinchu industrial cluster is main factor in the ITRI Incubator's development. The ITRI Incubator in turn reinforces the cluster in some aspects as feedback. This result confirms the existence and importance of this interaction in local development. It is recommended that government officials and incubator managers take account of this interaction in operating an incubator program and utilize the proposed model to analyze the incubator's contributions to its industrial cluster.     

Applicability of the market appeal—robusticity matrix: a case study of heritage tourism

Hong Kong is a city where contemporary global culture coexists with traditional Chinese heritage. One way of promoting Hong Kong's traditional built heritage is to develop a number of linked sites as a heritage trail. For helping the development of such, this study evaluates the applicability of the market appeal—robusticity matrix on heritage tourism development, by assessing the potential for tourism in the single-surname villages of Hong Kong's New Territories. The study techniques include documentary research, questionnaire survey and interviews. The findings indicate the matrix is effective for enabling the assessment of heritage tourism potential because it simultaneously demonstrates the importance of two major considerations for both tourism industry and heritage managers, namely market appeal—an asset's appeal to tourists, and robusticity—its ability to endure visitation. The shortcomings of the model includes the inappropriateness of the technical term “product design needs” in the market appeal subset and lack of community concerns in the robusticity subset of the matrix.     

Testing Monetary Policy Intentions in Open Economies

Temple (2002) argues that the inflation level used in Romer (1993) lacks power in revealing the policy intentions of monetary authorities, Temple also points out that Romer's use of the openness-inflation correlation cannot be explained by time consistency theory. In this article, we demonstrate that more open economies experience less inflation volatility and persislence. We attribute our findings to the hypothesis that monetary authorities in more open economies adopt more aggressive monetary policies. This pattern emerges strongly after 1990. Our results indicate that the near-universal regime shift in 1990 is not just a simple process of increased monetary policy aggressiveness, but an increased response to economic openness.     

The emerging oligopoly of pay-TV in the USA

The pay-television industry in the USA has been developing very rapidly in the past five years and is providing network quality alternatives to the mass taste programming of commercial television. However, the industry has been developing along lines very similar to the early history of radio in the USA with the emergence of strong distributor networks, restrictive affiliation contracts, and wide-spread vertical integration across all stages of production. History and economic efficiencies suggest that the result will be a strong oligopoly market structure. The proper public policy, then, is to insure that the unavoidable degree of concentration is not greater than that needed for efficiency reasons.