Examining human resource management outsourcing in Hong Kong

This study explored the state of human resource (HR) outsourcing in the Asian context, a particularly important subject given its rapid proliferation in Europe and North America, the inconsistent and limited evidence from prior research, and its strategic importance to the human resource management (HRM) function. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data and the transaction cost, resource-based, and institutional perspectives, we found that although respondents were generally favourable towards outsourcing, that in practice its adoption and diffusion were in a nascent stage in Hong Kong. Decisions to outsource were, by and large, incremental and experimental and influenced by a range of contextual factors (e.g., availability of in-house expertise, skills and creativity, strategic priorities, legislation (coercive), availability of external service providers, and industry and peer (mimetic) influence). Despite considerable pressure to cut costs, instead of outsourcing in the first instance, firms placed greater emphasis on maximising internal resource utilization (insourcing). Implications for practice and suggestions for future research are also provided.     

Friend or Foe? The effects of contingent employees on standard employees' work attitudes

Using data from a large-scale national survey of employers and employees in Britain, we examine the impact of the presence of contingent employees on work attitudes of standard (full-time, indefinite-term) employees. Drawing on differing explanations for the increased use of contingent employment arrangements, we derive competing hypotheses about how this use affects standard employees' work perceptions and attitudes, and explore the impact of a number of potentially intervening factors. We find that contingent employees have little effect on standard employees' perceptions of work overload, but strongly reduce perceived job security, which in turn, mediates the negative effects of contingent employees on job satisfaction and organizational loyalty.     

Human resources in the German maritime industries: ‘back-sourcing’ and ship management

In today's global shipping industry have management functions often been outsourced to separate companies and to overseas locations. With the appearance of socalled ‘flags of convenience’ the world shipping industry has increasingly registered commercial vessels overseas. Following this trend, human resource management functions have also been relocated, with the opening of recruitment offices and the use of HR agencies outside OECD countries. Recently, new German regulation has sought to attract previously outsourced HRM functions back to Germany. A case study of such a newly established firm, called ‘Reimarus’, will exemplify the impact of the new regulation on HR firms in shipping. The following paper analyses this process based on an empirical study of Germany's commercial shipping industry.     

四步减少供应商风险

那些依靠供应商提供商品或服务的公司总是面临着由此而带来的财务风险.在经济环境艰难的时候,总有一些供应商要走向破产,在他们无力偿还债务的同时,金融机构又拒绝为他们提供每日运营所需的短期贷款.当企业走到快要山穷水尽的时候,他们会被迫不惜以降低产品质量和延长交付时间为代价来削减成本,而当企业这样做的时候,破产也就离他们不远了...     

The shading and distancing of commerce: When internalization is not enough

A political economy of degradation and of sustainability should account not only for the full range of production costs but the sources of those costs. It should consider how the pursuit of wealth can, deliberately or not, lead to uncounted costs and unaccountable actors. This article explores the conditions of cost generation and externalization, especially those that are largely unintended and inadvertent. It shows how the pursuit of wealth, the expansion of markets, the mobility of capital, and the entanglements of production processes can lead to the unwitting generation and displacement of costs. It analyzes competitive business strategy and patterns of production and consumption for their contribution to such costs. Business strategy and state policy tend to create a never-ending search for frontiers, however simulated and however unecological they may be. The costs generated in those frontiers are a function of shading, that is, obscuring of costs, and distancing, the separation of production and consumption decisions, both of which impede ecological and social feedback and create cognitive, institutional, and ethical lags between initial benefits and eventual full costs. As distance increases along dimensions of geography, culture, bargaining power, or agency, negative feedback loops are severed, stakeholders expand while decision making contracts, environmental problems are displaced, and shading and cost externalization increase. The likelihood of sustainable resource use increases as distance is lowered, as institutions locate decision authority in those who receive negative ecological feedback and who have the capacity and incentives to act on that feedback, and as the burden of proof for economic interventions shifts to the interveners.     

Is fairness blind?—The effect of framing on preferences for effort-sharing rules

This paper uses a choice experiment to study citizens' preferences for effort-sharing rules for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. For a given global cost and level of emission reduction, we study the willingness to pay for various rules that imply different distributions of the cost between EU, the US, China and Africa. The focus of this paper is on the use of two different treatments, one where the respondents were informed about the country (or country group) names and one where the names were replaced with anonymous labels A-D. This allows us to test whether people's preferences for effort-sharing rules depend on the framing of the problem. We find that the ranking of the rules and the strength of the preferences are not significantly different between the two treatments, and hence we find no evidence of ingroup bias in preferences for effort-sharing rules.     

Endogenous Firm Objectives

We analyze the behavior of a monopolistic firm in general equilibrium when the firm's decisions are taken through shareholder voting. We show that, depending on the underlying distribution, rational voting may imply overproduction as well as underproduction, relative to the efficient level. Any initial distribution of shares is an equilibrium, if individuals do not recognize their influence on voting when trading shares. However, when they do, and there are no short–selling constraints, the only equilibrium is the efficient one. With short–selling constraints typically underproduction occurs. It is not market power itself causing underproduction, but the inability to perfectly trade the rights to market power.