Long-term care insurance matures as a benefit

Forty-eight percent of U.S. businesses now offer long-term care insurance (LTCI) coverage, an increase of 15% since 1998. As more organizations realize the added value of LTCI in the employee benefit package, they have also found that motivation to buy varies with employee financial standing, gender and age, and that targeted employee education as part of retirement planning is essential.     

The impact of demographics on household personal computer purchasing decisions

The authors examine the relationship between role structure and influence in family decision-making with the changing status of spouses in regard to increased income, education and occupation. Based on a series of personal interviews, this study explores various components of decision-making for the purchase of a home computer. The findings suggest that, although males were overwhelmingly the dominant influence in various stages of decision-making, demographic variables were associated with varying patterns of influence among family members. Differences were also noted between demographic factors and sources of information used prior to purchase results, suggesting that retailers of personal computers would benefit by profiling potential submarkets of this product. Furthermore, children were shown to have input, particularly as initiators, of the decisions concerning home computers     

Emerging Stock Markets and International Asset Pricing

This article investigates whether emerging stock markets arenow part of the global financial market and characterizes returnbehavior in these markets. Tests of the conditional InternationalCapital Asset Pricing Model (ICAPM) reveal that eighteen ofthe twenty largest emerging markets were integrated with theworld market between December 1984 and December 1991, but thatmany of the same markets reject the model when data for 1977–84are used. These results suggest that large capital inflows fromindustrial economies, beginning in the late 1980s, caused pricesin emerging markets to reflect covariance risk with the worldportfolio, thus inducing their consistency with the ICAPM.     

Cultural intelligence

In an increasingly diverse business environment, managers must be able to navigate through the thicket of habits, gestures, and assumptions that define their coworkers' differences. Foreign cultures are everywhere--in other countries, certainly, but also in corporations, vocations, and regions. Interacting with individuals within them demands perceptiveness and adaptability. And the people who have those traits in abundance aren't necessarily the ones who enjoy the greatest social success in familiar settings. Cultural intelligence, or CQ, is the ability to make sense of unfamiliar contexts and then blend in. It has three components--the cognitive, the physical, and the emotional/motivational. While it shares many of the properties of emotional intelligence, CQ goes one step further by equipping a person to distinguish behaviors produced by the culture in question from behaviors that are peculiar to particular individuals and those found in all human beings. In their surveys of 2,000 managers in 60 countries, the authors found that most managers are not equally strong in all three of these areas of cultural intelligence. The authors have devised tools that show how to identify one's strengths, and they have developed training techniques to help people overcome weaknesses. They conclude that anyone reasonably alert, motivated, and poised can attain an acceptable CQ.     

A cost comparison of hand hygiene regimens

The cost and quality of two hand hygiene regimens were compared. A waterless alcohol-based rub was significantly less costly than traditional handwashing because of reduced time required, and was associated with significantly better quality.     

Business ethics and the free market

Contrary to popular opinion, business ethics properly understood does not justify any kind of government interference with the free market. By highlighting the distinctive nature of business, and precluding coercion, business ethics actually provides essential support for free markets.     

Effect of guideline implementation on costs of hand hygiene

Hands of health care personnel frequently serve as vectors for the transmission of organisms between patients and are also a major reservoir for pathogens with antimicrobial resistance. Hand hygiene is one effective strategy to reduce health care associated infections. The purposes of this study were to (a) compare the costs of hand hygiene in hospitals with high and low hand hygiene compliance as well as high and low frequency of alcohol hand rub use; and (b) examine associations between hospital characteristics and hand hygiene compliance as well as frequency of alcohol hand rub use. Nursing and health care policy leaders should look for ways to promote sustained adherence to hand hygiene recommendations.     

Issue Information

The international human resource management (IHRM) field naturally lends itself to spotlighting the importance of internal and external organizational contexts to help understand how to manage employees in organizations effectively. However, we argue that the range of opportunities that the field creates to understand this context has not yet been fully embraced by IHRM scholars. To address this gap, this special issue explores: (a) the variety of approaches to theorizing how contexts promote or constrain organizational practice; and (b) relevant methodologies that might allow us to unearth novel context-dependent theory in international HRM. We propose a distinction between variable-oriented theorizing (that explains the effects of internal and external contexts on the phenomena under study) and context-dependent theorizing (that requires researchers become intimately familiar with the setting under study to understand context as a shaper of meaning). This editorial also highlights how the articles in the special issue contribute to stimulating further context-dependent IHRM research.