Analysis of the Visitors of Superagüi National Park,Brazil

The present work consists of the analysis of the visitors' profile of the Superagüi National Park, located on the north coast of the State of Paraná, Brazil. During the season 1998/1999 94 interviews were analysed. It was verified that most of the visitors can be considered as 'ecotourists', because their profile fits the one commonly proposed in literature. Visitors' preferences related to activities and infrastructure and critics are valuable indicators for the park's future management.     

Theories of practice — New inspiration for ecological economic studies on consumption

The dynamics behind ever-increasing consumption have long been a core issue of ecological economics. Studies on this topic have traditionally drawn not only on insights from economics, but also from such disciplines as sociology, anthropology and psychology. In recent years, a practice theory approach has emerged in sociological consumption studies, as part of a general wave of renewed interest in practice theory emanating from a desire to move beyond such dominant dualisms as the structure-actor opposition in sociology. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the practice theory approach in relation to studies of everyday life, domestic practices and consumption, and to argue that this approach can be fruitful for ecological economics and other fields interested in the environmental aspects of consumption. The paper emphasizes the immense challenge involved in promoting sustainable consumption, and the need for collective efforts supported by research into the co-evolution of domestic practices, systems of provision, supply chains and production.     

Vorschau 6 / 2010

Vorschau

Vorschau 6 / 2010     

Optimal Tax and Public Investment Rules for Congestion Type of Externalities

Optimal government policy is considered in a second-best framework where consumers and producers cause an externality of the congestion type and income distribution issues are taken into account. The theoretical results of the optimal tax literature are adapted using the concept of the net social Pigouvian tax. An illustrative AGE model uncovers the relative importance of its components. The model demonstrates that the level of the externality tax does not depend strongly on distribution concerns, as reoptimization of the other taxes ensures that the income distribution objective is reached. The model also allows us to study the interaction between externality taxes and public abatement.     

Climbing the Ladder: Gender‐Specific Career Advancement in Financial Services and the Influence of Flexible Work‐Time Arrangements

The aim of this study is to gain insight into the gender‐specific career advancement of about 10,000 middle‐ and top‐level managers in a Dutch financial services company. Our results indicate that women earn less, work at lower job levels, but show slightly higher career mobility than men. However, working a compressed four‐day nine‐hours‐a‐day workweek turns out to be favourable for women who are ‘rewarded’ for working full time, whereas men are ‘penalized’ for not working five days a week. Introducing this form of flexibility into a predominantly masculine organizational culture offers new opportunities for career advancement, albeit solely for women.     

The performance implications of outsourcing customer support to service providers in emerging versus established economies

Recent discussions in the business press query the contribution of customer-support outsourcing to firm performance. Despite the controversy surrounding its performance implications, customer-support outsourcing is still on the rise, especially to emerging markets. Against this backdrop, we study under which conditions customer-support outsourcing to providers from emerging versus established economies is more versus less successful. Our performance measure is the stock-market reaction around the outsourcing announcement date. While the stock market reacts, on average, more favorably when customer-support is outsourced to providers located in emerging markets as opposed to established economies, approximately 50% of the outsourcing firms in our sample experience negative abnormal returns. We find that the shareholder-value implications of customer-support outsourcing to emerging versus established economies are contingent on the nature of the customer support that is being outsourced and on the nature of the outsourcing firm. Customer-support outsourcing to emerging markets is less beneficial for services that are characterized by personal customer contact and high knowledge embeddedness than for customer-support services that involve impersonal customer contact and are low on knowledge embeddedness. Firms higher in marketing resource intensity and larger firms benefit more from outsourcing customer-support services to emerging markets than firms lower in marketing resource intensity and smaller firms.     

Debriefing to learn from extreme events: the case of Utøya

The objective of this study was to discover potential ways to enhance debriefing so that more can be learned from the experience of extreme events. In order to reach this aim, we explored how personnel in the Explosive Ordnance Disposal team from the Norwegian Armed Forces experienced debriefing after an extreme event. That event was a terror attack on the Norwegian island of Utøya on 22 July, 2011, in which 69 people were killed and 66 were wounded. An Explosive Ordnance Disposal team was sent to the island to search for and disarm potential bombs. We explored how personnel in the team experienced their debriefing after this event. Reports of interviewees' experiences identified two relevant dimensions: content (technical and personal) and form (formal and informal), leading to the development of four categories. The main learning points were that although personnel experienced room to share technical issues during debriefing and hence learn from the situation, there were fewer opportunities to share personal issues, and this seemed to limit the debriefing as a learning process.     

The effects of human resource management on small firms’ productivity and employees’ wages

This paper analyses whether employees and firms differently benefit from particular human resource (HR) practices. The focus is on small firms that may be badly informed on the impact of HR practices on firm performance. In this study on Dutch pharmacies, it is found that firms do not reward employees’ skills according to their contribution to firms’ productivity, as (1) employees are over-rewarded for their sector-specific skills and under-rewarded for the productivity enhancing effect of their computer skills and (2) employees’ work experience positively affects their wages but does not have real productivity effects. Moreover, it is found that training employees in case of vacancy problems seems to be an adequate HR practice, since it increases productivity without affecting the average wage level. The opposite holds for offering higher wages to newly recruited employees. Furthermore, we find that only the employees benefit from performance evaluation interviews, whereas employing many employees by temporary contracts appears to have a negative effect on productivity, without affecting the wage level.     

Homelessness in Pretoria: Exploring the survival challenges of the homeless and their right to the city

ABSTRACT

This article documents the biographies of 60 homeless people from a range of different backgrounds in South Africa’s capital city of Pretoria. The article focuses on their right to the city and how the lack thereof affects their daily lives. It explores the challenges they face on a daily basis and the different strategies they implement in mitigating these challenges.