Corporate smart phones: professionals' conscious engagement in escalating work connectivity

This article explores how the adoption of company sponsored smart phones inflicts upon the lives of professionals. Drawing upon qualitative interviews at a law firm in Brazil, the experiences of new smart phone users are reported upon in detail. Increased accessibility, accuracy and speed in exchanges gave the users a sense of autonomy and flexibility. However, the technology also helped to intensify the organisation's hold on employees outside of regular working hours, reaching into new settings, time slots and social contexts. Employees expressed concerns regarding demands from superiors that negatively affected their private spheres, yet many of them paradoxically requested more efficient smart phone connectivity. The article focuses on the justifications, the different narrative strategies, employed by professionals for their conscious engagement in escalating work connectivity. It is suggested that these justifications display users' attempt to ‘dis‐identify’ with the role and practice they perform.     

Regime shifts in stock–flow I(2)–I(1) systems: the case of US fiscal sustainability

In the last two decades, fiscal sustainability has been tested through the use of non‐stationary time series analysis. Two different approximations can be found in the literature: first, a univariate approach that has focused on the stochastic properties of the stock of debt and, second, a multivariate one that has focused on the long‐run properties of the flows of expenditures and revenues, i.e., in the stochastic properties of the deficit. In this paper we unify these approaches considering the stock–flow system that fiscal variables configure. Our approach involves working in an I(2) stochastic processes framework. Given the possibility of the existence of regime shifts in the sustainability of US deficit that the literature has pointed out, we develop a new statistic that can be applied to test several types of I(2) cointegration and multicointegration relationships allowing for regime shifts. To test for these kinds of changing long‐run relationships we propose the use of a residual‐based Dickey–Fuller class of statistic that accounts for one structural break. We show that consistent estimates of the break fraction can be obtained through the minimization of the sum of squared residuals when there is I(2) cointegration. The finite sample performance of the proposed statistic is investigated by Monte Carlo simulations. The econometric methodology is applied to assess whether the US fiscal deficit and debt are sustainable. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

ECONOMIC RECESSIONS,BANKING REFORM AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM1

In the 2010 London School of Economics and Political Science Hayek Memorial Lecture, the author argues that flaws in the design of the monetary and financial system were responsible for the global financial crisis and the subsequent recession. The crash reflected the unsustainable nature of the bubble induced by artificial credit expansion created by fractional‐reserve banking under the direction of central banks. Such boom–bust cycles will continue until radical reforms are implemented, including a 100% reserve requirement for demand deposits.     

Money,Prices and the Silver Industry during the Price Revolution

The discovery of American silver has been commonly viewed in the literature as the moving force behind the sustained rise of prices experienced by Western Europe from the early 16th to the mid-17th century. However, the mechanical connection between the money supply and the general price level implied by the Quantity Theory oversimplifies the analysis of a period characterized by different trends, some of which cannot be easily explained by the monetarist story: (i) Central Europe silver mining boomed between 1451 and 1540 following a phase of scarcity of money that was especially severe between the end of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th century; (ii) European prices started to rise before American silver was significantly imported to the Continent; (iii) the rapid expansion of American mining coincided with the decline of the European silver industry (1540–1618); and finally (iv) Mexican and Peruvian bullion production evidenced a downward course during the period 1628–1697, but no alteration in the rising trend of European prices occurred in response. It is argued instead that the classical theory of value and distribution, emphasizing costs of production as determinants of the ‘natural’ value of commodities including precious metals, can accommodate the facts in a more consistent manner than the monetarist view.     

Waves and Determinants in Mergers and Acquisitions: The Case of Latin America

This article contributes to the current literature on mergers and acquisitions (M&As) by identifying the existence of waves and the determinants of M&A activity in the economies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. From a sample of 2,391 M&A announcements reported by Thomson One on these countries, applying the methodology proposed by Harford (2005), evidence of M&A waves is found for the periods 1995–2002 and 2003–2010, as reported for other regions in various international studies. After controlling for economic and business environment variables, as well as for profitability and book-to-market variables at the industry level, we find evidence that supports neoclassical theory as a main explanation for M&A activity but not for the misvaluation effect.     

Power Relations and Social Mix in Metropolitan Neighbourhoods in North America and Europe: Moving Beyond Gentrification?

Research on spatial segregation has suggested that social mix may be a temporary phase in class displacement, where relations between different groups are at best divided or ‘tectonic’, for instance in England. Political and policy discourses, by contrast, tend to uncritically valorize social mix as a means to breaking up concentrations of poverty and providing neighbourhoods with a middle‐class voice. In the literature, little attention has been paid to power dynamics in socially mixed neighbourhoods and the implications this may have for understanding theory and policy. The five articles that make up this symposium address the ways in which social and ethnic groups interact in major cities in Europe and North America and, as the title suggests, this involves taking into account power relations, domination and negotiation between the different groups. There is a need to connect the experience of the deployment of power within neighbourhoods (and between them) with the discussions of power mechanisms at work in wider urban processes.     

The relationship between high performance work systems and employee proactive behaviour: role breadth self‐efficacy and flexible role orientation as mediating mechanisms

Drawing on the contextual perspective, this study provides novel empirical evidence on how the organisational context (specifically, the firm's human resource strategy) has an effect on employee proactivity. We use matched data from managers and employees in 102 Spanish professional service firms to examine how high performance work systems contribute to enhance employee proactive behaviours through two motivational variables: role breadth self‐efficacy and flexible role orientation. Results of a multilevel study demonstrate that role breadth self‐efficacy mediates between HPWS and employee proactivity, but flexible role orientation does not mediate this relationship.     

Students' persistent preconceptions and learning economic principles

Economic views held by the general public tend to differ significantly from those of economic experts. Would these differences fade away if people were exposed to some economic instruction? In this article, the authors identify college students' preconceptions about economic issues at the beginning of the semester, verify their persistence throughout the semester, and test whether their beliefs are correlated to course performance. The authors conduct a survey at the beginning and end of the semester on a sample of first-year students taking an economic principles course. They find evidence of preconception persistence and reasoning inconsistencies, pointing to some cognitive biases as a plausible cause. Most students do not integrate the newly learned tools into their thinking process, even if they perform well in tests.