European Pension Funds and Sustainable Development: Trade‐Offs between Finance and Responsibility

Pension funds try to account for sustainable development in their operations. This mainly translates in responsible investing. We investigate how this interacts with the financial objectives. We use a survey of more than 250 pension funds based in 15 European countries. Multinomial logistic regression is used to find out how pension funds trade off sustainable development and financial objectives. Our findings suggest that pension funds that have not included responsibility in their strategy and investments have a clear priority regarding their financial performance. Pension funds who integrate sustainable development in their strategy can bring balance between finance and responsibility. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

USING WEB 2.0 TO SHARE KNOWLEDGE OF CONSTRUCTION SAFETY: THE FABLE OF ECONOMIC ANIMALS

Gone are the days when knowledge sharing depended solely on face‐to‐face meetings. With the help of Web 2.0, rapid and dynamic cross‐border knowledge sharing among construction safety researchers has become possible. Nevertheless, empirical observation has shown that researchers are falling behind the curve. Generally speaking, there are two major types of motivations: intrinsic and extrinsic. Introducing extrinsic motivators on top of intrinsic motivators can produce better results than relying solely on intrinsic motivation.     

Penalized likelihood smoothing in robust state space models

In likelihood-based approaches to robustify state space models, Gaussian error distributions are replaced by non-normal alternatives with heavier tails. Robustified observation models are appropriate for time series with additive outliers, while state or transition equations with heavy-tailed error distributions lead to filters and smoothers that can cope with structural changes in trend or slope caused by innovations outliers. As a consequence, however, conditional filtering and smoothing densities become analytically intractable. Various attempts have been made to deal with this problem, reaching from approximate conditional mean type estimation to fully Bayesian analysis using MCMC simulation. In this article we consider penalized likelihood smoothers, this means estimators which maximize penalized likelihoods or, equivalently, posterior densities. Filtering and smoothing for additive and innovations outlier models can be carried out by computationally efficient Fisher scoring steps or iterative Kalman-type filters. Special emphasis is on the Student family, for which EM-type algorithms to estimate unknown hyperparameters are developed. Operational behaviour is illustrated by simulation experiments and by real data applications. Received: March 1998     

The dialectics of human resource management in Cuba

Dialectical theory is applied to the examination of how institutional and organizational level changes are leading to a new human resource management (HRM) paradigm in Cuba. The paper starts with a general overview of economy and enterprise in Cuba, which serves to expose the nature of the pressures and contradictions facing managers and organizations in this country. Based on a focus group study, an analysis of the process of change in the HRM paradigm as perceived by a sample of Cuban managers is presented. The emerging dialectical paradigm is to a great extent influenced by the institutional context, namely by the control of the state. The state's role in the protection of the communist principles, combined with the need to open the economy to the logic of the market, is constituting a singular case in the world of management in general and of HRM in particular: that of a communist country with an increasingly market-based economy, where the socialist cadre is simultaneously becoming a market-oriented HR manager.     

Small business management and environmental engagement

Small firms in tourism are characterised by informal approaches to management, allowing their owners to meet a variety of often overlapping business and personal goals. Environmental certification schemes generally require members to subscribe to formal environmental management systems (EMS), even when aimed at small business operators. This paper examines in detail the managerial approaches of a small group of owner-managers who are operating within the approximately 3000-member Green Tourism Business Scheme (GTBS) available in the UK and Ireland. The findings suggest that the type of environmental practices adopted most willingly reflect the formality of management within the business and the owner-managers’ various backgrounds, values, reasons to be in business, expectations from acting and their understanding of the “environment”. It finds that the “Plan-Do-Check-Review” approach of most EMS does not easily relate to the complex motivations and needs of the world of small business. The paper concludes that environmental engagement is more likely to be fostered if owner-managers’ managerial approaches and assumptions are better understood and that shared visions for environmental engagement are encouraged through informed dialogue. Both economic benefits and the fostering of “feel good” factors should be stressed if small tourism businesses are to adopt EMS programmes.     

Advertisers and Media Independents—Cooperation and Control: A Study in Norway

While many researchers, as well as practitioners, have discussed the validity of marketing standardization, few seem to bother about standardized international advertising statistics. It is quite common to see comparisons between countries based on data which are hardly comparable. This paper highlights some of the differences in international statistics, explains some reasons for such differences and proposes a new system for international advertising statistics.     

Dialogic Communication and Thought Leadership: Twitter Use by Public Relations Agencies in the United States

Abstract

This study examined how the 117 Twitter profiles maintained by U.S. headquartered agencies appearing in the 2017 Global Top 250 PR Agencies list from the Holmes Report are using this platform to communicate with their publics. Guided by the dialogic communication theory, a content analysis of 1,120 tweets (from the 112 agencies identified as having public active accounts) published between January and October 2017 were analyzed to better understand the content strategies implemented by these agencies as well as the relationship between levels of public engagement and the implementation of dialogic principles. Additionally, this study placed a special emphasis on thought leadership and the means being employed by agencies to introduce and promote their ideas. The study’s results suggest that while media vividness increases the public’s levels of engagement, interactivity has an inverse effect. At the same time, the findings indicate that agencies are not fully employing the dialogic capacity of Twitter. From a strategic point of view, this study provides significant implications for social media communication practices by public relations agencies.     

The dynamic effects of shocks to wages and prices in the United States and the Euro Area

This article investigates the dynamics of aggregate wages and prices in the United States (US) and the Euro Area (EA) with a special focus on persistence of real wages, wage and price inflation. The analysis is conducted within a structural vector error-correction model, where the structural shocks are identified using the long-run properties of the theoretical model, as well as the cointegrating properties of the estimated system. Overall, in the long run, wage and price inflation emerge as more persistent in the EA than in the US in the face of import price, unemployment, or permanent technology shocks. This finding is robust to the changes in the sample period and in the models’ specifications entertained in the article.