Sustainable entrepreneurship and the Sustainable Development Goals: Community-led initiatives,the social solidarity economy and commons ecologies

The social solidarity economy is an approach to the production and consumption of goods, services and knowledge that promises to address contemporary economic, social and environmental crises more effectively than business as usual. The paper employs the concept of commons ecologies to examine the practices, relationships and interactions among actors and organisations in the social solidarity economy, as well as between them and the mainstream economy, which shape the field and its degree of autonomy in relation to capitalism, through a process defined as boundary commoning. Such process shapes both local and regional commons ecologies, as well as the participation of local and regional actors in wider networks at national, international and global levels. The paper takes a case study-based approach to identify practices, relationships and interactions of commons ecologies in relation to selected community-led initiatives in the UK, Portugal, Brazil and Senegal. Each case study illuminates different qualities of local/regional commons ecologies and their forms of engagement with wider networks. Further, the paper shows that these cases demonstrate how the social solidarity economy may facilitate delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals in a distinctive way. In each case, SSE acts as a vehicle for expressing participants' values and principles consistent with those underlying the SDGs. Local implementation of SDGs is thus an in-built feature of these commons ecologies. The participation of community-led initiatives in international and global networks offers opportunities to learn from local level experiences and successes, potentially strengthening SDG implementation more generally.     

The “Six Ws” of sustainable development risks

Risk management in an organization represents a decisive function in seizing opportunities and managing the risks that can affect a business's reputation, prosperity, growth, value creation, stakeholder engagement, long-term survival, and a firm's contribution to sustainable development. For this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review of 148 indexed studies and uses the “Six Ws” (what, who, why, where, when, and how) approach to understand the linkages between sustainability and risk management. This study's findings reveal that the management of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns plays a mitigation's function on business risks.     

Lost in intervention. The Harrod–Balassa–Samuelson effect on the peseta/dollar real exchange rate (1870–1998)

We have decomposed the peseta/dollar real exchange rate (1870–1998) into its trend and cyclical components and used the former to proxy its time-varying equilibrium. Then, we have compared changes in the equilibrium with changes in the Spanish and the USA productivity differentials to identify years that do not fit with the Harrod–Balassa–Samuelson (HBS) hypothesis. The greatest maladjustment is found in the 1940s and 1950s, decades of strong exchange rate intervention in Spain. Conversely, the link between equilibrium and differentials adjusts to the hypothesis when using the non-intervened peseta/dollar exchange rate on the Tangier black market. These contrasting results back up the idea that exchange rate intervention, so common in developing countries, might explain their scanter evidence in favour of the HBS effect.     

Economic and Household Impacts of Projected Policy Changes for the Irish Agri‐food Sector

The policy environment for the Irish agri‐food sector could change rapidly in the coming decade. A potentially positive factor will be the elimination of milk quotas in 2015, although a potentially negative factor will be further trade liberalisation and increased import competition. These changes come on top of the move to decouple direct aids to farmers in 2005 as part of the Mid‐Term Review of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy agreed in 2003. This paper examines these reforms and their impacts on the Irish economy and income distribution using a CGE model particularly rich in detail on the agri‐food sectors, differentiated household groups, and agricultural policy instruments including their links to productive factors and households. The results suggest that the past and projected changes in the policy environment have, in sum, a small positive impact on GDP and household income. However, the gains and losses are unequally distributed across sectors and household groups due to the highly differentiated distribution of support and protection. Although all households generally gain from the sequence of policy reforms in the long run, some experience strong adverse effects from particular reforms and in the medium term.     

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.     

Firm heterogeneity and immigrant wage assimilation

This article investigates the role of job mobility in immigrant wage assimilation. I use longitudinal linked employer–employee data for Portugal to estimate the immigrant wage catch-up in log wage regressions with both individual and firm fixed effects. I show that moving to firms with higher wage premiums accounts for approximately 30% of the immigrant wage catch-up in the first years.     

Success factors in a CRM strategy: technology is not all

Organisations today need to create, maintain and reinforce relationships with customers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) seems to have helped firms to better understand their relationships. However, past studies have looked at technology and customer orientations (COs) as key factors. This paper aims to analyse the simultaneous effect of Market Orientation (MO) (rather than CO), Knowledge Management (KM) and other organisational factors in order to explain how to implement a successful CRM. Findings suggest that MO and KM may influence CRM success. Data also suggest that particular organisational factors such as employees, leadership and specific know-how may be key factors in determining the success of CRM. For efficiency resource management, this paper recommends to focus not as much in technology, but on programmes for selection, training and motivation of employees which may enhance CRM objectives. Companies may also pursue a higher customer value by putting in place and reinforcing KM schemes in specific know-hows about CRM.     

Information and Investor Behavior Surrounding Earnings Announcements

The goal of this paper is to analyze the impact of annual earnings announcements on the market through the order flow data in addition to the usual transaction data. In this respect, examining order flow data can potentially reveal valuable information that is not available from transaction data. In fact, the data allow us to test hypotheses about asymmetric information and investor behavior and to test if the behavior varies with investor sophistication. In addition, the paper tries to identify the determinants of the impact on a firm's value using assumptions about investor behavior.