Control and commitment HR practices,job satisfaction and turnover intentions: a comparison between local and multinational firms in China

There is a growing body of literature and debate around control versus commitment human resource management (HRM) systems and their impacts on employees. However, the impacts of these constructs have not been widely examined in more emerging economies. Taking a specific sample of educated professionals working for multinational and local firms in China, this study investigated employee perceptions of control and commitment HR practices, job satisfaction and turnover intentions. A total of 311 respondents completed a structured survey questionnaire. Results revealed that those working for multinational firms reported more positive perceptions of their employers' control and commitment HR practices. In multinational firms, the use of commitment HR practices predicted lower intentions to leave. However, in domestic firms a lack of control HR practices predicted higher turnover intentions. Theoretically, the study adds to discussions about the nature and roles of these constructs, their impacts on HR outcomes and how institutional mechanisms might shape the degree of HRM homogeneity and hybridity across organizations in China. Practically, the study provides guidance to international and local firms on how to improve their HRM effectiveness to achieve a higher retention of their most talented professionals.     

Corporate Governance,Valuation, and Performance: Evidence from a Voluntary Market Reform in Brazil

In December 2000, the São Paulo Stock Exchange launched a new premium market segment for companies that voluntarily commit to “good practices of corporate governance.” We construct a composite index (NM6) that combines six proxies for the main governance practices targeted by Bovespa's reform. We find that higher scores for our index are related to greater market value but not to better operating performance. An investment strategy that purchased stocks of firms with high NM6 and sold stocks of firms with low NM6 would have earned abnormal returns of 10.68% per year from 2001 to 2005.     

PRINCIPLES FOR THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A PEDESTRIAN PLAN IN MEDIUM SIZE CITIES

In order to contribute to the effective humanization of the contemporary city and in line with the sustainability of urban areas, this paper focuses on primary pedestrian areas aiming to investigate and demonstrate the benefits of organization and the essential conditions of implementing “pedestrian networks”. The realization of its qualifying character in the urban environment should specify:

• ? The challenge of reinterpreting the idea of the city, due to the transformation of associated “urban forms” and “lifestyles”;
• ? The need to structure the territory, in order to promote the understanding and ownership of the different places that compose a city;
• ? The ability to generate synergies, as a means of affirming the “local” in the context of the “global” opportunities and threats.

It is, therefore, disciplinary useful to test a methodological urban planning “process” with the aim to design and manage “pedestrian networks”, applicable in a range of cities considered of medium size, according to the European classification mainly based on population criteria.     

Virtue and Commerce in Domingo de Soto’s Thought: Commercial Practices, Character, and the Common Good

This paper draws from the work of sixteenth century theologian, philosopher, and ethicist Domingo de Soto and considers his virtue-based approach to the ethical evaluation of commerce within an Aristotelian–Thomistic framework for the articulation of business and the common good. Particular attention is given to the fundamental emphasis placed by Soto in distinguishing between commerce as an activity and the specific conduct of persons engaging in commercial activity. The distinction between the material and the formal parts of the common good is then employed to shed light on the way Soto articulates commercial practices, virtuous character, and the common good. It is concluded that Soto’s major contribution for business ethics is clarifying that the key element for the ethical evaluation of commerce is the embodiment of virtuous personal conduct in the exercise of commercial activity. In this framework, the fulfillment of commerce’s potential to contribute to the common good is thus fundamentally interconnected with putting virtues into practice.     

Fundamentalists,chartists and asset pricing anomalies

This paper investigates whether excess volatility of asset prices and serial correlations of stock monthly returns may be explained by the interactions between fundamentalists and chartists. Fundamentalists forecast future prices cum dividends through an adaptive learning rule. In contrast, chartists forecast future prices based on the observation of past price movements. Numerical simulations reveal that the interplay of fundamentalists and chartists robustly generates excess volatility of asset prices, volatility clustering, trends in prices (i.e. positive serial correlations of returns) over short horizons and oscillations in prices (i.e. negative serial correlations of returns) over long horizons, often observed in financial data. Moreover, we find that the memory of the learning rule plays a key role in explaining the above-mentioned stylized facts. In particular, we establish that excess volatility of asset prices; volatility clustering and autocorrelation of returns at different horizons emerge when fundamentalists have short memory. However, volatility clustering as well as short-run and long-run dependencies, observed in financial time series, are more pronounced when fundamentalists have longer memory.     

The Who,Where, and When of Social Marketing

Social marketing has experienced substantial growth over the last 3 decades and its utilization has spread into various areas of social and public life. However, certain barriers to its expansion do still remain. Thus, a systematic overview of studies on this field will contribute towards a better understanding of the subject and its progress thus far. This study presents the results of bibliometric analysis of the social marketing field defining the academic area subject to study, along with its respective bibliographical sources, based on publication counts, citation, co-citation, and co-word analysis. This study enables researchers new to the field to proceed in their work aware of core findings, their authors and journals, as well as identifying those conferences and institutions most closely related to this subject.     

Is Petrobras Options Market Efficient? A Study Using the Delta-Gamma Neutral Strategy

This study aims to verify if the Petrobras options market is efficient in its weak form. For this purpose, this work tries to make profits on a systematic basis through delta-gamma neutral strategies using the firm’s stocks and options. In order to simulate the strategy as it would be used in the real world, we built order books every five minutes considering all buy and sell orders sent for both the underlying asset and its options. We apply the strategy when we observe distortions between implied volatilities extracted from the options. The results show evidence that the Petrobras options market is not efficient, since in 371 day-trade transactions (with an average investment of R$81,000 and an average holding time of one hour and thirteen minutes), 85% of the options strategies were profitable and the average return was 0.49%, which corresponds to more than 1600% of the highest interbank interest rate for the period.     

Possible selves and identity in relation to career development: evidence from Chilean male middle‐aged managers' career narratives

Social and economic conditions, as well as the dynamism of the Chilean labour market, place new demands on middle‐aged workers who have to explore both internal and external opportunities to develop successful careers. We assumed that possible self and identity in future states are core organizing aspects in this process. Identities, being core components of the self‐concept, comprise self‐representations that are contextually based and rooted in a social structure. Given the fact that there is a serious lack of empirical research in this domain, this study was aimed to help close an important gap in the literature. More specifically, it was intended to better understand the role played by possible selves and identity – that is, knowledge about what the self might eventually achieve or become – in career development. Based on an in‐depth qualitative study among 25 male middle‐aged Chilean managers, we found that the possible selves reported: (1) are evolving processes that vary in terms of content, stability and elaboration; (2) are related to career variety; (3) help in both career transitions and the adjustment process in novel situations; and (4) act as an incentive in career development. It is important to stress that in cases of challenging work contexts, employees are urged to create and recreate new selves and identities at work in order to increase their adaptability to ever‐increasing working life demands and enhance their employability.     

A semi-automated system for interoperability assessment: an ontology-based approach

ABSTRACT

A plethora of approaches to assess the ability of companies to interoperate can be found in the literature. Nevertheless, most of the current assessment approaches are following manual-conducted processes, which can be laborious, time-consuming and costly. Therefore, this paper aims at developing a knowledge-based system for supporting an interoperability assessment process using an ontology as its knowledge model. The resulting system allows identifying potential interoperability problems and related solutions based on the knowledge model including information of the assessed enterprise(s). A real business case is presented for evaluating the proposed approach.