Local Responsive Talent Management for Foreign Multinational Enterprises in China

China evolves with amazing speed to be a leading player in the world economy. However, the transformation from isolated centrally planned to internationally open market economy during the past 25 years has occurred so fast that the change in the mindset and the adaptation of new modern business practice is still in progress. Foreign multinational enterprises in the mainland of China responded to the resulting shortcomings of Chinese professionals and managers by covering the key position in the organization by their own resources or managers from neighbor Asian countries. In this qualitative study, a new local responsive talent management concept for foreign multinational enterprises with expatriated managers was proposed under special consideration of the cultural business environment in China. The establishment of a learning firm culture with advanced training system to compensate the drawbacks of Chinese professionals was outlined. The coverage of the key positions in the organization by Chinese professionals with established social network and optionally supported by temporary foreign advisors was proposed to improve the firm climax, domestic customer and stakeholder relations.     

Effort rewarding incentive mechanisms for public enterprise managers

Management incentive schemes leading to welfare optimal pricing and efficient production of public enterprises have so far been mainly concerned with the information advantages that public enterprise managers hold over their supervising government or central planning agency. Managers under these schemes are induced to improve their firm's performance in adjustment processes which in the limit lead to optimal firm decisions. Such managers are supposed to be income maximizers disregarding any personal effort which could influence their performance and utility. In this paper I show that two incentive schemes recently proposed by Tam (1981) and Finsinger and Vogelsang (1982) can also help to induce managers to provide an optimal level of effort. Here effort is assumed to reduce managers' utility and the firm's costs. The result depends crucially on myopic managerial utility maximization. Once managers maximize the discounted value of future utility levels they will deviate from the optimal behavior. Under Tam's scheme, this can hold independent of the optimal effort level. Under the Finsinger-Vogelsang performance index managers will always show suboptimal effort levels in a steady state equilibrium, because the index only rewards welfare improvements.Effort, however, has to be rewarded even with no improvement in behavior. An improved performance index, which provides cumulative rewards is shown to be strategy proof and lead to a welfare optimum. This reward structure basically treats managers as if they were private entrepreneurs. It looks extremely generous in that it gives managers the fruits of all costs reductions due to increases in effort. Suggestions are made to mitigate this income distributional impact.     

Karl Marx — heute noch aktuell?

On the occasion of his 200th birthday, Karl Marx is very popular again. He seems to be quoted in newspapers more often than even Keynes and great liberal economists. The authors agree that he should be taken seriously as a classic author. There are some fundamental pillars of his thinking: He fought for individual freedom and was a pioneer of systemic thinking. Marx was a self-taught economist and a powerfully eloquent demagogue. But all attempts to modernise his economic theory ultimately fail because of their mistakes and contradictions. He analysed an economy whose labour market was characterised by unrestricted competition. His prediction of a final collapse of the capitalist system failed due to far-reaching institutional changes, especially in the labour market. Today Karl Marx must be seen rather as an extremely interesting figure in the intellectual history of the 19th century. His ideas are only of limited use for the analysis of the economic present. Bertram Schefold judges him less stringently, arguing he is topical not only as a historical figure, but also as a theoretical economist and originator of still valuable analytical ideas. Jürgen Kromphardt points out that apart from his dialectical approach, the distribution of income between classes and its consequences are a research area where Marx’s explanations and failures are actually still worthy of consideration.     

Commitment Strategies for Sustainability: How Business Firms Can Transform Trade‐Offs Into Win–Win Outcomes

This paper addresses a fundamental problem in corporate sustainability: How can corporations transform trade‐offs through win–win‐oriented governance strategies aimed at creating value? Drawing on new strands of research in business ethics, we employ an ‘ordonomic’ perspective and proceed in four steps. First, we sketch how sustainability semantics has evolved historically from a societal searchlight to a heuristics for business practice. Second, we discuss how business firms can make strategic use of moral commitments as governance contributions by deploying individual or collective self‐commitments as well as commitment services in their stakeholder relations. Third, we combine these four governance strategies with the three ESG (‘ecological, social and governance’) criteria of sustainability. We derive and illustrate with real‐life examples a 12‐box matrix as a tool for the strategic management of corporate sustainability. Fourth, we discuss the specific contribution of our ordonomic approach to the literature. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Prozessorientierte Planung und Kalkulation (kern-)produktbegleitender Dienstleistungen

Zusammenfassung  Die Bedeutung von Dienstleistungen nimmt volks- und betriebswirtschaftlich immer weiter zu. Die zunehmende Nachfrage führt jedoch in vielen F?llen dazu, dass die Dienstleistungen wenig systematisch und unreflektiert auf Nachfrage durch Kunden angeboten werden. Eine systematische Planung, Entwicklung und Kalkulation finden – im deutlichen Gegensatz zum physischen Produkt – nicht statt. Allerdings wird ein solches Vorgehen auch durch verschiedene Spezifika der Dienstleistungen erschwert. Der vorliegende Beitrag konzentriert sich auf (kern-)produktbegleitende Dienstleistungen und zeigt zun?chst wesentliche theoretische Grundlagen einer prozessorientierten Planung und Kalkulation auf. Basis stellt dabei eine Weiterentwicklung der Prozesskostenrechnung – das Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing – dar, das für produktbegleitende Dienstleistungen angepasst wird. Die Umsetzbarkeit und der praktische Nutzen der entwickelten prozessorientierten Planung und Kalkulation werden abschlie?end in einem Beispiel aus der Unternehmenspraxis dargestellt.      

A Sustainable Pathway to Consumer Wellbeing. The Role of Anticonsumption and Consumer Empowerment

This study investigates the effect of different anticonsumption constructs on consumer wellbeing. The study assumes that people will only lower their level of consumption if doing so does not also lower personal wellbeing. More precisely, this research investigates how specific subtypes of sustainable anticonsumption (e.g., voluntary simplicity, collaborative consumption, and debt-free living) relate to different states of consumer's wellbeing (e.g., financial, psychosocial, and subjective wellbeing). This work also examines whether consumer empowerment can improve personal wellbeing and strengthen the anticonsumption wellbeing relationship. The results show that voluntarily foregoing consumption does not reduce wellbeing and consumer empowerment plays a significant role in supporting sustainable pathways to consumer wellbeing. This study reasons that empowerment improves consumer sovereignty, but may be detrimental for consumers heavily concerned about debt-free living. The present investigation concludes by proposing implications for public and consumer policymakers wishing to promote appropriate sustainable (anticonsumption) pathways to consumer wellbeing.     

Roadmapping: (Missed) opportunities to overcome strategic challenges

Firms face various critical challenges when pursuing a coherent course of action that seeks to create value for the long term. They are required to balance myopic and hyperopic behavior. They must ensure coordination, adopt a holistic view of various functional perspectives, and foster commitment among key decision makers. They need to develop a credible and compelling line of reasoning that employees understand and can act on. Adopting the perspective of roadmapping as a strategy tool, this article advances the argument that roadmapping is especially suitable in helping firms to surmount these three critical strategic challenges. This article distills three core features of the roadmap: graphical representation, multi-disciplinary integration, and scaling. It then reviews the three critical strategic challenges and shows how roadmapping can help to overcome each of these. Following this explanation, the article describes ten key principles for effective strategic roadmapping that support firms in obtaining the strategic benefits promised. The article concludes with additional insights for practice with the intent of encouraging further exploitation of roadmapping’s potential.     

Is there a wage premium for volunteer OSS engagement? – signalling,learning and noise

Volunteer-based open-source production has become a significant new model for the organization of software development. Economics often pictures this phenomenon as a case of signalling: individuals engage in the volunteer programming of open-source software (OSS) as a labour-market signal resulting in a wage premium. Yet, this explanation could so far not be empirically tested. This article fills this gap by estimating an upper-bound composite wage premium of voluntary OSS contributions and by separating the potential signalling effect of OSS engagement from other effects. Although some 70% of OSS contributors believe that OSS involvement benefits their careers, we find no actual labour-market premium for OSS engagement. The presence of other motives, such as fun of play or altruism, renders OSS contributions too noisy to function as a signal.