Timeline of a financial crisis: Introduction to the special issue

The economic crisis fueled by risky mortgages and the exotic financial instruments developed from bundling these mortgages caused the largest one-day losses on the US stock market in history (BBC News, 2009a). The resulting financial collapse quickly spread throughout the world, causing economic recessions in much of the EU, Turkey, and many other countries. Since 2008, economists, government agencies, and academics pondered the causes of the financial crisis with an eye toward avoiding such catastrophic collapse in the future. This special issue contributes to the discussion by bringing together academics from marketing, finance, and economics to put the financial crisis into theoretical perspective and propose theoretically viable alternatives to avoid similar economic downturns in the future.     

Changes in Host Community Reactions to a Special Sporting Event

Special events are a popular component of tourism and economic development strategies for communities and regions in many parts of the world. Researchers continue to develop an understanding of the positive and negative aspects of the events, and to assess residents' support for these events and their views about impacts. The main objective of this paper is to assess residents' reactions over a one-year period to hosting a special sporting event. The analysis is based on three community surveys, one undertaken before the event, the next immediately following the event, and the final one six months later. The research found that support remained high over this period, though a decline in overall support was evident. Over time, views about changes to facilities and services in the community shifted and there were distinct differences in residents' opinions on the impacts of hosting the event. The paper concludes that longitudinal studies must include a time-frame that extends beyond the immediate post-event period and, further, that a comprehensive event hosting impact scale would be useful for research in this field.     

Predicting general election outcomes: campaigns and changing voter knowledge at the 2017 general election in England

There is a growing literature suggesting that the result for each constituency at British general elections can be predicted using ‘citizen forecasts’ obtained through voter surveys. This may be true for the majority of constituencies where the result at previous contests was a substantial majority for one party’s candidates: few ‘safe seats’ change hands. But is it true in the marginal constituencies, where elections are won and lost? Analysis of such ‘citizen forecast’ data for the Labour-Conservative marginal constituencies in 2017 indicates not. Although respondents were aware of the seats’ relative marginality and of general trends in party support during the campaign, they could not separate out those that were eventually lost by each party from those that were won again, even in seats where the elected party won comfortably.

     

Tenure,promotion and executive remuneration

Commentators frequently remark on the need to pay high levels of chief executive officer remuneration to attract, motivate and retain the best executives for Britain's leading companies. This paper presents the results of an empirical investigation into tenure, promotion and executive remuneration. The remuneration of the chief executive officers at some of Britain's largest businesses is examined. In the majority of cases the CEO had not been lured away from rivals but had risen through the internal labour market, often after a long–term employment relationship. Moreover, long job tenure and internal promotion were associated with higher levels of pay. It is concluded that understanding of this controversial issue will be improved if it is recognized that a part of current executive pay may be a reward for previous successful performance.     

The influence of calculative (“hard”) and collaborative (“soft”) HRM on the layoff‐performance relationship in high performance workplaces

We investigate the effect of employment systems on the layoff‐performance relationship. We construct a typology of two types of HPWS (Calculative or “hard” HRM and Collaborative or “soft” HRM) and two non‐high performance systems (Traditional HRM and Low HRM). We use attribution theory as a framework from which to draw hypotheses. We examine survey responses from two waves of panel data. We employ cluster analysis to identify distinctive configurations of employment practices used in UK workplaces. We use the cluster outcomes as explanatory variables in moderator regression analysis. Following layoffs, we find that Calculative workplaces experience lower subsequent performance than Collaborative workplaces. Over the next five years, Calculative and Collaborative workplaces experience equivalent amounts of performance change but Calculative workplaces fail to make a full recovery.