Global talent management and inpatriate social capital building: a status inconsistency perspective

Distinct to expatriate managers at the subsidiary-level, inpatriate managers' influence at the headquarter (HQ)-level is controlled by the extent to which an inpatriate manager is able to ‘win’ status from HQ personnel. The primary goal of the paper is to conceptualize how organizational support, in the form of global talent management (GTM) practices, can alleviate inpatriates' difficulties in building social capital at HQ. Building social capital at HQ is vital for inpatriates to attain status in order to build the inter-unit social capital that enables them to pursue their boundary-spanning role across HQs and subsidiaries. Status inconsistency theory is put forward to recognize the personal, professional and structural incongruence of events and activities at HQ carried out with respect to inpatriates. We argue that inpatriate managers become empowered at HQ only when social capital is accumulated whereby social capital is driven by an acknowledgment of inpatriates as a legitimate staffing option. The relationship between GTM practices and social capital building needs to be managed properly by inpatriates themselves as well as by the organization. A future research agenda helping to build social capital of inpatriates through GTM infrastructure is discussed and propositions are offered throughout.     

Beyond “Pink It and Shrink It” Perceived Product Gender,Aesthetics, and Product Evaluation

Marketing research on product personality suggests that products possess gender; however, the process by which a product becomes masculine or feminine is unknown. This research identifies product aesthetics as a source of product masculinity and femininity and investigates the influence of product gender created by aesthetics on consumer behavior. Building on prior work on anthropomorphism and evolutionary psychology (EP), the authors broadly hypothesize that specific physical characteristics identified as representing masculinity and femininity—and thus considered attractive in the mate selection process—will have a similar effect on products. The first study identifies the impact of the aesthetic dimensions of form (proportion, shape, and lines), color (tones, contrast, and reflection), and material (texture, surface, and weight) on defining a product's gender. The second study shows that products that are strongly gendered, particularly those that are strong in both the masculine and feminine dimensions, result in positive affective and behavioral responses. Thus, this research identifies product aesthetics as a significant source of product gender while highlighting the theoretical contribution of EP to consumer behavior. Managerial implications for product design are then discussed, offering guidelines for creating strongly gendered products.     

Adaptive Preferences and Capabilities: Some Preliminary Conceptual Explorations

The Capability Approach (CA) as developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, has in part been a response to the problem of adaptive preferences. Their argument says that people might adapt to certain unfavorable circumstances and any self-evaluation in terms of satisfaction or happiness will in this case necessarily be distorted. To evaluate people's well-being in terms of functionings and capabilities guarantees a more objective picture of people's life. Next to this strong criticism on subjective measurements of well-being, we observe an increasing interest in Subjective Well-Being (SWB) or Happiness studies that are included in the broader field of Hedonic Psychology. In this paper, we thus revise the original critique of adaptive preferences and compare it with a more detailed analysis of adaptation as it is presented in hedonic psychology. It becomes clear that adaptation can be a positive as well as a negative phenomenon and that the adaptive preference critique had a particular narrow view on adaptation. However, this does not mean SWB-research is not any longer susceptible to this critique. An alternative way to assess people's subjective well-being, but which could be considered to be more in line with the CA, is proposed by Daniel Kahneman's Objective Happiness. These are all relatively new considerations, especially in economics. Therefore much more research needs to be done on the positive and negative aspects of adaptation to understand its consequences on well-being – especially when evaluated within the capability-space.     

Book Reviews

Utopian ideals of communist, socialist, or even individualistic, free market societies have inspired humankind for centuries. Against the notions of "the end of ideology" or "the end of history" this article argues for the legitimacy of utopian discourse, but not by promoting a specific utopian plan. It is shown that even "anti-utopians" such as Marx and Hayek end up promoting a utopia of their own. Instead of rejecting utopianism, what is required is a meta-utopian discourse in which the idea of a perfect society is rejected but the potential and limitations of different kinds of utopias can be measured. Key parameters are outlined via a critical consideration of the writings of Hayek, Malthus, Marx, and Veblen. The idea of evotopia is established to accommodate the elements of novelty and variety which are missing in much utopian thinking.     

Measuring Income Inequality in Euroland

In this paper we propose an aggregate measure of income inequality for the founding countries of the European Monetary Union. Applying the methodology of the Theil index we are able to derive a measure for Euroland as a whole by using complementary data from the European Community Household Panel and the Luxembourg Income Study. The property of additive decomposability allows us to determine each country's contribution as well as that of each demographic group to overall income inequality. In addition the impact of government transfers on this inequality measure is assessed.     

Organizational change and accounting: the gunpowder monopoly in New Spain, 1757-87

The Viceroyalty of New Spain was the main source of income for the Spanish Crown and the largest producer of silver in the world throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Carlos III, a member of the Bourbon dynasty, initiated a great tax reform in the viceroyalty during the last third of the eighteenth century, and transferred public activities and leased monopolies were brought under direct state control. This paper focuses on the study of the specific change in the system of administering the gunpowder monopoly in 1766. Institutional sociology provides the theoretical framework for analysing the effects of institutionalized environments on the organizational structure and its expression through a process of bureaucratization as a mean of establishing organizational rationality. The role of accounting in the process of organizational change is analysed from a multidimensional perspective: on the one hand, as an aspect of the organizational structure which enables the improvement of the economic performance of the monopoly and to generate organizational visibility; and, on the other hand, as an element under the control of the creator of environmental rationality.     

PROPOSAL FOR A NEW MEASURE OF CORRUPTION, ILLUSTRATED WITH ITALIAN DATA

Standard cross-national measures of corruption are assembled through surveys. We propose a novel alternative objective measure that consists of the difference between a measure of the physical quantities of public infrastructure and the cumulative price government pays for public capital stocks. Where the difference is larger between the monies spent and the existing physical infrastructure, more money is being siphoned off to mismanagement, fraud, bribes, kickbacks, and embezzlement; that is, corruption is greater. We create this measure for Italy's 95 provinces and 20 regions as of the mid-1990s, controlling at the regional level for possible differences in the costs of public construction.     

Deliberation over new hydrogen energy technologies: evidence from two Citizens’ Panels in the UK

Hydrogen energy and hydrogen energy technologies are still largely at the experimental and demonstration project stages. If the hydrogen is produced sustainably from renewable sources, it may be a potential means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and achieving other environmental objectives. But hydrogen technologies are still ‘emergent’ – seeking a niche to compete against incumbent technologies in stationary and mobile applications. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (buses and automobiles) and hydrogen refuelling stations have been developed, but they have yet to become established in the market. Much attention has been given to technical risk assessment of hydrogen as a hazardous gas, but broader ‘whole systems’ appraisals of a hydrogen infrastructure (for domestic and transport uses) are lacking. Importantly, public risk perceptions are seen as crucial factors influencing acceptance or rejection. This paper examines qualitative evidence about public attitudes towards hydrogen energy technologies and compares results from two Citizens’ Panels carried out recently in England and Wales. These Citizens’ Panels enabled selected samples of the general public to question the experts and deliberate over the issues raised. The paper highlights unresolved questions concerning ‘critical trust’ of experts and other stakeholders, and citizens’ demands for greater familiarity with the hydrogen technologies in practical, everyday settings, in order to offer judgements about their desirability and feasibility.