‘Free actors’ and organizations: critical remarks about the new career literature,based on French insights

What is the reality of contemporary careers? Have individuals become masters of their professional destiny? While the ‘new career literature’ puts forward the figure of an individual free to invent his/her career (the ‘free actor model’), this article shows that the changes purported to affect careers are less radical than they seem. Despite a weakening of environments, discriminating career mechanisms are still imposed on cadres, at least in France. Because individuals do not always have the means or the will to escape those mechanisms, ‘external clues’ continue to mark careers more than the new career literature supposes. To account for the realities observed in France, this paper proposes a specific view on careers, which highlights why career rules still exist in the country.     

The strategic strength of weak signal analysis

Foresight can be seen as a social cognition process involving a complex set of methods and interactive processes intended to assist policy in becoming more adaptive and forward-oriented in unpredictable environments. As a form of foresight raw material, “weak signals” can be thought of as gross, unstructured, fragmented, incomplete and inadvertent environmental data that may be refined into valuable information regarding context and further be articulated into strategically actionable knowledge. As advanced indicators that precede significant discrete one-off events and/or novel developments in the rate and direction of trends, their analysis has the potential to facilitate the real-time alignment between organisational decision-making and changing external circumstances. These predictors of future change pose fundamental problems of identification and interpretation and represent a challenge to established mental models. Thus, the practical significance of weak signals is that they can be transformed into meaningful insight for policy action. Such a value, however, does not materialise automatically. Realising this potential requires a degree of tolerance and fluidity of the collective cognitive frameworks by which weak signals can be apprehended, assessed and acted upon. This paper aims at covering the scope of perceptions and actions typically involved in the tracing and tracking of this shaping process.     

The Effects of Additive Outliers and Measurement Errors when Testing for Structural Breaks in Variance*

This article discusses the asymptotic and finite‐sample properties of the CUSUM tests for detecting structural breaks in volatility when the data are perturbed with (additive) outliers and/or measurement errors. The special focus is on the parametric and non‐parametric tests in Inclán and Tiao (1994) and Kokoszka and Leipus (2000) . Whereas the asymptotic distribution of the former can be largely affected, the distribution of the latter remains invariant and renders consistent break‐point estimates. In small samples, however, large additive outliers are able to generate sizeable distortions in both tests, which explains some of the contradictory findings in previous literature.     

Are Occupations Paid What They are Worth? An Econometric Study of Occupational Wage Inequality and Productivity

Labour economists typically assume that pay differences between occupations can be explained with variations in productivity. The empirical evidence on the validity of this assumption is surprisingly thin and subject to various potential biases. The authors use matched employer-employee panel data from Belgium for the years 1999–2006 to examine occupational productivity-wage gaps. They find that occupations play distinct roles for remuneration and productivity: while the estimations indicate a significant upward-sloping occupational wage-profile, the hypothesis of a flat productivity-profile cannot be rejected. The corresponding pattern of over- and underpayment stands up to a series of robustness tests.     

Project Management of Production Line Automation: A Comparative Analysis of Project Management in Brazil and Colombia

This article aims to evaluate the production line automation projects developed by Brazilian and Colombian companies from the Project Management perspective, through the analysis of the application degree of PMBOK processes, to understand how formal techniques are being employed in these countries and also to identify improvement opportunities, when necessary. Data were collected through a survey. The similarity index between the ten processes, with the highest application degree in the Brazilian and Colombian samples, was 70%. For the processes with the lowest application degree, the similarity index was 60%. No similar study was found in the literature.     

PRICING AND HEDGING OF DERIVATIVES BASED ON NONTRADABLE UNDERLYINGS

This paper is concerned with the study of insurance related derivatives on financial markets that are based on nontradable underlyings, but are correlated with tradable assets. We calculate exponential utility‐based indifference prices, and corresponding derivative hedges. We use the fact that they can be represented in terms of solutions of forward‐backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDE) with quadratic growth generators. We derive the Markov property of such FBSDE and generalize results on the differentiability relative to the initial value of their forward components. In this case the optimal hedge can be represented by the price gradient multiplied with the correlation coefficient. This way we obtain a generalization of the classical “delta hedge” in complete markets.     

Subsidization of S&Ls under the flat-rate deposit insurance system: Some empirical estimates

This study provides some estimates of the magnitude of the subsidies extracted by S&L holding companies under the present flat-rate deposit insurance system. The results suggest that the flat-rate deposit insurance system induces substantially uneven and inequitable distribution of subsidies among thrift institutions. The analysis of the thrift institutions' asset volatilities over the 1966–1988 period does not support the claim that deregulation of the industry has led to a systematic increase in risk-taking in the industry. On the other hand, we find that a large fraction of the asset volatilities are attributable to firm-specific investment policies and that the risk of the institutions' assets change considerably over time. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that switching to a risk-based deposit insurance system would be economically more efficient than the present scheme. We provide some recommendations for policy changes that can increase the efficacy of risk-based insurance by increasing the level of monitoring by depositors and the financial markets.     

Simultaneous Pooled Auctions

Suppose a seller wants to sell k similar or identical objects and there are n > k potential buyers. Suppose that each buyer wants only one object. In this case, we suggest the use of a simultaneous auction that would work as follows. Players are asked to submit sealed bids for one object. The individual with the highest bid chooses an object first; the individual with the second-highest bid chooses the next object; and this process continues until the individual with the kth highest bid receives the last object. Each individual pays the equivalent to his or her bid. When objects are identical, we show that the proposed auction generates the same revenue as a first-price sealed-bid sequential auction. When objects are perfectly correlated, there is no known solution for sequential auctions, whereas we can characterize bidding strategies in the proposed auction. Moreover, the proposed auction is optimal (given an appropriately chosen reserve price), and it may be easier and cheaper to run than a sequential auction.     

Restructuring the public sector: examples from the Swedish School Administration Board

This research note begins with a discussion of recent changes in the Swedish labour market, with special reference to employment changes in the public sector from a gender perspective. These changes are illustrated with a discussion of results from a study of the closing of the National Board of School Administration, an agency with a high proportion of women on its staff. Changes are compared to observations made during the restructuring of the industrial sector. The research note concludes with a short discussion on employment trends for the future, with special reference to the importance of the public sector.