Rezensionen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

A new mandate for human resources

Should we do away with HR? In recent years, a number of people who study and write about business--along with many who run businesses--have been debating that question. The debate arises out of serious and widespread doubts about HR's contribution to organizational performance. Dave Ulrich acknowledges that HR, as it is configured today in many companies, is indeed ineffective, incompetent, and costly. But he contends that it has never been more necessary. The solution, he believes, is to create an entirely new role for the field that focuses it not on traditional HR activities, such as staffing and compensation, but on business results that enrich the company's value to customers, investors, and employees. Ulrich elaborates on four broad tasks for HR that would allow it to help deliver organizational excellence. First, HR should become a partner in strategy execution. Second, it should become an expert in the way work is organized and executed. Third, it should become a champion for employees. And fourth, it should become an agent of continual change. Fulfilling this agenda would mean that every one of HR's activities would in some concrete way help a company better serve its customers or otherwise increase shareholder value. Can HR transform itself on its own? Certainly not--in fact, the primary responsibility for transforming the role of HR, Ulrich says, belongs to the CEO and to every line manager who works with the HR staff. Competitive success is a function of organizational excellence, and senior managers must hold HR accountable for delivering it.     

Risk management strategies - before Hominization and after

Selected examples, ranging from birds to pastoralistic nomads and subsisting peasants, indicate that the higher animals adopt foraging strategies similar to individual decision makers in economies without market (subsistence economies): in contrast to actors in (ideal neoclassical) market economies, maximizing expected utility, they operate in such way as to optimize long-term survival of genetically related groups. This can be seen as a strategy of (maximum) ruin avoidance, played by 'selfish genes'. In the sense of conjectural history the parallelism between risk behaviour of animals and early men may be regarded as the continued existence of principles of natural evolution beyond hominization up to the historical emergence of complex societies where pursuit of surplus production replaced ruin avoidance as the primary orientation in the older subsistence economies.     

Entrepreneurial resource acquisition via personal networks: an empirical study of German start-ups

This paper presents a resource-based theoretical model for an extended version of the network success hypothesis. It derives four main hypotheses for the relationships between resources obtained from personal networks of the founders and a new venture's success. The model takes into account a broad range of control variables. In the empirical study, based on a sample of 123 German entrepreneurs, we do not find much support for our hypotheses. We conclude that, quite in contrast to most existing theories, network links have close to no impact on getting cheap or exclusive resources.     

Import-Price Uncertainty, Production Decisions, and Relative Factor Shares

The effects of import-price uncertainty on factor income in Switzerland are estimated. The production-theory approach is used to derive the import demand function from an expected utility maximization problem, treating imports as an input to the technology. The model is also used to test for risk aversion and to assess the impact of uncertainty on the volume of imports and gross output. Evidence is found that, for most years, labor has been relatively more vulnerable to uncertainty than has capital.     

Neither bad apple nor bad barrel: how the societal context impacts unethical behavior in organizations

Every time another corporate scandal captures media headlines, the ‘bad apple vs. bad barrel’ discussion starts anew. Yet this debate overlooks the influence of the broader societal context on organizational behavior. In this article, we argue that misbehaviors of organizations (the ‘barrels’) and their members (the ‘apples’) cannot be addressed properly without a clear understanding of their broader context (the ‘larder’). Whereas previously, a strong societal framework dampened the practical application of the Homo economicus concept (business actors as perfectly rational and egocentric utility‐maximizing agents without any moral concern), specialization, individualization and globalization led to a business world disembedded from broader societal norms. This emancipated business world promotes a literal interpretation of Homo economicus among business organizations and their members. Consequently, we argue that the first step toward ‘healthier’ apples and barrels is to sanitize the larder, that is, adapt the framework in which organizations and their members evolve.