How a Firm's Domestic Footprint and Domestic Environmental Uncertainties Jointly Shape Added Cultural Distances: The Roles of Resource Dependence and Headquarters Attention

Even though many firms conduct most of their business domestically, international management research has remained remarkably silent on the role of a firm's domestic footprint in its internationalization strategy. We shed light on that role by exploring how the size of a firm's domestic footprint influences the cultural distance that the firm adds to its country portfolio when expanding internationally. Integrating resource dependence theory and the attention‐based view, we hypothesize that a firm's domestic footprint has a negative relationship with added cultural distance (ACD), and that domestic policy uncertainty strengthens this relationship whereas domestic demand uncertainty weakens it. We find robust support for our hypotheses in a sample of the world's largest retailers covering the period 2000–07, indicating that a firm's domestic footprint and domestic environmental uncertainties jointly shape cross‐cultural expansion strategies. Our findings suggest that ACDs reflect headquarters executives' desire to avoid ineffective foreign expansions, hinting at possible biases in studies of the performance effects of distance.     

Career mentoring in context: A multilevel study on differentiated career mentoring and career mentoring climate

This study explores how supervisor career mentoring contributes to contemporary organizational career development, which strives to foster employees' promotability while strengthening their intention to stay. Specifically, we focus on the implications of career mentoring in team contexts. Applying a multilevel framework, we distinguish between individual‐level differentiated mentoring (i.e., an employee's mentoring perceptions as compared to those of other team members) and group‐level career mentoring climate (i.e., the average perception across all group members). In a workplace setting, we collected data from vocational job starters (N ranged from 230 to 290) and their company supervisors (N ranged from 56 to 68). We find that career mentoring climate positively relates to promotability, more so than differentiated career mentoring. Both career mentoring climate and differentiated career mentoring are positively related to the intention to stay. At the individual level, this relationship is mediated by job satisfaction. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of differentiated and group‐level mentoring.     

Identifying Worldviews on Corporate Sustainability: A Content Analysis of Corporate Sustainability Reports

Companies commonly issue sustainability or corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. This study seeks to understand worldviews of corporate sustainability, or the corporate message conveyed regarding what sustainability or CSR is and how to enact it. Content analysis of corporate sustainability reports is used to position each company report within stages of corporate sustainability. Results reveal that there are multiple coexisting worldviews of corporate sustainability, but the most dominant worldview is focused on the business case for sustainability, a position anchored in the weak sustainability paradigm. We contend that the business case and weak sustainability advanced in corporate sustainability reports and by the Global Reporting Initiative are poor representations of sustainability. Ecological embeddedness, or a locally responsive strategy that is sensitive to local ecosystems, may hold the key to improved ecological sensemaking, which in turn could lead to more mature levels of corporate sustainability worldviews that support strong sustainability and are rooted in environmental science. This must be supported by government regulation. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

First mover or higher quality? Optimal product strategy in markets with positive feedbacks

Conventional wisdom holds that in markets with positive feedbacks being first to market can matter more than product quality. In this paper, we test that intuition within a generalized Pólya urn model. We find that if we assume constant feedbacks, in the long run, higher quality products dominate the market regardless of initial market shares, contradicting the common wisdom. However, when we allow for variable feedbacks, initial advantages persist almost indefinitely. Thus, the choice of whether to rush to market or focus on quality depends on market characteristics such as whether the positive feedbacks result from more consistent returns to scale or from more variable social influences.     

The role of performance appraisals in motivating employees

Workers' rewards and career perspectives often depend on how their supervisors perceive their performance. However, evaluating a worker's performance is often difficult. We develop a model in which a worker is uncertain about his own performance and about his supervisor's ability to assess him. The supervisor gives the worker a performance appraisal aiming to affect both the worker's self‐perception and his own credibility in assessing the performance. We examine how performance appraisals affect the worker's future performance. Our model's predictions are consistent with empirical findings. Supervisors give, on average, “too” positive appraisals, and both positive and negative feedback can (de)motivate workers.     

On the robustness of the fat-tailed distribution of firm growth rates: a global sensitivity analysis

Firms grow and decline by relatively lumpy jumps which cannot be accounted by the cumulation of small, “atom-less”, independent shocks. Rather “big” episodes of expansion and contraction are relatively frequent. More technically, this is revealed by the fat-tailed distributions of growth rates. This applies across different levels of sectoral disaggregation, across countries, over different historical periods for which there are available data. What determines such property? In Dosi et al. (The footprint of evolutionary processes of learning and selection upon the statistical properties of industrial dynamics. Industrial and corporate change. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016) we implemented a simple multi-firm evolutionary simulation model, built upon the coupling of a replicator dynamic and an idiosyncratic learning process, which turns out to be able to robustly reproduce such a stylized fact. Here, we investigate, by means of a Kriging meta-model, how robust such “ubiquitousness” feature is with regard to a global exploration of the parameters space. The exercise confirms the high level of generality of the results in a statistically robust global sensitivity analysis framework.     

A proposed configurable approach for recommendation systems via data mining techniques

This study presents a configurable approach for recommendations which determines the suitable recommendation method for each field based on the characteristics of its data, the method includes determining the suitable technique for selecting a representative sample of the provided data. Then selecting the suitable feature weighting measure to provide a correct weight for each feature based on its effect on the recommendations. Finally, selecting the suitable algorithm to provide the required recommendations. The proposed configurable approach could be applied on different domains. The experiments have revealed that the approach is able to provide recommendations with only 0.89 error rate percentage.     

How Capitalism Endogenously Creates Rising Income Inequality and Economic Crisis: The Macro Political Economy Model of Early Industrial Relations

A major economic issue today is the causes and consequences of wage stagnation and rising income inequality. This paper uncovers, describes, and formalizes the macro political economy model developed by pre–New Deal institutional/industrial relations economists to explain these issues. The model is formalized in a three‐part diagram and used to explain the role of inequality and wage stagnation in causing the Great Depression and World Financial Crisis and the appropriate policy responses.