Of believers,atheists and agnostics: practitioner views on HRM

Using empirical evidence, this article identifies those personnel/HRM practitioners who are convinced of HRM’s existence (‘believers‘), those who are convinced of its non-existence (‘atheists‘) and those who are unsure (‘agnostics‘). It also reveals a significant and positive relationship between membership of the Institute of Personnel and Development and practitioner belief in HRM.     

Persistent Advantage or Disadvantage?: Evidence in Support of the Intergenerational Drag Hypothesis

By utilizing the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) and a measure of occupational prestige (OCCSCORE) as a labor market outcome, the authors examine variations in the degree of labor market discrimination faced by several ethnic and racial groups in the United States between 1880 and 1990. Results demonstrate that the sharpest decline in labor market discrimination against blacks occurred between 1960 and 1980. For black males the extent of labor market discrimination was greater in all census years in IPUMS after 1880 until 1970, evidence contradicting the conventional expectation that market-based discrimination will decline progressively over time by dint of competitive pressure. Finally, after replicating George Borjas' ethnic capital exercise, the authors pool the 1880, 1900, and 1910 data to determine the relative magnitude of a group's gains and losses in occupational prestige due to group advantage or disadvantage in human capital endowments and due to favorable or unfavorable treatment (nepotism or discrimination) of those endowments in the labor market. The authors then examine statistically whether the group human capital advantage or disadvantage and group exposure to nepotism or discrimination at the turn of the century affects labor market outcomes for their descendants today. Results indicate strong effects of the past on present labor market outcomes. Hence, the essence of the study is the statistical demonstration that there are significant and detectable effects on current generations of the labor market experiences of their racial/ethnic ancestors.     

Gentrifier? Who,Me? Interrogating the Gentrifier in the Mirror

Schlichtman and Patch suggest that there is an elephant sitting in the academic corner: while urbanists often use ‘gentrification’ as a pejorative term in formal and informal academic conversation, many urbanists are gentrifiers themselves. Even though urbanists have this firsthand experience with the process, this familiarity makes little impact on scholarly debate. There is, Schlichtman and Patch argue, an artificial distance in accounts of gentrification because researchers have not adequately examined their own relationship to the process. Utilizing a simple diagnostic tool that includes ten common aspects of gentrification, they compose two autoethnographic memoirs to begin this dialogue.     

Understanding information propagation on online social tagging systems: a case study on Flickr

Online social networking services (SNS) have been regarded as one of the most powerful online communication channels to propagate information to other users. It means that the online social networking services are providing users with efficient features (e.g., searching, managing and visualizing new information). It is important for many online collaborative applications to understand how the information can be propagated via such social media. Thus, we want to focus on a social tagging system (e.g., Flickr) where users can easily exchange resources as well as their tags. In this paper, given a certain tag, a social pulse can be established by counting (i) the number of users and (ii) the number of resources over time. More importantly, we assume that information can be propagated by (iii) inducibility from other tags by comparing social pulses. To conduct experimentation, a tag-based searching system (called Tagoole) has been implemented to collect a dataset from Flickr.     

Whistle Blowers: Saints of Secular Culture

Neither the corporate view of whistle blowers as tattle-tales and traitors, nor the more sympathethic understanding of them as tragic heroes battling corrupt or abused systems captures what is at stake in whistle blowing at its most distinctive. The courage, determination and sacrifice of the most ardent whistle blowers suggests that they only begin to be appreciated when they are seen as the saints of secular culture. Although some whistle blowers may be attempting to deflect attention from their own deficiencies and others may be disgruntled employees, the most serious instances involve a level of moral sensitivity that approaches religious proportions that are baffling for a culture that has dispensed with sainthood.     

THE RETURNS TO INVESTMENT IN RESEARCH ON AUSTRALIAN WOOL PRODUCTION*

A production function approach is used to estimate growth in farm productivity in the Australian wool industry from an estimated level of expenditure on wool production R & D. A market equilibrium model of the wool industry is then used to measure the share of total benefits from this productivity growth accruing to Australia and its wool growers. A net return is estimated after allowing for lags in the development and adoption of technology.     

Socially responsible investment fund performance: the impact of screening intensity

Perhaps the most common criticism of socially responsible investment funds is that imposing non‐financial screens restricts investment opportunities, reduces diversification efficiencies and thereby adversely impacts performance. In this study we investigate this proposition and test whether the number of screens employed has a linear or curvilinear relation with return. Moreover, we analyse the link between screening intensity and risk. Screening intensity has no effect on unadjusted (raw) returns or idiosyncratic risk. However, we find a significant reduction in α of 70 basis points per screen using the Carhart performance model. Increased screening results in lower systematic risk – in line with managers choosing lower β stocks to minimize overall risk.     

Race and cesarean delivery in Florida

At a time when the Clinton Administration has set a goal of eliminating racial disparities in health by the year 2010, medical experts are struggling to understand one of the most glaring, and least talked about, disparities of all: death in childbirth. In a study made public this spring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta reported that black women in the U.S. were nearly four times as likely to die during delivery, or shortly thereafter, as white women. The disparity, which has remained about the same for the last four decades, holds true even for women who … are middle class and have health insurance. The findings … have renewed interest among scientists and legislators in a problem that many peoole think no longer exists … Dr. David Satcher, the United States Surgeon General, (says) “the disparity is important. In this country, we have a certain standard of expectation about the risk of women dying in pregnancy, and black women are off the scale right now.” (Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Black Mothers' Mortality Rate Under Scrutiny,” Front Page, 8 Aug. 1999 New York Times)