The Global Compact Selected Experiences and Reflections

In this paper, the Executive Head of the Global Compact shares some of his own reflections on the evolution of the Global Compact initiative – United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s voluntary corporate citizenship initiative in the area of human rights, labor, the environment and anti-corruption. Two main themes are addressed. The first considers the Global Compact’s institutional context, examining how such an initiative is even possible in the historically hierarchical and traditionally business-unfriendly UN. The second concerns the voluntary nature of the initiative and how it interacts with regulatory approaches. It explains what the Global Compact has to offer as a voluntary initiative, as well as how it can make a unique and complementary contribution to regulation-backed initiatives. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of what the future holds for the Global Compact. Georg Kell Georg Kell began his career at the United Nations in 1987–1990: UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Geneva. 1990: he joined the New York office of UNCTAD; 1993–1997: head of the office. 1997: senior officer at the executive office of the Secretary-General responsible for fostering the cooperation with the private sector. Since 2000, executive head, Global Compact, United Nations, New York.     

Offshore Outsourcing

The offshore outsourcing of IT services has become increasingly important for the global IT industry and is creating new uncertainties for the IT workforce in the USA and Western Europe. It is easy to overestimate the benefits of offshore outsourcing, however, if only wage cost differentials are taken into account and the many hidden costs are ignored. The following article discusses the advantages and risks involved in the different phases of offshore projects and presents some conclusions with regard to prospects.

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*Senior Researcher, German Institute for Economic Research, Berlin, Germany.

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**Research Assistant, German Institute for Economic Research, Berlin, Germany.     

Mapping sexual orientation research in management: A review and research agenda

Attitudes, norms, and laws regarding sexual orientation are undergoing a worldwide revolution. Managers and HR professionals play a key role in responding to these changes, and managing issues related to sexual orientation diversity in organizations. As such, the amount of management scholarship on sexual orientation has been rapidly growing to help inform practice. However, at present, the literature is fragmented across management specialty areas. This makes it difficult to have an overview of what has been learned to date, and detect research opportunities. Thus, this article aims to provide the first integrative review of sexual orientation research across the management field over 23 years. We use bibliometric techniques to (a) systematically identify and map 111 topics in this literature (map downloads from: https://bit.ly/SOTopicMap ), (b) identify topic trends and topic citation rates, and (c) derive an inductive taxonomy of major topic clusters. We then identify key theories and relationships in the literature, review key findings for scholars and practitioners, and identify future research directions. Among these, we highlight the need to incorporate sexual orientation as a standard demographic question in management research, and highlight best practices for doing so from other scientific fields.     

Organizing for Radical Innovation: Exploring Novel Insights

While radical innovation brings extensive economic rewards to firms, it is an activity fraught with risk. Prior research has shown that such risks mainly stem from organizational arrangements (at the level of individuals, teams, firms, and inter firm collaborations), which are inadequate or inefficient to support radical innovation. The papers in this special issue on “Organizing for Radical Innovation: Exploring Novel Insights” take stock of past work and provide novel insights about how to organize for radical innovation. The overarching idea linking them is that radical innovation hinges on the creation of fundamentally new knowledge and the continuous stimulation of creativity. Thus, organizational arrangements that support such processes play a crucial role in explaining and predicting the successful commercialization of breakthrough ideas, radically new technologies, and solutions. In particular, the field of science, which in essence aims for the systematic production of new knowledge, can be a valid source of inspiration for how individuals, teams, firms, and interfirm collaborations should organize for radical innovation. Moving from these premises, in this introductory paper, we offer an overview of the topic of organizing for radical innovation and highlight possible linkages with the organizing principles. Then, we summarize the main insights from the papers in this special issue and use their core ideas to sketch a novel research agenda for scholars working at the intersection of organization theory, economics of science, and management of innovation.     

Connecting capabilities in highly unequal developing countries: The case of the Square Kilometre Array telescope in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Innovation and skills development require interactive capabilities to function effectively. Interactive capabilities mediate between skills supply and skills demand actors in an innovation system, and in the knowledge economy more broadly. This article investigates such interactive capabilities, and the manner in which they facilitate labour market alignment. Within a case-study focus on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope in South Africa, we investigate how organisational capabilities, structures, and mechanisms facilitate or constrain interaction between the SKA and its network partners, including universities, firms, intermediaries, and a technical college. This illustrates how pockets of excellence within an unequal South African skills and innovation landscape were effectively connected in order to build a critical mass of skills and technologies that were highly competitive on the international stage. This shows how, in highly unequal developing countries, interactive capabilities form a lever for access to the global science and technology frontier.     

HAZOP-proof ammonia plant: A new way of defining a safe and reliable design

This new technique, which meets interacting design criteria of a 1,800-MTPD ammonia project, offers special safety features and withstands a detailed HAZOP study.