The perceived importance of HR duties to Danish line managers

Today, HR scholars widely acknowledge that realising HRM requires the involvement of all managers and that the personal motivation of line managers plays an important role in their successful involvement. Yet, previous research has neglected to study how line managers rate the importance of particular HR duties and how the importance assigned to HR duties varies across managers. Based on a survey of 1,500 Danish managers, we find that ‘motivating others’ is considered the most important HR duty whereas ‘team building’, ‘handling conflicts’ and ‘coaching’ are considered the least important HR duties. Female top managers in the public sector exhibit the greatest interest in HR whereas men at lower managerial levels in the private sector give lowest priority to HR work. We conclude with possible explanations for the observed differences in a Danish context and beyond and provide suggestions for facilitating managerial involvement in HRM. In doing so we are well aware that the Scandinavian model of HRM in general and the Danish implementation in particular may represent a unique frame for the results.     

THE THREAT EFFECT OF ACTIVE LABOR MARKET PROGRAMS: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

This paper is a systematic review of the threat effect of active labor market programs for unemployed individuals. The threat effect is the induced change in the hazard rate of leaving unemployment prior to program participation. Studies included in the review all estimated a threat effect, with the participants in all cases being unemployed individuals in receipt of benefit of some kind during their tenure of unemployment. Eight of these studies have been included in a meta-analysis: The meta-analysis, which has been carried out using a random effects model to account for heterogeneity, indicated a hazard ratio of 1.25 for the pooled estimate. We conclude that active labor market programs constitute a statistically significant threat effect, although it is modest.     

Discourses of transparency in the intellectual capital reporting debate: Moving from generic reporting models to management defined information

In the last decade, transparency has become a necessary mantra for both publicly listed companies and government institutions. Intellectual capital reporting is often related to this goal of enhancing the transparency of business and public institutions. In this paper we emphasize that a movement is seen in the intellectual capital reporting debate, which we argue can be approached as two different discourses of transparency, namely one discourse based on generic reporting versus a second discourse based on management driven information. In other words, one discourse highlights as much information to stakeholders as possible, but seems to be in the process of being substituted by another, which emphasizes reporting what is seen from the perspective of management, namely the “right” information, and only that. The argument for the latter discourse is that it will make intellectual capital reporting more transparent, because of users’ bounded rationality and other constraints such as time. This, however, has the implication that users of intellectual capital reporting may become victims of management's selected “right” information, by [Strathern, M. The tyranny of transparency. British Educational Research Journal 2000;26:310–32] designated as the “tyranny of transparency”. Also, we emphasize the problems of perceiving transparency as a goal and not a means.     

How Firms Should Hedge

Substantial academic research explains why firms should hedge,but little work has addressed how firms should hedge. We assumethat firms can experience costly states of nature and deriveoptimal hedging strategies using vanilla derivatives (e.g.,forwards and options) and custom "exotic" derivative contractsfor a value-maximizing firm facing both hedgable (price) andunhedgable (quantity) risks. Customized exotic derivatives aretypically better than vanilla contracts when correlations betweenprices and quantities are large in magnitude and when quantityrisks are substantially greater than price risks. Finally, wediscuss how our model may be applied in practice.     

Exploring private consumers’ willingness to adopt Smart Grid technology

The goal of radically increasing the proportion of electricity generated from renewable sources puts the current electrical grid under pressure and one of the solutions is to turn the grid into a ‘Smart Grid’. One of the key elements of the Smart Grid is that electricity consumers make some of their consumption available as flexible capacity to balance the grid. Consumers’ flexible capacity is only available to the grid if the consumers adopt Smart Grid technology (SGT) that establishes the link between the electric system and the consumer. This technology is new to private consumers and using it involves behavioural changes. There is a need to get more insight into who are willing to adopt SGT and why. This study draws on innovation adoption theory as a framework for understanding consumer adoption of this new technology. We explore whether consumers who have already adopted other types of new energy technology, such as a geothermal heat pump, are more favourably disposed towards SGT than other consumers. Also, we explore how consumers who have signed up to let their heat pump be used as flexible capacity in a test trial differ from other heat pump owners, if at all. We used semi‐structured interviews with household members as well as a questionnaire to explore differences between three groups: households with (1) a heat pump with SGT (n = 11), (2) a heat pump‐only (n = 7), or (3) an oil‐fired boiler (n = 6). We find that the families in the three groups perceive the technology characteristics differently and those who have trial experience with SGT are most in favour of the technology.     

AN APPLICATION OF SPATIAL ANALYSIS TO BEEF SLAUGHTER PLANT LOCATION AND SIZE,QUEENSLAND

The objective of this study is to define in the cost minimizing sense the optimum size and location for beef slaughter plants in the Eastern Central Queensland region. The plant location model used for this purpose is a modified transhipment formulation. It is applied to both a long run unlimited capacity case and a short run limited capacity case. The analysis indicates that for both cases production-area oriented slaughter minimizes costs. Sensitivity testing of the stability of the solution is outlined.