Management Dynamics in the Knowledge Economy (E-Journal)
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Managing the Work and Family Roles. Does Flexibility Reduce the Negative Interference? An Exploratory Study
Get PDFBalancing work and family demands has become a great challenge for employees. By providing flexible benefits, organizations actively engage in endeavours aimed at reducing the negative interference between the two life spheres. Even if some empirical studies have examined the effects of family supportive initiatives, focusing on flexibility, however, the findings tend to lack consistency. If flexible benefits are traditionally associated with reduced levels of work-family conflict, in some studies no significant results have been reported. Another line of research suggests that flexibility can actually increase the negative work-family interface. From this perspective, the current study examines the relationship between the flexibility benefits used and work-family conflict, focusing especially on the role flextime and telecommuting. Using flexible benefits is negatively associated with time and strain-based conflict, the effects of flextime and telecommuting varying accordingly to the type of conflict examined. Limitations of the current study andfuture research directions are examined
The Face Management Challenges of Sport Celebrity
Get PDFWhile gaining centrality within the sport field, media accelerated its commodification process and facilitated sport actors becoming competitive on the celebrity market. The aim of this paper is to discuss the reconfiguration that the celebrity logic brought in terms of the mere condition of the sport actor and the face management challenges and remedial strategies that he has to cope with. I will thus focus on two main dimensions that I find to be constitutive for the celebrity status: one related to the augmented media exposure that sport stars are subject to and to the corollary symbolic reconfiguration of the boundaries between his public and his private life, and the second one related to the vulnerability that comes along with the new visibility of the complex repertoire of identities and social roles performed by the sport actors. Within this last dimension of the sport-related celebrity cycle of promotion, I will lay stress not only on the face threatening aspects for the sport stars, but also on the vulnerability transfer within the affinal branding network and the challenges it could bring for the brands that chose to associate their image with a sport celebrity. Thus, I argue that the kaleidoscopic public figures of sport celebrities requires high impression management involvement on their part, as well as more caution on the marketeers part
Stories, Heroes and Commercials. Spreading the Message across with a New Type of Responsibility
Get PDFStories have always been a form of communication, the first form of narrative we have encountered in early childhood. And although we have grown up they continue to fascinate us. They maintain and recreate bonds with old traditions, legends, archetypes, myths and symbols. In analyzing stories, Joseph Campbell (2008) proposed the monomyth or the Hero's Journey, a basic pattern, which comprises fundamental stages and structures identifiable in all narratives from different cultures and ages. Although the pattern was further refined and enriched according to the specifics of the narrative (myth, fairy tale, dream, movie etc.) the common structural elements of the Hero's Journey from the ordinary world to a challenging and unfamiliar world include: the departure, the initiation and the return. Picking up on Campbell’s model, Sachs (2012) proposes a circular representation of the hero and his/her journey. In this model, a new character, the mentor, plays a pivotal role in the shaping of the hero and his/her transformation. It is the mentor that supports the hero in her/his taking the call to adventure as well as in providing the needed support for crossing the thresholds to the supernatural world and back. Based on what Sachs (2012) suggests that brands could use storytelling as a means to engage with consumers. In doing so he argues that brands should reflect and adopt the role of mentors in their consumers’ journeys, guiding them through the challenges on their own world and contributing to their personal fulfillment. This paper aims to evaluate four stories, all focused on women and empowerment and as a result our discussion focuses mainly on the position of the brand within the story and its role. This, we believe, may contribute to a new trend focused on the adoption and applications of empowerment storytelling
Knowledge-Based Economy in Argentina, Costa Rica and Mexico: A Comparative Analysis from the Bio-Economy Perspective
Get PDFThe objective of this article is to determine the necessary institutional characteristics of technology and human capital in Argentina, Costa Rica and Mexico in order to evolve towards a knowledge-based economy, addressing the importance of institutions for their development. In particular, the knowledge-based economy is analyzed from the perspective of bioeconomics. Based on the Knowledge Economy Index (KEI) which considers 148 indicators, in the following categories: a) economic performance and institutional regime; b) education and human resources, c) innovation, and d) information and communication technologies, we selected 13 indicators. We aim to identify the strengths and opportunities for these countries in order to meet the challenges that arise from the paradoxes of technological progress and globalization. In this sense, bioeconomy is approached as part of the economy. This analysis shows, among other things, that Argentina has greater potential to compete in an economy sustained in the creation and dissemination of knowledge, while Costa Rica has an institutional and regulatory environment that is more conducive to the development of business activities, and Mexico faces significant challenges regarding its institutional structure, economic performance and human resources
Four Seasons in One Day: The Different Shades of Organisational Culture in Higher Education
Get PDFUsing a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, this study seeks to explore the diversity of culture amongst the staff of a business school in Hungary and then examine how this diversity may impact upon the organisation’s orientations towards three aspects of market orientation: interfunctional cooperation; competition and the student orientation. The diversity of culture is found through the identification of five subcultures. These subcultures exhibit signs of both heterogeneity and homogeneity as two pairs of subcultures are divided not by differences in values themselves but by the expressed strength of values. The empirical findings indicate that each subculture varies in perception of the dominant cultures of the organisation and its particular market orientation in relation to culture type. Furthermore, some subcultures perceive themselves as enhancing, when this may not be the case and others perceive themselves as counter cultures. The qualitative study confirms that subcultures have both homogenous and heterogeneous aspects in relation to other subcultures as well as the perceived dominant culture. This greater complexity gives an extension to the existing perspectives taken on organisation culture, although this would need to be confirmed with generalizable research
The Role of European Union Funds in Economic Development
Get PDFThe European Union project initially started as a peaceful solution for war reconstruction in Europe. European countries decided to cooperate rather than compete in an aggressive way. At the beginning, this project supposed (involved) market liberalization, trade barriers removals, market access improvement (initially for coal, steel, energy and, later, for all goods, services, workforce and capital). Unfortunately, in the last decades, all these Single Market facilities have been backed by redistributive schemes, protectionist mechanisms, social engineering, subsidies and facilities packed in so-called ”EU policies”. New ”European” institutions have been created, more and more funds have been involved to financially support this very complex redistributive intervention. The political dimension of the European Union project enhanced the economic dimension and constantly suffocated private markets and the economy. The “incomes” of the European Union that fuel its financial support are coming from taxes and/or inflation (better administered after the introduction of a Single Currency – the Euro). This paper will discuss the relevance of European Funds for economic development, especially for new members in this project
The Use of Gamification at Different Levels of E-Recruitment
Get PDFE-recruitment is a field of human resources where ICT tools are frequently used. We popularly assume that the scope with which they are used differs between countries, and that technical structure is the main reason for these differences. However, we lack the tools to explain why e-recruitment is considered more common in the US than in Poland, for instance, despite similar access to the Internet among employees and employers in both countries. The article presents a typology of four levels of e-recruitment methods, as a tool for explaining the differences in the maturity of using e-recruitment methods in these two countries. Additionally, for each of the four groups of e-recruitment methods, strong and weak points are shown, and the keys to their successful use are described. It has been also shown that a positive image of a company’s brand is a necessary condition for higher levels of e-recruitment to be successful. A special analysis is conducted of the use of gamification and games for e-recruitment purposes, and examples are given of their use on each of the four e-recruitment levels
The Impact of Financial Diplomacy and the Effects of Financial Crisis on Norwegian Firms' Capital
Get PDFThis research focuses on investigating changes in the financial diplomacy of the Norwegian firms’ leverages due to the decrease in banks’ lending as a consequence of the financial crisis shock wave. The research question is whether the leverage ratio measured as debt-to-equity significantly declined as a consequence of the credit crunch. Its purpose is to analyze the relationship between firms, financial diplomacy and banks and find out its implications on the capital structure, answering to the question whether firms whose bank received a large shock after Lehman Brothers’ default changed their capital structure or they found substitutes for bank lending. This paper does not study whether the changes in financial leverage led to a decreased performance of the companies, the research focuses on the relationship between Norwegian financial diplomacy and firms, emphasizing how performance of the banks influences the way in which a company finances its assets and which substitutes does it have when there is a credit crunch
Capitalistic Firms as Cognitive Intelligent and Explorative Agents. The Beer’s VSM and Mella’s Most Views
Get PDFIn this paper we propose a general model to understand (not merely describe) the operating logic of Business Value-Creating Organizations and, in particular of the capitalistic firm - that is, the business for-profit organization. When viewed as autopoietic and teleological organizations, firms can be interpreted both as viable systems (following Beer’s Viable System Model, or VSM) and as operating systems for efficient transformation (following Mella’s MOEST, or Model of the Organization as an Efficient System of Transformation). Beer believes that organizations must be viewed as viable systems, which, through their structure, which is capable of learning and cognition, can achieve an enduring structural coupling with the environment, continuing in this way to exist for a long time through continually adapting to the environment. Mella asserts that organizations must be conceived of as transformation systems that carry out five parallel transformations: (1) a productive transformation of factors into production; this is a transformation of utility, governed by productivity and by quality; (2) an economic transformation of costs and revenues into operating income; this is a transformation of value, governed by prices and therefore by the market; (3) a financial transformation of risks, which transforms capital into returns and guarantees the maintenance of its financial integrity; (4) an entrepreneurial transformation of information into strategies, which leads to a continual readjustment of the firm's strategic position; (5) a managerial (organizational) transformation of strategies into actions of management control. The MOEST proposes a system of performance indices and measures and highlights the mutual relationships among these indexes. Based on VSM and MOEST, we will try to demonstrate that, just as individuals in a Social System are responsible for their own actions and behavior with respect to the other individuals in the system, Organizations, as vital entities that make up the Social System, must also necessarily be held accountable for the economic and non-economic consequences of their actions. The complex “thinking-action” interaction leads the organization to behave as a cognitive entity, as a vital unitary system, that must be held “socially responsible” for its own actions, as these are produced, in turn, by its own decisions. This results in the necessity and inevitability of CSR.Specifically, the MOEST shows that the action of every BVCO assumes a Corporate Governance that specifies stakeholder objectives and environmental constraints, in this way defining the various levels of CSR. The CSR thus represents a fundamental variable in the strategy of BVCOs, as corporate ethics and reputation is based on this. For this reason we have enlarged the original structure of the Kaplan & Norton’s Balanced Scorecard (BSC) by including in the model of four scorecards a fifth scorecard that measures the firm’s capacity to create well-being for the collectivity and demonstrate the firm’s social utility by indicating its capacity to achieve social and environmental objectives
Active Ageing and Shadow Economy in Romania. An Empirical Causality Analysis
Get PDFThe paper aims to analyze the unidirectional relationship from active ageing phenomena to the size of the Romanian shadow economy in order to see if the unofficial sector represents a social buffer for older workers who have lower labor market opportunities. In order to do that, we applied two important causality analyses, Granger and Toda-Yamamoto, based on quarterly data over the period 2000-2010. The size of the Romanian shadow economy was previously estimated using a revised version of the currency demand approach based on autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach. For active ageing, the employment rate for older workers was used as proxy. The cointegration empirical results highlight the existence of a positive long-run relationship between employment rate of elderly and unofficial sector. The empirical causality results conclude that there is a unidirectional Granger causality that runs from employment rate of older workers to shadow economy both on long-run and short-run. The empirical results of Toda-Yamamoto revealed the absence of a short-run causal relationship from employment rate for older workers to the size of shadow economy. One possible explanation for the existence of a positive relationship that runs from employment rate of elderly to unofficial sector can be the low capacity of the economy to generate proper jobs, so this age group of older workers does not have qualifications that meet the needs of formal economy, and therefore shadow economy becomes an alternative to formal work and it may provide a buffer for some workers who have few alternative labor market opportunities. Another alternative could be the fact that this age group of elderly remains occupied in the formal lab our market, but with low earnings and they work in informal activities in order to supplement their income