Search results

Purpose – Our study focuses on the impacts of young adults’ financial situation and agency on success and satisfaction regarding developmental tasks (attainments in educational, work and social domains) in the context of economic upheavals.

Methodology/approach – The study is part of the longitudinal Finnish Educational Transitions Studies (FinEdu), in which high school students (N=614 at baseline) participated once before and three times after graduation (ages 19–25) while progressing to tertiary education and employment.

Findings – Agency (indicated by achievement and social approach strategies) increased, whereas achievement and social avoidance decreased from ages 19 to 25. Financial situation improved from an objective but not subjective perspective. Both high and increasing levels of agency were related to high levels of success and satisfaction regarding developmental tasks at age 25. In particular, social approach was related to educational attainment, sense of belonging, and romantic relationship satisfaction. High initial levels of agency and an improved financial situation predicted low economic pressure at age 25.

Research implications – Both sociopolitical structures and individual agency are important in shaping life course transitions in early adulthood. The apparent discrepancy between the macro-level national economic recession and young adults’ relatively high economic satisfaction could be explained by high agency in a welfare state context.

Social implications – The study shows important links between individuals’ life course and the societal context of Finland, a secure Nordic welfare state in the midst of global economic upheavals.

Originality/value of paper – Our longitudinal study makes a significant contribution to life course research by comprehensively conceptualizing the developmental tasks and considering their individual and social determinants.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and nearly caused a meltdown of the financial system. This article looks at the situation before Lehman went bankrupt and how this event came to trigger a financial panic during the fall of 2008 and early 2009. Two key ideas inform the analysis. The first is that what triggers financial panics are typically hidden losses. The second is that confidence plays a key role in financial panics and that confidence can be conceptualized as a belief that action can be based on proxy signs, rather than on direct information about the situation itself.

The purpose of this paper is to apply the wavelet thresholding technique in order to analyze economic socio-political situations in Tunisia using textual data sets. This technique is used to remove noise from contingency table. A comparative study is done on correspondence analysis and classification results (using k-means algorithm) before and after denoising.

Textual data set is collected from an electronic newspaper that offers actual economic news about Tunisia. Both the hard and the soft-thresholding techniques are applied based on various Daubechies wavelets with different vanishing moments.

The results obtained have proved the effectiveness of wavelet denoising method in textual data analysis. On one hand, this technique allowed reducing the loss of information generated by correspondence analysis, ensured a better quality of representation of the factorial plan, neglected the interest of lemmatization in textual analysis and improved the results of classification by k-means algorithm. On the other hand, the proximities provided by the factorial visualization validate the economic situation of Tunisia during the studied period showing mainly a stable situation before the revolution and a deteriorated one after the revolution.

The results are the first to analyze economic socio-political relations using textual data. The originality of this paper comes also from the joint use of correspondence analysis and wavelet thresholding in textual data analysis.

This paper aims to focus on non-poor households that during the Great Recession experienced economic stress (ES). That is, whose economic comfort was reduced taking into account their previous living standards. The paper seeks to determine how the crisis has affected this extensive (and key) social group.

The analysis has been performed in a dynamic way. The non-poor households ES situation and its changes are studied throughout the period 2008-2016 by taking the four-year intervals provided by the longitudinal Spanish Living Conditions Survey. The authors discuss and select the circumstances to determine whether ES has occurred. To identify which variables determine the probability of suffering ES the authors use a standard logit model.

The main variable is the tenure status of the dwelling: property with a mortgage or rented multiply the risk of ES by up to 3.5 times. ES falls as the household’s work intensity increases. However, an improvement in the employment situation cannot be associated with a reduction in ES probability. The main socio-demographic variables behave as predicted: woman householder, grow in the number of household members and bad health increase the risk of ES, and the higher the level of education of the householder, the lower the risk.

There are very few studies regarding the people above the poverty line. Exploring and analyzing the factors determining the sensitivity of the largest part of the population to the crisis is very relevant, as the pace of the economic recovery depends largely on them.

To achieve a full understanding of the role of marketing from plan to profit requires a knowledge of the basic building blocks. This textbook introduces the key concepts in the art or science of marketing to practising managers. Understanding your customers and consumers, the 4 Ps (Product, Place, Price and Promotion) provides the basic tools for effective marketing. Deploying your resources and informing your managerial decision making is dealt with in Unit VII introducing marketing intelligence, competition, budgeting and organisational issues. The logical conclusion of this effort is achieving sales and the particular techniques involved are explored in the final section.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

The aim of this paper is to study the relation between intellectual capital (IC) and economic development (ED). The analysis presented aims to have both theoretical and practical relevance. The main hypothesis assumed is that IC, although fundamental, is not sufficient to assure the existence of ED. Instead, argues that, for a developing country to become a modern economy some facts have to happen. Those facts are: a process of stable political democratisation; a process of economic stabilization; a process of economic and political integration; a process of investment in development tools, like physical capital and intellectual capital. Furthermore, it is shown that the process of investment in IC implies the development of active social policies, but it is difficult for a developing county to make those social policies by itself. In consequence, in the future, due to the need of economic and political stability, the growing globalisation and the lack of development resources (IC, infrastructures, etc.) in developing countries, some Economic and Political Unions (EPUs) may emerge, or consolidate. Those EPUs are the European Union, the American Union (around Canada and the USA), the Asian Union (centred in Japan), the African Union (based in South Africa), the Oceanic Union (beginning with Australia and New Zealand), and the Arab Union (mainly constituted by Middle East oil producers).

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that, contrary to prevailing opinion in the social sciences, people are not driven by pure selfishness. Behavioral studies demonstrate that human beings have an inherent sense of fairness in the sharing of resources. What this should mean to leaders when distributing wealth will be discussed.

Approach – Anthropological and archaeological work indicates how this sense of fairness evolved and how the expectation of fair play provides a model of government that will work not only for the people but also for the leaders. It also demonstrates what happens when the model is not followed.

Findings – Recent events in the Middle East demonstrate how not following the model results in revolution and several examples are briefly discussed. The current situation in Russia is also discussed as another volatile hotspot. Finally, a worldview is taken arguing that corporate manipulation of governments has resulted in a global situation that does not take into account the underlying human sense of fair play, and, therefore, is setting up a worldwide situation for revolutions.

Value – Evolved human behavior has been overlooked by classical economics and social science theory. However, looking at the recent revolutions and current world economic situation from this behaviorist point of view provides a means of solving the situation.

This study aims to investigate the impact of skills and knowledge of employees, economic situations of the company, current IT infrastructure, payment fashion, cloud availability, and cloud privacy and security on the productivity of the human resources in the COVID-19 era.

Over the past few years, the advent of cloud-assisted technologies has dramatically advanced the Information Technology (IT)-based industries by providing everything as a service. Cloud computing is recognized as a growing technology among companies around the world. One of the most critical cloud applications is deploying systems and organizational resources, especially systems whose deployment costs are high. Manpower is one of the basic and vital resources of the organization, and organizations need an efficient workforce to achieve their goals. But, in the COVID-19 era, human resources' productivity can be reduced due to stress, high labor force, reduced organizational performance and profits, unfavorable organizational conditions, inability to manage and lack of training. Therefore, this study tries to investigate the productivity of human resources in the COVID-19 era. Data were collected from the medium-sized companies through a questionnaire. Distributed questionnaires were conducted on the Likert scale. The model is assessed using the structural equation modeling technique to examine its reliability and validity. The study is a library method and literature review. A case study was conducted through a questionnaire and statistical analysis by SPSS 25 and SMART-PLS.

Based on the findings, the skills and knowledge of employees, the economic situations of the company, payment fashion, cloud availability and the current IT infrastructures of the company have a positive impact on human resource efficiency in the COVID-19 era. But cloud privacy and security have a negative effect on the productivity of human resources. The findings can be the basis for companies and organizations in the COVID-19 era.

This study has some restrictions that need to be considered in evaluating the obtained results. First, due to the prevalence of Coronavirus, access to information from the companies under study was limited. Second, this research may have overlooked other variables that affect human resource productivity in the COVID-19 era. Prospective researchers can examine the impact of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) on the human resource's productivity in the COVID-19 era.

The results of this research are applicable for all companies, their departments and human resources in the COVID-19 era.

In this paper, human resources' productivity in the COVID-19 era is pointed out. The presented new model provides a complete framework for investigating cloud-based enterprise resource planning systems affect the productivity of human resources in the COVID-19 era.