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Recent labor market research has called into question whether social capital effects are causal, or are spuriously due to the influence of social homophily. This essay adopts the demand-side perspective of organizations to examine the causal status of social capital. In contrast with supply-side approaches, we argue that homophily is a key mechanism by which organizations derive social capital. We develop an approach to bolster inferences about the causal status of social capital, and illustrate these ideas using data from a retail bank.

Purpose – Research has shown that employers often disfavor racial minorities − particularly African Americans − even when whites and minorities present comparable resumes when applying for jobs. Extant studies have been hard pressed to distinguish between taste-based discrimination where employers' racial animus is the key motivation for their poor treatment of minorities and variants of statistical discrimination where there is no assumption at all of racial animus on the part of the employer. This chapter proposes a test of these theories by observing whether employers use employee referrals as a “cheap” source of information to help assess applicant quality.Methodology/approach – Unique quantitative data encompassing the entire pool of 987 candidates interviewed by one company in the western United States during a 13-month period are used to test our arguments.Findings – We find that employers in this setting are making use of the cheap information available to them: Consistent with statistical discrimination theory, minority referrals are more likely to receive a job offer than non-referred minority applicants, and are not disfavored relative to referred whites.Originality/value of the chapter – Both statistical and taste-based theories of discrimination propose similar observable outcomes (lower rates of disfavored minority hiring). While different mental processes are being invoked by taste-based and statistical discrimination theories, the theories are extremely difficult to distinguish in terms of observable behaviors. Especially for the purpose of designing legal remedies and labor market policies to ameliorate the disparate treatment of minority groups, differentiating between these theories is a high priority.

The literature on job networks predicts that employees referred through networks would be better matched and mentored and thus would have lower turnover. However, existing research on this question has neglected the ways in which network effects are contingent upon firm organization. Using the personnel records of a large retail bank, we examine the relationship between network recruitment and turnover among new employees. There was no significant difference between network referrals and non-referrals, but referrals eligible for the employee referral program did have lower turnover. These results are explicable in light of the bank’s organization.

Research on employee mobility has proliferated in the past four decades across four research traditions: Economics, sociology, management, and organizational behavior/human resource management. Despite significant overlap in interest and focus, these four streams of research have evolved independent from each other, resulting in a structural divide. We provide a detailed account of the research on employee mobility and the structural divide across disciplines. We document that the payoff from this profusion of research and increasing interest has been disappointing, as reflected in the limited number of cross-disciplinary citations, even among common topics of interest. However, our analysis also provides some encouraging signs in the form of specific journals and individuals who provide a bridge for cross-disciplinary fertilization.

Despite the relevance of firm size in the analysis of corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement, there is still much to know about the specific impact of firm size on CSR formalisation. Moreover, in order to better understand such a relation, the interaction effects of development strategies on which companies may base its growth, namely diversification and internationalisation, will be also taken into account. Specifically, this work contributes to shed light on these issues by combining theories related to external and internal drivers of CSR. Using a sample of Spanish listed firms, the results show that firm size affects positively CSR formalisation, and that this effect is stronger in the case of adopting a diversification strategy, while no evidence was found for the moderating effect of internationalisation strategy.

This study aims to explore how responsible corporate behaviour, specifically self-imposed financial regulatory control, might subsequently be reflected in the financial performance of companies subject to such regulation.

In this study, the authors aim to explore how financial compliance in the form of the Economic Control Regulation (ECR) has impacted on the financial performance of professional football clubs in Spain. To this purpose, the authors adopted a quasi-experimental before and after study design. This type of design assesses the object of study before and after a specific event in order to determine whether this event has had any effects on the object. In this case, the event was the coming into effect of the ECR in the fiscal year of 2012, and the object hypothetically affected was the clubs’ economic performance.

The authors can confirm that in general terms and for the whole set of clubs analysed, the ECR has had a strong and positive effect on financial performance.

In this study, the authors wish to establish a link between the idea of “compliance” and that of “responsible corporate management practice”. It is not just a matter of compliance with the law. The fact of complying with certain laws could, in general terms, or from the point of view of common sense, be qualified as “responsible behaviour”. However, under the contemporary concept of corporate responsibility, compliance with the law is a behaviour that must be taken for granted. Responsibility, therefore, would entail going beyond such expected behaviour to one that exceeds the environment's expectation of the corporate actor.

What extent improvements in financial performance have also boosted social performance. Confirming such a positive effect endorses the argument that ethical improvements in corporate culture have a general effect on business sustainability in its different aspects: economic, social, environmental and in governance.

The authors may foresee that the culture of compliance will spread from the finance departments to other management areas. Its connection with ethical business practice is directly linked to the more complex concept of the “citizen company”. There are suggest interesting bases on which professional football clubs might move from a traditional profit-oriented company model towards a more contemporary one oriented towards relationships of integrity with the sport's environment. This study shows that the ECR has been a starting point for the development of Spanish professional football clubs towards this type of “citizen company”.

It was a single-sector study whose principal value lies in the verification of whether responsible economic management (the main consequence of applying the ECR) had any effects on company profits, financial results and other important indicators. In addition to fostering responsibility, this new management model involves a special innovation, as it is based on self-regulation (i.e. on regulations not imposed by national or supranational states), designed and implemented to ensure the sector's viability.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the relationships between advanced manufacturing technologies (AMTs) categories (stand-alone, intermediated and integrated systems) implementation and design, process and commercial benefits obtained.

A survey is designed with benefits gained from AMT implementation as well as its categories, which is applied to the maquiladora industry. A structural equation model with data from 383 responses is used to measure the relationship between AMT categories and benefits gained using nine hypotheses that are tested statistically significant using partial least squares. Also, using conditional probabilities, a sensitivity analysis reports how low and high levels from AMT implementation influence on the obtained benefits.

Integrated systems are the most important AMT for maquiladoras and have the strongest impact on design, processes and commercial benefits.

Data obtained support the model, but results may be different in another industrial sector and countries with different labor culture and technological level.

Managers in maquiladora industry must focus their attention on integrated manufacturing systems, because high implementation levels guarantee the biggest probability to gain benefits in design, production process and commercial.

The relationship between AMT and their benefits has not been measured in depth, and this paper contributes to understand that problem. In addition, this paper is the first to report a sensitivity analysis that enables managers to acknowledge the probability of obtaining certain benefits.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse student performance and perceptions when a flipped classroom setting is used, in comparison with the traditional model.

The inverted learning model or “flipped classroom” is a pedagogical approach that attempts to reverse the traditional teaching and learning process, making the student the protagonist of their own learning, and is characterised by the theoretical contents being taught “outside the classroom”, allowing students to spend more class time carrying out other types of more practical activities that encourage much more active learning, such as enquiry exercises, problem solving, collaborative projects and so on. The study was conducted on a biology course of the Primary Education Bachelor’s Degree during the 2017/2018 academic year (n = 240).

The results revealed that better learning outcomes were achieved by students when the flipped classroom methodology was proposed. It has also been found that student perceptions of the teaching approach were more positive when the flipped model was followed. The flipped classroom methodology also seems to foster student participation and motivation more effectively than traditional teaching formats, mainly because the active learning activities that are carried out in this new educative approach manage to involve the students in their own learning processes.

Despite the enhanced popularity of flipped classroom research in multiple educational contexts and the growing number of studies published in recent years, there is little empirical evidence regarding the effect of the flipped classroom on learning outcomes and satisfaction in pre-service teachers.