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Education tends to colonize. Established authorities (teachers, curricula, and examinations) instruct newcomers, extending conditional membership. This presents a dilemma for teachers seeking to instill in their students habits of critical, creative, and lateral thinking. In Australia as elsewhere, blueprint educational documents embody lofty aspirational statements of inclusion and investment in people and their potential. Yoked to this is a regime routinely imposing high-stakes basic-skills testing on school students, with increasingly constrictive ways of doing, while privileging competition over collaboration. This chapter explores more informal, organic learning. This self-study narrative inquiry explores my career in terms of a struggle to be my most evolved, enlightened self, as opposed to a small-minded, small-hearted mini-me. To balance this, I examine responsible autonomy (including my own), rather than freedom. This chapter also explores investment in humans, with the reasonable expectation of a return on that investment. It draws and reflects upon events in or impacting my hometown, Sydney, Australia, focusing largely on WorldPride, the Women's World Cup, and a referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament, all of which took place as I compiled this chapter. Accordingly, the narrative focuses primarily on sexuality, gender, and race. I explore the capacity of my surroundings to teach me and my capacity to learn from my surroundings. The findings and discussion comprise diary-type entries of significant events and their implications for (my) excessive entitlement. The final section of this chapter reviews what and how I have learned.

Using data from a top-five global executive placement firm, the authors explore how an organization's financial misconduct may affect pay for former employees not implicated in wrongdoing. Drawing on stigma theory, they hypothesize that although such alumni did not participate in the financial misconduct and they had left the organization years before the misconduct, these alumni experience a compensation penalty. The stigma effect increases in relation to the job function proximity to the misconduct, recency of the misconduct, and an employee's seniority. Collectively, results suggest that the stigma of financial misconduct could reach alumni employees and need not be confined to executives and directors that oversaw the organization during the misconduct.

Multisensory stimulation is integral to experiential consumption. However, a gap persists between recognition of the importance of multisensory stimulation and the research techniques used to study the effects of such stimulation on consumption experiences. This article draws on sensory anthropology to narrow the gap.

Sensory anthropology has the potential to help consumer researchers understand multisensory stimulation and its effect on consumption experiences. To highlight this potential, ethnographic fieldwork is reported for two related experiential settings: yacht racing and adventure racing.

It is shown how consumer researchers can apply concepts and data collection techniques from sensory anthropology to derive powerful insights into consumption experiences. A set of guidelines and examples is derived from the embodied concepts associated with sensory anthropology, namely, kinaesthetic schema, bodily mimesis, the mindful body and local biology. These concepts are used to comprehend how consumers experience sensations phenomenologically, understand them culturally and re-enact them socially.

By acknowledging and engaging the senses, researchers can acquire embodied information that would not be evident from the conventional interview, survey or experimental data. Sensory anthropology adds to what is known from psychological, social and cultural sources to enable organisations to differentiate their offerings by means of the senses and sensory expressions, not only in yacht and adventure racing but potentially in many other experiential settings, such as travel, shopping, entertainment and immersive gaming.

This article offers distinct and original methodological insights for consumer researchers by focusing on concepts and data collection techniques that assist the study of experiential consumption from an embodied and corporeal perspective.

Organizational performance is widely recognized as an important – if not the most important – construct in strategic management research. Researchers also agree that organizational performance is a multidimensional construct. However, the research implications of the construct's multidimensionality are less understood. In this chapter, we use a synthesis of previous attempts to describe the dimensions of performance and our own analysis of performance measurement in the Strategic Management Journal to build a conceptual model of organizational performance and its dimensions. Our model suggests that operational performance and organizational performance are distinct, and that organizational performance can be further dimensionalized into accounting returns, stock market, and growth measures. The model has implications for how future research might advance understanding about performance and how empirical studies should conceptualize and measure performance.

The discipline of management is, among other things, the skill of translating accounting information into behaviour. Where the knowledge and skills of employees are the principal asset of an organisation, current key performance indicators rarely provide appropriate or relevant information and indeed may be misleading to management. Because managing the knowledge and skills of employees is the current organisational challenge (Handy, 1996), it is time that serious consideration is given to the development of measures that meet this challenge. Management accounting provides an attractive concept, namely, the balanced scorecard, to assist management in the assessment of organisational performance. Its usefulness is often questioned because of a lack of relevant measures in the fourth quadrant. This paper considers, in relation to the human element of an organisation, how it may be possible to strengthen the innovation and learning perspective of the balanced scorecard. The aim is to provide information that allows managements to monitor the performance of their human resources and also enables others to assess managements' ability to nurture and to augment the talent and accumulated knowledge of their organisations' human resources. This model may well be considered the beginning of Puxty's (1993) long road in search of a planning, control and performance measurement system that accounts for the human element of an organisation's intellectual assets.

Sudden crises, known as environmental jolts, can cripple unprepared organizations. In recent years, financial jolts have led many organizations, particularly government organizations, to respond by furloughing employees. Furloughs can engender various responses in employees that can lead to negative work outcomes for both the employees and the organization. Previous research shows that the implementation of strategic human resource management (SHRM) practices, such as commitment-based systems, can mitigate the negative effects of environmental jolts. Utilizing the knowledge-based view and affective events theory, we propose a multilevel model where SHRM practices moderate employee affective responses to furloughs, which, in turn, drive subsequent employee behavioral outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors predicting which employees receive employer‐funded commercial pension insurance contributions in Shanghai's zhenbao (town insurance) program, introduced by the Shanghai Government in 2003.

A series of hypotheses are developed to examine whether employees with characteristics that make them more influential constituencies will be more likely to receive voluntary commercial pension insurance contributions. The hypotheses are tested through application of a ReLogit model to data on 103,095 employees enrolled in the town insurance scheme in one district as at the end of 2004.

The study finds that only a small proportion of individuals in the sample receive commercial pension insurance. The most important determinant of whether an employee received commercial pension insurance is his or her level of education.

The study provides support for the societal corporatist perspective that employers who place a premium on human capital and invest significant resources in the skills of their workers will favor social policies that target benefits to a selected group of workers to reward their performance and foster commitment. A limitation of the research is that it is based on data collected soon after the town insurance scheme was introduced. The low level of employee coverage may improve once employers become more familiar with the operation of the scheme.

Employers should consider social insurance as a labor market strategy to retain staff and enhance the human resource base of the firm.

Little attention has been given to the role of employer‐funded social insurance within the ambit of labor market strategies designed to enhance the human resource base of the organisation. This is the first study to use micro level data to examine the determinants of voluntary employer contributions to social insurance.

Many organizations hold the traditional view that due to the potential of higher job dissatisfaction and employee turnover rates, hiring overqualified job candidates is risky. The purpose of this paper is to take an alternative perspective, using Human Capital and Resource-based theories to propose that hiring overqualified job candidates adds to a firm’s human capital depth. This additional human capital depth, in turn, enables firms to improve near term organizational effectiveness, and ultimately, build long-term competitive advantage. However, the ability of the firm to sustain this competitive advantage is dependent upon the retention of the overqualified human capital. The authors propose that job and career development opportunities made available to the overqualified will increase commitment and reduce turnover intentions, resulting in a long-term competitive advantage. Thus, the conceptual framework makes reference to deployment of the overqualified as an under used source of human capital. Finally, the implications of the proposed conceptualization and directions for future research are discussed.

This paper reviews theory and proposes a conceptual framework for reimaging overqualified human resources.

There are powerful benefits to hiring overqualified job candidates, but by not hiring overqualified job candidates, organizations are missing out on a large, easily available, and potentially lower cost source of highly skilled human capital.

The authors propose that job and career development opportunities made available to the overqualified will increase commitment and reduce turnover intentions, resulting in a long-term competitive advantage. Thus, the conceptual framework makes reference to deployment of the overqualified as an under used source of human capital.

This paper uses Human Capital and Resource-Based theory to propose a conceptual framework which makes four key contributions. First, the authors propose that hiring overqualified job candidates increases an organization’s human capital depth. Next, this increased human capital leads to near term improvements in employee performance and organizational effectiveness. In turn, firms using career development exercises such as job crafting, mentoring, and/or informal leadership to retain overqualified human capital are more likely to covert near term organizational effectiveness into long-term competitive advantage. Finally, the authors offer a conceptual framework that bridges the overqualification and strategic human resources management literatures.

We investigate the relationship between job complexity and skill development of adult workers in Europe using the Cedefop European Skills and Jobs Survey. ¹ The results suggest that challenging workplaces in which jobs are designed to include complex tasks that place high demands on workers’ skills also stimulate skill development. Increasing the degree of job complexity has positive and robust effects on the degree of skill development. Skill development is also positively linked to job tenure. The analysis stresses the importance of on-the-job learning and contextual workplace characteristics for adult workers’ skill development.