High Tech and High Touch: Headhunting, Technology, and Economic Transformation

[Excerpt] In High Tech and High Touch, James E. Coverdill and William Finlay invite readers into the dynamic world of headhunters, personnel professionals who acquire talent for businesses and other organizations on a contingent-fee basis. In a high-tech world where social media platforms have simplified direct contact between employers and job seekers, Coverdill and Finlay acknowledge, it is relatively easy to find large numbers of apparently qualified candidates. However, the authors demonstrate that headhunters serve a valuable purpose in bringing high-touch search into the labor market: they help parties on both sides of the transaction to define their needs and articulate what they have to offer. As well as providing valuable information for sociologists and economists, High Tech and High Touch demonstrates how headhunters approach practical issues such as identifying and attracting candidates; how they solicit, secure, and evaluate search assignments from client companies; and how they strive to broker interactions between candidates and clients to maximize the likelihood that the right people land in the right jobs

INDUSTRIAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE CRISIS: An Empirical Analysis of Industrial Policies in France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. CES Open Forum Series 2018-2019, 2019

This paper gauges the forces and structures that shape economic transformation through an analysis of industrial polices in four European economies since the 2008 crisis: France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. We argue that differences across recent European industrial policies respond to variations in national historical and institutional legacies; the characteristics of productive structures and the capabilities of the state. Pathdependency shapes views regarding the acceptable role of the state, although institutional legacies need to be balanced against historical institutional consistency and the intensity of the crisis. The characteristics of industry in terms of size, specialization, and position in the global division of labor affect preferences for framework versus sector-specific policies and the ambitiousness of goals. Finally, the state’s coordination capacity is essential to the design and efficient implementation of interrelated actions across multiple areas whereas financial capacity establishes commitment, signals priorities, and determines the feasibility of forward-looking projects

Toward a Strategic Perspective of Human Resource Management

[Excerpt] The current decade has brought yet another transformation in the practice and study of human resource management (HRM). The field, for better or for worse, has discovered, and indeed begun to embrace, a strategic perspective. The intellectual energy currently being invested in discussions of the nature, extent, and desirability of this development is a clear indication that something of significance is afoot. Understand it or not, believe in it or not, like it or not, strategy is well on its way to becoming an important paradigm behind much of what HR professionals do and think

U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform

The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform was created by Congress to assess U.S. immigration policy and make recommendations regarding its implementation and effects. Mandated in the Immigration Act of 1990 to submit an interim report in 1994 and a final report in 1997, the Commission has undertaken public hearings, fact-finding missions, and expert consultations to identify the major immigration-related issues facing the United States today.LBJ School of Public Affair

Corporate Governance, Innovative Enterprise, and Economic Development

corporate governance, innovative enterprise, economic development

INTERNAL DEMARKETING: CONSTRUCT, RESEARCH PROPOSITIONS AND MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS

To a large degree, organizations strive for marketing and selling themselves as good employers. However, by a wide range of actions, practices, mistakes, and premises they can most notably demotivate rather than motivate their workforces. On the face of it, this paper proposes a conceptual framework where (1) internal demarketing (ID) is regarded as a sort of corporate illness that is (2) closely associated with high and middle managers’ actions, decisions, and behaviors that (3) are capable of triggering negative perceptions at work settings that (4) can potentially lead to the decrease of productivity and/or poor organizational performance. Thus, some constructs are posited as determinants of ID manifestation such as psychological contract violation, people devaluing, quality of work life unconcern, poor leadership, blurred vision, the spread of distrust, and lack of corporate communication. Also, the potential consequences of ID are addressed, namely the lack of commitment, employee dissatisfaction, and employee silence.distrust, internal customers, internal marketing, organizations, vision.

Regional update

Federal Reserve District, 11th

Execution: the Critical “What’s Next?” in Strategic Human Resource Management

The Human Resource Planning Society’s 1999 State of the Art/Practice (SOTA/P) study was conducted by a virtual team of researchers who interviewed and surveyed 232 human resource and line executives, consultants, and academics worldwide. Looking three to five years ahead, the study probed four basic topics: (1) major emerging trends in external environments, (2) essential organizational capabilities, (3) critical people issues, and (4) the evolving role of the human resource function. This article briefly reports some of the study’s major findings, along with an implied action agenda – the “gotta do’s for the leading edge. Cutting through the complexity, the general tone is one of urgency emanating from the intersection of several underlying themes: the increasing fierceness of competition, the rapid and unrelenting pace of change, the imperatives of marketplace and thus organizational agility, and the corresponding need to buck prevailing trends by attracting and, especially, retaining and capturing the commitment of world-class talent. While it all adds up to a golden opportunity for human resource functions, there is a clear need to get to get on with it – to get better, faster, and smarter – or run the risk of being left in the proverbial dust. Execute or be executed

Access to Medicine in an Era of Fractal Inequality

Those in the richest countries have far more income and wealth than those in poor countries. Moreover, the most fortunate in the richest countries – particularly those in the top centile of the income distribution – are far richer than those around them. Most dramatically, even within that top centile, the richest of the rich have far more resources than even their elite peers. Like fractals, the patterns of distribution repeat at various levels. This pattern of fractal inequality ensures that spending that seems trivial to those at the top of an income distribution can overwhelm the purchasing power of those in the middle, which in turn can dwarf the purchasing power of those at the bottom. The reallocative effects of higher spending on health care by the wealthiest can cascade down the distributive ladder. This paper describes some of these effects in the U.S. health care sector, modeling the rise of concierge medicine, single specialty hospitals, and cosmetic surgery as epiphenomenal of the expansion of the purchasing power of wealthier Americans between 1975 and 2005. Each of these developments is part of a larger trend toward allocating medical resources in accordance with ability to pay as opposed to medical need. This reallocation of medical resources has in turn provoked several stopgap measures to promote access to care for the underserved in the U.S., ranging from medical tourism to physician and nurse immigration. These measures may, in turn, divert medical attention away from the global poor. Zero-sum contests for influence and power remain prevalent within our social world, and cause particular concern in the health care sector. A relatively fixed supply of doctors can mean that any group that uses its buying power to purchase disproportionately time-consuming (and often unnecessary) medical attention threatens to divert care from those with less purchasing power. Fractal inequality of income and wealth forces us to reconsider the relationship between markets and health care. If high levels of inequality persist, policymakers will need to reinforce the redistributive aspects of health care law

Toward a Strategic Theory of Workplace Conflict Management

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio