Reputation and talent mobility in the Asia Pacific

Author's version available on SSRN. Final published version at doi:10.1111/1744-7941.12047This paper argues that different forms of reputation are important for the attraction and retention of talent. Drawing upon the skilled migration literature as well as examples from national governments, supranational organisations and the mass media, we provide a typology that highlights the intersections between reputation and talent mobility. We provide three important contributions. First, we illustrate that reputation plays a central role in the global competition for talent. Second, we highlight that the reputations of countries affect the attraction and retention of top workers. Third, we show that global talent is not only influenced by country reputation but also produces reputations which manifest at the individual level through the inflow and outflow of talent. These contributions shed new theoretical and practical insights on the importance and impact of reputation for talent mobility

Talent attraction, a competitive variable

Facilitating the arrival of talent as well as international promotion of BCN and Catalonia as a place attracting international entrepreneur

Metropolis on the margins: talent attraction and retention to the St. John’s city-region

The objective of this research is to examine the factors that influence the attraction and retention of creative and highly educated workers in a small-sized Canadian city. The study examines two hypotheses: that the social dynamics of city-regions constitute the foundations of economic success in the global economy; and, that talented, highly educated individuals will be attracted to those city-regions that offer a richness of employment opportunity, a high quality of life, a critical mass of cultural activity and social diversity. The hypotheses are explored through in-depth interviews with creative and highly educated workers, employers and intermediary organizations. The evidence from the interviews suggests mixed support for the hypotheses. In view of these findings, we contend that the specificities of place must be more carefully theorized in the creative class literature and be more carefully considered by policy-makers designing policies directed towards attracting and retaining talented and highly educated workers

Talent nests

Talent nests:The supply of higher education and frontier research activities as instruments of attraction and cultivation of a certain type of talen

Is It Worth It To Win The Talent War? Evaluating the Utility of Performance-Based Pay

While the business press suggests that “winning the talent war,” the attraction and retention of key talent, is increasingly pivotal to organization success, executives often report that their organizations do not fare well on this dimension. We demonstrate how, through integrating turnover and compensation research, the Boudreau and Berger (1985) staffing utility framework can be used by industrial/organizational (I/O) psychologists and other human resource (HR) professionals to address this issue. Employing a step-by-step process that combines organization-specific information about pay and performance with research on the pay-turnover linkage, we estimate the effects of incentive pay on employee separation patterns at various performance levels. We then use the utility framework to evaluate the financial consequences of incentive pay as an employee retention vehicle. The demonstration illustrates the limitations of standard accounting and behavioral cost-based approaches and the importance of considering both the costs and benefits associated with pay-for-performance plans. Our results suggest that traditional accounting or behavioral cost-based approaches, used alone, would have supported rejecting a potentially lucrative pay-for-performance investment. Additionally, our approach should enable HR professionals to use research findings and their own data to estimate the retention patterns and subsequent financial consequences of their existing, and potential, company-specific performance-based pay policies

Attracting and Retaining Women in the Transportation Industry

This study synthesized previously conducted research and identified additional research needed to attract, promote, and retain women in the transportation industry. This study will detail major findings and subsequent recommendations, based on the annotated bibliography, of the current atmosphere and the most successful ways to attract and retain young women in the transportation industry in the future. Oftentimes, it is perception that drives women away from the transportation industry, as communal goals are not emphasized in transportation. Men are attracted to agentic goals, whereas women tend to be more attracted to communal goals (Diekman et al., 2011). While this misalignment of goals has been found to be one reason that women tend to avoid the transportation industry, there are ways to highlight the goal congruity processes that contribute to transportation engineering, planning, operations, maintenance, and decisions—thus attracting the most talented individuals, regardless of gender. Other literature has pointed to the lack of female role models and mentors as one reason that it is difficult to attract women to transportation (Dennehy & Dasgupta, 2017). It is encouraging to know that attention is being placed on the attraction and retention of women in all fields, as it will increase the probability that the best individual is attracted to the career that best fits their abilities, regardless of gender

The Allure of Celebrities: Unpacking Their Polysemic Consumer Appeal

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.To explain their deep resonance with consumers this paper unpacks the individual constituents of a celebrity’s polysemic appeal. While celebrities are traditionally theorised as unidimensional ‘semiotic receptacles of cultural meaning’, we conceptualise them here instead as human beings/performers with a multi-constitutional, polysemic consumer appeal. Supporting evidence is drawn from autoethnographic data collected over a total period of 25 months and structured through a hermeneutic analysis. In ‘rehumanising’ the celebrity, the study finds that each celebrity offers the individual consumer a unique and very personal parasocial appeal as a) the performer, b) the ‘private’ person behind the public performer, c) the tangible manifestation of either through products, and d) the social link to other consumers. The stronger these constituents, individually or symbiotically, appeal to the consumer’s personal desires the more s/he feels emotionally attached to this particular celebrity. Although using autoethnography means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the depth of insight this approach garners sufficiently unpacks the polysemic appeal of celebrities to consumers. The findings encourage talent agents, publicists and marketing managers to reconsider underlying assumptions in their talent management and/or celebrity endorsement practices. While prior research on celebrity appeal has tended to enshrine celebrities in a “dehumanised” structuralist semiosis, which erases the very idea of individualised consumer meanings, this paper reveals the multi-constitutional polysemy of any particular celebrity’s personal appeal as a performer and human being to any particular consumer

Immigration, the University, and the Tolerant Second-Tier City

BackgroundThe ongoing geographical shift in immigrant settlement patterns and the related settlement experiences of immigrants outside of the largest national cities continues to be of interest to policy makers, practitioners, and researchers alike. This paper explores recent immigration to Kitchener- Waterloo (K-W), a second-tier city (STC) in Ontario, through the conceptual lens of the creative community and the role of the university. PurposeQualitative research on immigrant settlement in Kitchener-Waterloo (K-W), Ontario has revealed the important role played by the region’s universities in attracting immigrants, but also in creating the feeling of a safe and welcoming space. This paper explores these findings in light of recent scholarship on the links between social diversity, the creative city, and economic development, and applies it specifically to the context of immigration to STCs. MethodsBetween 2004 and 2006 semi-structured interviews were conducted with visible-minority and European non-English-mother-tongue immigrants. Questions were asked of participants concerning their reasons for settling in the area, their experiences with regard to service delivery and other municipal functions, and their general perspectives on the nature of the community. In all, 21 immigrant couples were interviewed, with the majority being of South Asian origin (N =42). Two focus groups were held with European and non-European women (13 respondents). In addition, seven service providers and municipal and regional government officials were interviewed, In total, 62 respondents were included in 30 interviews/focus group sessions. Key Findings and DiscussionThe paper argues that greater qualitative assessment of the specific nature of STC communities, their community qualities, and the resources present can complement more abstract quantitative indices. Such attributes can, in fact, be used to highlight the specific roles played by key actors in the community, in this case universities. In the case of Kitchener-Waterloo, its universities attract immigrants to the region, and assist in their subsequent integration by creating spaces that are perceived as being safe and free from discrimination. The findings hint at some interesting strategies that are being used by skilled international workers, such as applying simultaneously for student and permanent immigration visas. This strategy should be seen as a method being employed by some immigrants in order to overcome international credential devaluation. RecommendationsPolicy implications are offered in relation to how universities, and, by extension, international students, factor into how Canada’s immigration policy is evolving in response to the demand for skilled immigrants. The recommendations are: Expand the reach of universities and colleges in second tier cities; Develop further means to integrate international students into the immigrant regionalization model; and Critically examine the use of international students as a talent pool while simultaneously advancing a neoliberal education funding regime that under invests in higher education