The effects of flexibility in employee skills, employee behaviors, and human resource practices on firm performance

The components of human resource (HR) flexibility and theirpotential relationship to firm performance have not been empirically examined. The authors hypothesize that flexibility of employee skills, employee behaviors, and. HR practices represent critical subdimensions of HR flexibility and are related to superior firm performance. Results based on perceptual measures of HR flexibility and accounting measures of firm performance support this prediction. Whereas skill, behavior, and HR practice flexibility are significantly associated with an index of firm financial performance, the authors find that only skill flexibility, contributes to cost-efficiency

IJV’s political ties and R&D strategy: Asymmetric contingencies of market versus governmental policy turbulence

The purpose of this article is to empirically explore (1) the impact of political ties on international joint ventures’ (IJVs) R&D strategy and (2) the moderating effects of market turbulence and governmental policy turbulence on the relationship between IJV political ties and R&D investment in China. Our sample consists of 1,344 observations taken from 224 IJVs over a period of 6 years (2012–2017), and we applied hierarchical moderated regression analysis (HMRA) with panel data to analyze our three hypotheses. Our findings show that IJVs with political ties tend to invest more in R&D than their counterparts without political ties. Interestingly, this positive relationship grows stronger with high market turbulence, but wanes under high governmental policy turbulence. While the issues regarding the importance of political ties to IJVs competing in China have been discussed, the issues related to why political ties influence IJV’s decisions on R&D investment have been largely overlooked. Hence, this study applies the environmental contingency view to fill this gap and shows how asymmetric contingencies for market turbulence and governmental policy turbulence occur in this context

The Effect of Chief Executive Officer and Board Prior Corporate Social Responsibility Experiences on Their Focal Firm’s Corporate Social Responsibility: The Moderating Effect of Chief Executive Officer Overconfidence

This research aims to examine how the prior experiences of the chief executive officer (CEO) and board influence the focal firm’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. Further, the present study examines how CEO overconfidence influences the diffusion of CSR activities. The authors theorize that overconfident CEOs are influenced more by the corporate strategies they experienced on other boards and less by the corporate strategies experienced by other directors. Through longitudinal analyses of the CSR profiles a sample of S&P 500 companies for the period 2006-2013, the study shows that CEO and board prior CSR experience are positively related to the firm’s current CSR activities. The authors find a significant positive moderating effect of CEO overconfidence on the relationship between CEO prior CSR and the focal firm’s CSR. The theory and results highlight how CEO and board prior CSR exposure may influence the focal firm’s stances toward CSR and that CEO overconfidence may have differential effects on these relationships

Secrecy and absence in the residue of covert drone strikes

AbstractBy focusing on the materials and practices that prosecute drone warfare, critical scholarship has emphasised the internal state rationalisation of this violence, while positioning secrecy and absence as barriers to research. This neglects the public existence of covert U.S. drone strikes through the rumours and debris they leave behind, and the consequences for legitimisation. This article argues that by signifying the possible use of covertness, the public residue of unseen strikes materialises spaces of suspected secrecy. This secrecy frames seemingly arbitrary traces of violence as significant in having not been secreted by the state, and similarly highlights the absence in these spaces of clear markers of particular people and objects, including casualties. Drawing on colonial historiography, the article conceptualises this dynamic as producing implicit significations or intimations, unverifiable ideas from absences, which can undermine rationalisations of drone violence. The article examines the political consequences of these allusions through an historical affiliation with lynching practice. In both cases, traces of unseen violence represent the practice as distanced and confounding, prompting a focus on the struggle to comprehend. Intimations from spaces of residue position strikes as too ephemeral and materially insubstantial to understand. Unlike the operating procedures of drone warfare, then, these traces do not dehumanise targets. Rather, they narrow witnesses' ethical orientation towards these events and casualties, by prompting concern with intangibility rather than the infliction of violence itself. A political response to covert strikes must go beyond 'filling in' absences and address how absence gains meaning in implicit, inconspicuous ways

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Policy and Goals of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

A recent memo out of our regional office says that we shall refer to this subject as seasonal predator management. You know it covers a lot of other terms; we used to call it predator control and so on. But going back to the origins of predator management in this country, we generally think of protecting domestic crops, be it trees or grains or sheep or cattle. If you turn in another direction and look towards Europe, you can see many centuries of involvement in use of the land. There game is a product of the land and is owned by the landowner. They refer to game as their property and handle it as such. In some places it is managed out of existence, and in others it is highest on their agenda for production. Predators of game, if landowners want to raise game, are considered vermin. They are not given the time of day or words of praise. It gets down to standard approach and is not even talked about; landowners decided centuries ago that the vermin would be removed so that they could raise the pheasant or cottontail or whatever they want to raise. I think back to the philosophy of the balance of nature, a popularized conundrum during the youth of most of us here and maybe at Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center, where I worked from 1968 through 1984. In the early years (196O\u27s) most of the people there had grown up with that philosophy and teachings, and it was rather a shock to see what was occurring with duck nesting out there in the real world. It was a significant shock to see the overall effects on nesting. By 1973 there was a consensus at that station that it was something that had to be reckoned with in one way or another if we were going to preserve or enhance waterfowl production. We have not come to the point of European game management, although that may be arriving on the East Coast and other areas east of here

Predator Management To Increase Duck Nest Success

Operational programs of seasonal predator management to increase duck production may be economically feasible. Mammalian predators of nesting ducks and their eggs were reduced in numbers on selected areas of west central Minnesota during the nesting seasons 1982-86. Where predators were removed, nest success averaged 30% while nest success on nearby untreated habitat was 10%

The Organizational Context and Performance Implications of Human Capital Investment Variability

In contrast to the traditional focus of HRD on human capital accumulations we examine the issue of variability in human capital investment. Drawing on Real Options Theory, we theorize that larger firms and firms that are faced with greater organizational risk will create a greater number of options in terms of human capital investment decisions resulting over time in greater variability in labor costs. Based on a large sample of U.S. firms and longitudinal data, we found that labor cost variability was positively related to organizational risk and firm size, but negatively related to capital intensity. These relationships were significant even after controlling for employment variability. Overall, we found that in the long term, firms with greater variability in labor costs achieved better performance. Implications for strategic HRD theory and practice are discussed

The Effects of Flexibility In Employee Skills, Employee Behaviors, and Human Resource Practices On Firm Performance

The components of human resource (HR) flexibility and theirpotential relationship to firm performance have not been empirically examined. The authors hypothesize that flexibility of employee skills, employee behaviors, and. HR practices represent critical subdimensions of HR flexibility and are related to superior firm performance. Results based on perceptual measures of HR flexibility and accounting measures of firm performance support this prediction. Whereas skill, behavior, and HR practice flexibility are significantly associated with an index of firm financial performance, the authors find that only skill flexibility, contributes to cost-efficiency