5,962 research outputs found
HRM in Service: The Contingencies Abound
[Excerpt] Despite the rapid growth in the diversity of service consumers—both abroad and domestically—theoretical developments regarding this diversity in the service world have lagged far behind those that have characterized the world of manufacturing. With regard to international services, Knight (1999) conducted a review of the literature and concluded that there is an alarming paucity of research on international services management despite the importance of services in the global economy. A large proportion of the research that has been conducted on international services has focused on marketing issues rather than human resource management (HRM) issues. This means that little is known about the cross-cultural applicability of service HRM theories, which have hitherto been developed and tested almost exclusively within the West (mostly within the U.S. context). Similarly, there has been little research on the HRM implications of the growing diversity of service consumers within the U.S. domestic market. Again, much of the research focuses on the challenges associated with simultaneously marketing services to a multicultural customer base, with little or no work focusing on the implications of these challenges for HRM in service firms. Thus, the purpose of our chapter is to introduce a preliminary discussion of the HRM implications of both increased internationalization and domestic diversity for service firms. We begin by presenting a brief synthesis of the services management literature that has been established to date. Readers will note in the synthesis that a number of contingencies with regard to HRM practices have already been introduced especially via definitions of what constitutes service and the role of customers in service production and delivery. We then discuss the potential cross-cultural applicability of these services management principles abroad, and when doing so, we focus primarily on the aspects of services management theories that are laden with Western cultural principles. Next, we discuss parallel challenges faced by service firms as a result of increased diversity within the domestic marketplace and we conclude with some thoughts about the necessity to more explicitly explore the contingent nature of HRM practices
How well do third-order aperture mass statistics separate E- and B-modes?
With 3rd-order statistics of gravitational shear it will be possible to
extract valuable cosmological information from ongoing and future weak lensing
surveys which is not contained in standard 2nd-order statistics, due to the
non-Gaussianity of the shear field. Aperture mass statistics are an appropriate
choice for 3rd-order statistics due to their simple form and their ability to
separate E- and B-modes of the shear. However, it has been demonstrated that
2nd-order aperture mass statistics suffer from E-/B-mode mixing because it is
impossible to reliably estimate the shapes of close pairs of galaxies. This
finding has triggered developments of several new 2nd-order statistical
measures for cosmic shear. Whether the same developments are needed for
3rd-order shear statistics is largely determined by how severe this E-/B-mixing
is for 3rd-order statistics. We test 3rd-order aperture mass statistics against
E-/B-mode mixing, and find that the level of contamination is well-described by
a function of , with being the
cut-off scale. At angular scales of , the
decrease in the E-mode signal due to E-/B-mode mixing is smaller than 1
percent, and the leakage into B-modes is even less. For typical small-scale
cut-offs this E-/B-mixing is negligible on scales larger than a few arcminutes.
Therefore, 3rd-order aperture mass statistics can safely be used to separate E-
and B-modes and infer cosmological information, for ground-based surveys as
well as forthcoming space-based surveys such as Euclid.Comment: references added, A&A publishe
ILR Impact Brief - Employee Attributions about HR Practices Lead to Customer Satisfaction
[Excerpt] The perceived reasons why management chooses a set of HR practices are linked to employee satisfaction, commitment, and on-the-job behavior. Employees individually make their own attributions about the purposes behind the practices, which are, in turn, associated with employees’ attitudes: a perception that management cares about service (or product) quality and employee well-being is associated with positive attitudes, but a sense that management is intent on cost cutting or employee exploitation is associated with negative attitudes. Furthermore, individual attitudes are shared within work units and in their aggregate are associated with “organizational citizenship behaviors;” i.e., group-level satisfaction and commitment are associated with intra-unit helping behaviors, which are linked to enhanced unit performance and customer satisfaction
Extreme Lagrangian acceleration in confined turbulent flow
A Lagrangian study of two-dimensional turbulence for two different
geometries, a periodic and a confined circular geometry, is presented to
investigate the influence of solid boundaries on the Lagrangian dynamics. It is
found that the Lagrangian acceleration is even more intermittent in the
confined domain than in the periodic domain. The flatness of the Lagrangian
acceleration as a function of the radius shows that the influence of the wall
on the Lagrangian dynamics becomes negligible in the center of the domain and
it also reveals that the wall is responsible for the increased intermittency.
The transition in the Lagrangian statistics between this region, not directly
influenced by the walls, and a critical radius which defines a Lagrangian
boundary layer, is shown to be very sharp with a sudden increase of the
acceleration flatness from about 5 to about 20
Conditional vorticity budget of coherent and incoherent flow contributions in fully developed homogeneous isotropic turbulence
We investigate the conditional vorticity budget of fully developed
three-dimensional homogeneous isotropic turbulence with respect to coherent and
incoherent flow contributions. The Coherent Vorticity Extraction based on
orthogonal wavelets allows to decompose the vorticity field into coherent and
incoherent contributions, of which the latter are noise-like. The impact of the
vortex structures observed in fully developed turbulence on statistical balance
equations is quantified considering the conditional vorticity budget. The
connection between the basic structures present in the flow and their
statistical implications is thereby assessed. The results are compared to those
obtained for large- and small-scale contributions using a Fourier
decomposition, which reveals pronounced differences
The International Convention on the Prevention of Odious Agreements: A Human Rights-Based Mechanism to Avoid Odious Debts
This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.There is a lively discussion as to whether debts incurred by despotic regimes and used to the detriment of the population are legally valid. This article gives a brief introduction to the concept of so-called odious debts and argues that a legal solution is not only desirable, but feasible. Subsequently, international human rights are identified as the missing link between the behaviour of the debtor state and the assessment of individual debts. Consequently, a human rights-based mechanism for the prevention of odious agreements is developed, based on an international convention annexed to this article. The convention provides that a state is classified as odious debts-prone if it is responsible for serious and systematic violations of human rights or international humanitarian law, or if its public sector is governed by severe and systemic corruption. Agreements concluded with an odious debts-prone state are void, unless the agreement complies with principles of responsible contracting as developed in this article. Finally, the scope of application of the convention and possible state parties are specified.Peer Reviewe
- …