In this paper, we examine the efficiency of the sort done by the Swiss lower secondary school tracking system, looking at students’ outcomes in dual vocational education and training (VET)—the most common education type at the upper secondary level in the country. We discuss a simple Ricardian model about the process of school tracking based on the absolute advantage (i.e., the ability) of students in abstract learning, as opposed to contextualised learning which is more decisive in dual VET. The mismatch created by the tracking system for certain types of students is key to explain the relative track effect on outcomes in dual VET. Using administrative panel data for the Canton of Geneva, we estimate a series of zero inflated models. All results support the assumption of a miss-allocation of students to lower secondary school tracks. We thus conclude that the efficiency of the sort related to the tracking system could be improved, were students sorted on the basis of their comparative and not absolute advantage in each form of learning.
L’article se focalise sur les pratiques actuelles d’évaluation, en Suisse et en France, dans le contexte des offres publiques d’achat. Les auteurs exposent successivement leur méthodologie, leurs principaux résultats et quelques enjeux pratiques et académiques.
This paper appraises and evaluates more than three decades of empirical research on strategic change. Strategic change research has traditionally built on either the deterministic view or the voluntaristic view – two opposing perspectives with fundamentally
different assumptions about the influence of managers on the fortunes of organizations. In addition, a dialectical view on strategic change, which aims to bridge the two traditional views, has emerged. Despite the richness and value of research within these
three perspectives, the continued accumulation of isolated and idiosyncratic insights adds little to the understanding of strategic change. In this paper, therefore, the authors assess, contrast and integrate research across the three perspectives in order to foster one cumulative body of knowledge about strategic change and to provide guidance for future research. Based on an analysis of 119 studies published in the leading academic journals in the fields of strategy and management, they consolidate existing knowledge and identify shortcomings in the cumulative body of research. On the basis of this assessment concerning prior research foci, study designs and assumptions, the authors propose four pathways for future research across the three perspectives that they believe can help foster full understanding of strategic change: (1) examinations of different types, processes and outcomes of strategic change; (2) expansion of the scope of actors considered in relation to strategic change; (3) exploration of the non-linear nature of strategic change; and (4) investigations of strategic change conundrums.
Research Summary:
We explore the selection of new CEOs with an international background as a key microfoundation of global strategy. Building on executive succession, upper echelons, and international business research, we argue that firms choose CEOs with an international background to match their task demands. We further argue that depending on the CEO’s origin from inside or outside the firm different task demands matter. Specifically, we propose that the relationship between internal (firm-level) task demands and the new CEO’s international background is more pronounced for inside successions, whereas the relationship between external (industry-level) task demands and the new CEO’s international background is more pronounced for outside successions. An analysis of a sample of 363 CEO successions in S&P 500 firms supports our reasoning.
Managerial Summary:
Choosing a CEO with the “right” experience is a crucial concern for many large firms. While firms seem to increasingly often select new CEOs with international backgrounds, by far not all firms do so. In this paper, we explore the factors that might influence this choice. Specifically, we find that the predecessor’s international background, the firm’s level of internationalization, as well as the firm’s industry internationalization have an influence on the selection of a CEO with an international background. While for inside successions the firm’s level of internationalization is particularly important, for outside successions, the level of internationalization of the firm’s industry is particularly important. Our findings inform those who search, select, and appoint new CEOs, including boards of directors and (executive search) consultants.
In ever-changing environments, strategic change manifests as a crucial concern for firms and is thus central to the fields ofmanagement and strategy. Common and foundational to
all strategic change research is time—whether recognized in the extant studies or not. In this article, we critically review the existing body of knowledge through a time lens. We organize this review along (1) conceptions of time in strategic change, (2) time and strategic change activities, and (3) time and strategic change agents. This approach facilitates our assessment of what scholars do and do not know about strategic change, especially its temporal components. Our review has particularly revealed a need to advance scholarly understanding about the processual dynamics of strategic change. We thus extend our assessment by proposing six pathways for advancing future research on strategic change that aim at fostering an understanding of its processual dynamics: (1) temporality, (2) actors, (3) emotionality, (4) tools and practices, (5) complexity, and (6) tensions.
Despite the importance that scholars and practicing managers attribute to the organizational design of the corporate headquarters (CHQ), research on changes in CHQ size is lacking. In an attempt to empirically explore the antecedents and potential consequences
of such changes, I draw on the contingency and organizational-adaptation perspectives to develop a set of hypotheses for the relationships between corporate-level strategic change (CSC) – defined as changes in the firm’s business portfolio –, changes
in the size of the CHQ and firm performance. To test the hypotheses, I analyse data from a comprehensive survey of large public firms in Europe and the US, and data from public sources pertaining to the surveyed firms. While the empirical results lend support to the hypothesized role of CSC, they also reveal differences between related CSC and unrelated CSC. However, I find no support for the expected performance implications. The study contributes to research on the CHQ, corporate-level strategic change, and the relationship between strategy and structure in the contemporary corporation. The findings also inform corporate managers and those involved in advising firms, such as strategy consultants.
Our study investigates how an organization’s contribution to society (macro-level) relates to a person’s work outcomes and individual well-being (micro-level). Focusing on the occupational context and using cross sectional data of 1520 respondents we propose the organization’s societal value added in terms of creating public value to be an important mediator for effects of transformational leadership on work engagement, civic virtue, absenteeism, and happiness. We found general support for this both in method bias uncorrected and corrected analysis, suggesting employees to be influenced by the organization’s public value. However, we found no significant relations to absenteeism. Unexpectedly, transformational leadership revealed low positive relationships to work engagement and negative relationships to civic virtue and happiness. The study contributes to further understand the societal dimension of peoples’ workplace experience.
We introduce a unified modeling and solution framework for various classes of rich vehicle and inventory routing problems as well as other probability-based routing problems with a time-horizon dimension. Demand is assumed to be stochastic and non-stationary, and is forecast using any forecasting model that provides expected demands over the planning horizon, with error terms from any empirical distribution. We discuss possible applications to various problems from the literature and practice: from health care, waste collection, and maritime inventory routing, to routing problems based on event probabilities, such as facility maintenance where the breakdown probability of a facility increases with time. We provide a detailed discussion on the effects of the stochastic dimension on modeling and the solution methodology. We develop a mixed integer non-linear model, provide examples of how it can be reduced and adapted to specific problem classes, and demonstrate that probability-based routing problems over a planning horizon can be seen through the lens of inventory routing. The optimization methodology is heuristic, based on Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search. The case study is based on waste collection and facility maintenance instances derived from real data. We analyze the cost benefits of open tours and the availability of better forecasting methodologies. We demonstrate that relaxing the distributional assumptions on the error terms and calculating probabilities using simulation information has only a minor impact on computation time. Simulating the error terms on the final solution further allows us to verify the low level of occurrence of undesirable events, such as stock-outs, overflows or breakdowns, with a moderate impact on the routing cost compared to alternative realistic policies. What is more, simulating the objective of the final solution shows that it is an excellent representation of the real cost.
