Conoscenza e formazione si ritrovano sempre più al centro dell’attenzione politica ed economica e costituiscono uno degli assi portanti delle strategie di gestione e di sviluppo aziendale, come pure di intervento degli enti pubblici, tanto su scala internazionale quanto nei contesti nazionali e regionali. Ciò è in stretto legame con il ruolo assunto dal capitale umano e dalle competenze che, in un mercato globalizzato e agguerrito, sono diventati fattori decisivi per la competitività delle aziende e per il benessere degli Stati. Basti pensare agli sforzi dell’Unione Europea tesi ad incentivare iniziative formative in ambito sia pubblico sia privato. Diventa perciò essenziale capire il ruolo della conoscenza quale risorsa strategica e bene d’investimento, valutarne il contributo alla produttività, ma anche catturare l’efficacia e l’effetto di ritorno dei percorsi di formazione di base e continua. Sono queste alcune delle questioni fondamentali dell’economia della formazione che in questo volume vengono affrontate con specifico riferimento alla formazione professionale, una delle chiavi di volta per l’economia dei prossimi anni.
Partendo da un confronto dei sistemi formativi nei principali paesi europei e da un’analisi di studi svolti in questo campo negli ultimi anni, Economia della formazione professionale sviluppa diversi aspetti della formazione professionale, come i suoi costi e i suoi benefici, il suo contributo per il successo dell’azienda, il suo rapporto con i temi occupazionali e con le nuove tecnologie. Grazie alla loro esperienza di studiosi nel campo dell’economia della formazione e di formatori nel settore professionale, gli autori di questo libro mettono bene in evidenza come sia fondamentale per un’azienda o per un paese saper gestire la formazione con criteri economici.
Whereas the theoretical literature on organizational reward systems repeatedly points to the importance of tournament models from an efficiency perspective, very few is known about the application and effectiveness of tournament compensation in organizations, especially when contestant heterogeneity is taken into account. While the distorting effects of contestant heterogeneity on tournament incentives have been theoretically analyzed for the two-contestant-case, tournament incentives in a typical organizational context with more than two and with heterogeneous contestants and with more than one prize, have not been studied so far. In our paper, we analyze these effects theoretically as well as empirically by studying in-centive travel sales contests as a quantitatively important component of compensation, and we also present first empirical evidence on (successful and unsuccessful) organizational attempts to reduce contestant heterogeneity by active handicapping and league-building.
In this survey article, we review results from behavioural and experimental economics that have a potential application in the field of personnel economics. While personnel economics started out with a «clean» economic perspective on human resource management (HRM), it has recently broadened its perspective by increasingly taking into account the results from laboratory experiments. Besides having inspired theory-building, the integration of behavioural economics into personnel economics has gone hand in hand with a strengthening of empirical analyses (using field experiments and survey data) complementing the findings from the laboratory. Concentrating on employee compensation as one particular field of application, we show that for personnel economics there is indeed much to be learnt from the recent developments in behavioural economics. Moreover, integrating behavioural economics into personnel economics bears the chance of eventually reconciling personnel economics and «classic» HRM analysis that has a long tradition of relying on social psychology as a classical point of reference.
The Handbook of Research on Global Corporate Citizenship identifies and fosters key interdisciplinary research on corporate citizenship and provides a framework for further academic debate on corporate responsibility in a global society. This exciting and important Handbook provides a unique forum to discuss the consequences of the social and political mandate of business firms and examines the implications of these consequences for the theory of the firm. Leading academics have been invited from various
disciplines such as management studies, economics, sociology, legal studies and political science to evaluate the concept of corporate citizenship and to analyze the role of private business in global governance and the production of global public goods.
The Handbook is structured in seven sections:
• theoretical perspectives on corporate citizenship
• contemporary issues and challenges of global business regulation
• actors and institutions of global business regulation
• disciplinary perspectives on corporate citizenship
• implications for management theory building
• critical perspectives on corporate citizenship
• conclusions.
This Handbook will be a significant read for academics, postgraduate students and managers interested in the field of corporate citizenship, regulation and corporate responsibility across the social sciences.
The new developments of the globalization process bring with them new responsibilities for the multinational corporation and its leaders. The aim of the paper was to identify those new responsibilities and to look at the changing role of leadership due to those responsibilities. This paper thereby acknowledges the need for a more descriptive and prescriptive social scientific approach by aiming for an understanding of what will be called globally responsible leadership. The article starts with pointing to the changing role of leadership due to new ecological, societal and business obligations leaders in organizations are facing. The following literature review of leadership theories shows that there is no theory that can fully address the new developments. Thus, it is developed a new framework of globally responsible leadership that encompasses those new obligations and that exemplifies the personal preconditions of globally responsible leaders. It is therefore drawn upon theories of responsibility form the philosophy of law and further disciplines. The elements of the framework of globally responsible leadership are explained and suggestions are made of how to empirically capture globally responsible leadership behaviour. At the end, the article points to future research directions.
