Almost all social interations between people, but also within and between social groups rely on trust. Thus trust is one of the most relevant social phenomena, influencing our thinking, our feelings, our decisions and the way we act. The decision to trust typically requires the willingness of one party to rely on the actions of another party. Examples of trust relationships within organizations start at the individual level, e.g. people working together in a team, and develop into intra-organizational constellations, like teams sharing ideas or differnet departments working together on joint projects. But also the organizations itself is judged according to its trustworthiness by its internal and external stakeholders. Therefore, managing trust relationships is of key importance to organizational live. Challenges of managing these trust relationships are manifold and become the worst if negative experiences lead to a breakdown of trust. Organizations are therefore dependent on guidance on how to build, maintain, and rebuild trust across all organzational levels. The present book benchmarks to what extent a neuroeconomic view of trust can advance existing theoretical conceptualizations and can be of managerial help for organizational practice. It thus illustrates the practical help for organizational practice. It thus illustrates the practical relevance of trust an pictures the existing theoretival relevance of trust and pictures the existing theoretical landscape of already existing approaches to trust. Unlike other theoretical concepts, neuroeconomics starts to explain trust at the level of an individual's brain. This is possible due to its interdisciplinary access using neuroscientific methods, psychological theories, and economic models. As a result, new insights of understanding trust are at hand and worth to be discussed for its theoretical and practical insights.
We present and estimate a model of competition in a two-sided market: the market for magazine readership and advertising. Using data on magazines in Germany, we find evidence that magazines have properties of two-sided markets. The results are consistent with the perception that prices for readers are ‘subsidized’ and that magazines make all their money from advertisers. Consistent with advertisers valuing readers more than readers value advertisements, our results imply that higher demand on the reader side increases ad rates, but that higher demand on the advertising side decreases cover prices.
Seit das Beratungsunternehmen McKinsey im Jahre 1998 den «War for Talent», den Kampf um (zukünftige) Fach- und Führungskräfte, ankündigte, wird Talentmanagement als Lösung für die Herausforderungen des heutigen Arbeitsmarktes angepriesen , ja geradezu «vermarktet». Häufig bleibt allerdings unklar, wie «Talente» zu identifizieren sind und welchen Wertbeitrag «Talentmanagement» zum Unternehmenserfolg wirklich leistet.
Im Rahmen des Artikels wird argumentiert, dass die institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen dazu führen, dass Schweizer Unternehmen - im Vergleich zu deutschen - in geringerem Ausmaß auf ihre eigenen Lehrlinge zurückgreifen, wenn es darum geht, freie Facharbeiterstellen in der Produktion zu decken.
It has often been argued by scholars adopting a practice approach that by focusing on “what people do in relation to strategy” their research would be particularly relevant to practitioners. In response to this assumption, this article draws on a Bourdieusian perspective to argue that most practice-based strategy scholars are unaware of their inevitably “scholastic view” which is the cause for the gap between strategy research and praxis. This unawareness leads to two related fallacies: epistemic doxa and scholastic ethnocentrism. In order to avoid these fallacies, strategy researchers need to develop a particular kind of reflexivity by engaging in what is known as “participant objectivation.” This enables the researcher to generate rigorous research that is conceptually relevant to practitioners—without dissolving the necessary differentiation between strategy research and praxis.
During the current international financial crisis, the effectiveness of existing corporate governance institutions has been questioned both in the scientific community and in the media. A special focus of this discussion is on the containment of opportunistic behavior. In the corporate governance literature, the dominant approaches axiomatically assume individuals with self-interest or opportunistic behavior. The modern research stream of psychological economics, however, has shown that prosocial preferences exist and do matter. When the determinants of prosocial behavior are considered, the implications for the design of corporate governance institutions may clash with conventional wisdom. We suggest that the following measures help to overcome social dilemmas at the firm level: board representation of knowledge workers who invest in firm-specific human capital, attenuation of variable pay-for-performance, selection of directors and managers with prosocial preferences, and employee participation in decision-making and control. With our approach, we make a rare attempt to apply psychological economics to a complex institution, namely corporate governance.
Over the last few years research on management consulting has established itself as an important area in management studies. While, traditionally, consulting research has been predominantly a-theoretical, lately researchers have been calling for an exploration of different theoretical approaches. This article has been written in response to these calls. It explores a new perspective for theorizing the client–consultant relationship based on the theory of social systems by Niklas Luhmann. According to this approach, clients and consultants can be conceptualized as two autopoietic communication systems that operate according to idiosyncratic logics. They are structurally coupled through a third system, the so-called ‘contact system’. Due to the different logics of these systems, the transfer of meaning between them is not possible. This theoretical position has interesting implications for the way we conceptualize consulting, challenging many traditional assumptions. Instead of supporting the client in finding solutions to their problems, this perspective emphasizes that consulting firms can only cause ‘perturbations’ in the client’s communication processes, inducing the client system to construct its own meaning from it.
