scholarly journals The road to more sustainable firms in the face of a pandemic: Changes needed in employment relationships

2021 ◽  
pp. 234094442110179
Author(s):  
Alvaro Lopez-Cabrales ◽  
Angelo DeNisi

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we operate at work. Dealing with these changes may require new ways of thinking about our models of employment relationships, to create more sustainable organizations during troubled times. Sustainability can be understood as an attempt to strike a balance between the economic, social and environmental goals of companies—a balance that could drive a global recovery from the pandemic crisis. This essay focuses on the employer’s perspective and considers how firms can use different employment models to improve sustainability during the crisis. We propose two alternative employment models which we label “Oversustainability” and “Mutual Sustainability” that depend on the choice of the firm’s competitive strategy (proactive/innovative vs analyzer/following). We considered the contributions expected from employees and the inducements they were offered under each model. We believe these employment models can be advantageous for companies seeking to adopt proactive and analyzer-type sustainability strategies. JEL CLASSIFICATION M1

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-278
Author(s):  
Ariane Dupont-Kieffer ◽  
Sylvie Rivot ◽  
Jean-Loup Madre

The golden age of road demand modeling began in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in the face of major road construction needs. These macro models, as well as the econometrics and the data to be processed, were provided mainly by engineers. A division of tasks can be observed between the engineers in charge of estimating the flows within the network and the transport economists in charge of managing these flows once they are on the road network. Yet the inability to explain their decision-making processes and individual drives gave some room to economists to introduce economic analysis, so as to better understand individual or collective decisions between transport alternatives. Economists, in particular Daniel McFadden, began to offer methods to improve the measure of utility linked to transport and to inform the engineering approach. This paper explores the challenges to the boundaries between economics and engineering in road demand analysis.


2021 ◽  
pp. 048661342110039
Author(s):  
Gönenç Uysal

The growing economic and political roles of the so-called emerging powers in sub-Saharan Africa have attracted particular attention following the apparent decline of Western powers in the face of the global economic crisis of 2007–2008. The AKP’s “proactive” foreign policy has manifested Turkey’s burgeoning role in the region. This paper draws upon Marxism to explore the diffusion of Turkish capital and the enhancement of military relations in the region in harmony and in contradistinction with Western and Gulf countries. It discusses the AKP’s proactive foreign policy vis-à-vis sub-Saharan Africa as a particular sociohistorical form of sub-imperialism that is characterized by and reproduces economic and geopolitical rivalries and alliances among Turkey and Western and Gulf countries. JEL Classification: F5, P1, O1


2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-164
Author(s):  
Tess Moeke-Maxwell

In the bicultural context of Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori (people of the land) and Tauiwi (the other tribe, i.e. Pākehā and other non-indigenous New Zealanders), continue to be represented in binary opposition to each other. This has real consequences for the way in which health practitioners think about and respond to Māori. Reflecting on ideas explored in my PhD thesis, I suggest that Māori identity is much more complex than popular representations of Māori subjectivity allow. In this article I offer an alternative narrative on the social construction of Māori identity by contesting the idea of a singular, quintessential subjectivity by uncovering the other face/s subjugated beneath biculturalism’s preferred subjects. Waitara Mai i te horopaki iwirua o Aotearoa, arā te Māori (tangata whenua) me Tauiwi (iwi kē, arā Pākehā me ētahi atu iwi ehara nō Niu Tīreni), e mau tonu ana te here mauwehe rāua ki a rāua anō. Ko te mutunga mai o tēnei ko te momo whakaarohanga, momo titiro hoki a ngā kaimahi hauora ki te Māori. Kia hoki ake ki ngā ariā i whakaarahia ake i roto i taku tuhinga kairangi. E whakapae ana au he uaua ake te tuakiri Māori ki ngā horopaki tauirahia mai ai e te marautanga Māori. I konei ka whakatauhia he kōrero kē whakapā atu ki te waihangatanga o te tuakiri Māori, tuatahi; ko te whakahē i te ariā takitahi, marautanga pūmau mā te hurahanga ake i tērā āhua e pēhia nei ki raro iho i te whainga marau iwiruatanga. Tuarua, mai i tēnei o taku tuhinga rangahau e titiro nei ki ngā wawata ahurei a te Māori noho nei i raro i te māuiuitanga whakapoto koiora, ka tohu au ki te rerekētanga i waenga, i roto hoki o ngā Māori homai kōrero, ā, ka whakahāngaia te titiro ki te momo whakatau āwhina a te hauora ā-motu i te hunga whai oranga.


2020 ◽  
pp. 234094442091609
Author(s):  
David Diwei Lv ◽  
Weihong Chen ◽  
Hailin Lan

In the process of operation, firms will face different types of performance pressure. The inconsistency among multiple performance pressure signals has an important impact on resource allocation and R&D investment. However, at present, studies on the impact of multiple performance pressures on the firm’s resource allocation and R&D investment are very limited, and few studies have analyzed the impact of inconsistencies among multiple performance pressure signals on the firm’s R&D investment. Given this research gap, this article empirically tested a model from the perspective of behavioral agency theory, in which inconsistency in long- and short-term performance pressure facilitates the accumulation of organizational slack. We further test the impact of an increase in organizational slack on the firms’ R&D investment intensity and find that this effect is stronger when the level of managerial ownership is comparatively low. These results together indicate that high inconsistency in performance pressure and low managerial ownership jointly facilitate the accumulation of organizational slack, enabling firms to go beyond local search and have more slack searches in the face of multiple performance pressure, which is conducive to an increase in R&D investment. JEL CLASSIFICATION: M10.


2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (3) ◽  
pp. 412-416
Author(s):  
Brooks Berndt

Today’s climate crisis provokes dystopian and utopian narratives of the future faced by humanity. To navigate the theological terrain between the present and an uncertain future, this article explores passages pertaining to the journey of Moses and the Israelites to the Promised Land. The guiding point of orientation for this exploration comes from a verse that captures the seeming powerlessness of the Israelites in the face of the giants inhabiting the Promised Land. Numbers 13:33 reads, “To ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.” Of crucial importance in coming to terms with such honest self-assessment is the period of discernment and growth that comes from being in the wilderness with the presence of a God who loves and empowers grasshoppers in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Because the future of the Body of Christ is inseparable from how the climate crisis is confronted, the journey through the wilderness becomes not merely a story for self-coping but rather a story about churches finding a way forward, even as some dystopian narratives place churches on the road to irrelevance and ultimately extinction. This article explores how the story of exodus provides a sacred ground for imagining a different, even if difficult, future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (6) ◽  
pp. 457-460
Author(s):  
Daniel A. Dworkis ◽  
Sarah Axeen ◽  
Sanjay Arora
Keyword(s):  
The Road ◽  

Author(s):  
Mike Blommer ◽  
Reates Curry ◽  
Dev Kochhar ◽  
Rads Swaminathan ◽  
Walter Talamonti ◽  
...  

Blommer et al. (2015) reported on a simulator study that investigated a driver engagement (DE) strategy designed to keep the driver-in-the-loop during automated driving in the face of two different types of secondary tasks. The method, first reported by Carsten et al. (2012), involved driving in fully automated driving mode for 6 minutes followed by 1 minute of manual driving, after which this fixed schedule was repeated several times throughout the drive. This scheduled strategy was compared to a reference condition in which different participants experienced continuous automated driving without interruptions. For each condition, some participants watched a video and others listened to the radio. All drives ended in automated driving mode with a surprise forward collision (FC) hazard to which the participant had to manually intervene. Compared to video watchers, radio listeners responded faster, looked to the road scene more, and they were more often looking forward at FC event onset. The DE strategy had no effect on radio listeners. In contrast, video watchers responded to the hazard more quickly with the scheduled strategy than without it. However, there was no reliable statistical difference between DE conditions in percent-eye-glance-time looking to the forward road scene during automated driving or in the number of drivers looking forward at FC event onset. This paper presents additional analyses of off-road eye glance behavior and finds no relationship between how long people were looking away prior to receiving a Forward Collision Warning (FCW) and driver response time (RT). About 95% of all video watching drivers glanced back to the road within 20 sec regardless of the automated driving condition. Approximately 85% of glances away from the road in the scheduled mitigation condition were 7 sec or less.


2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor C. Shih

The purges of former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang, former Central Military Commission Vice Chairman Xu Caihou, and the former head of the Central Committee Office Ling Jihua in 2014 re-excited a long-standing debate in the field of elite Chinese politics: how contentious is politics at the elite level? On the face of it, these purges, as well as the arrests of ninety nine senior officials associated with these three individuals and with other cases, seem to prove that elite politics remains highly contentious at the top (People's Daily 2015). This outcome was surprising considering that decades of institution building had taken place after the Cultural Revolution. However, proponents of institutionalized politics in the CCP argue that the leadership had a genuine desire to clean house, and that these arrests, even if politically motivated, instilled a renewed discipline in the party. Once the “bad apples” were eliminated, the leadership under Xi Jinping would have continued on the road of institutionalization (Li 2014). Cadre promotion institutions, regular meetings of the Politburo and its standing committee, party congresses, and retirement rules remain largely unaffected by the purges and will continue to ensure relatively harmonious decision making and predictable successions in the foreseeable future.


Author(s):  
Jelica Davidović ◽  
Dalibor Pešić ◽  
Boris Antić

For decades, around the world is developing a fatigue detection system to alert drivers when they reach the state of fatigue that threatens them in traffic. Most of the research on the impact of fatigue on drivers based on driving simulators mainly because it is a controlled environment, cheap and safe approach. Since the nineties of the last century, many surveys were conducted in which the survey method was applied, while examining the subjective attitudes of drivers about the impact of fatigue on traffic safety. The beginning of the 21st century is characterized by the development of a fatigue detection system based on modern technologies, and a number of experiments were conducted. However, it not yet in use tools that can be easily detected drivers fatigue, in order to respond quickly and prevent them from operating the vehicle in such condition.The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the importance and implementation of a new fatigue identification model for commercial vehicle drivers in selected transport companies. Based on the results of this research, it is possible to determine which company is the safest from the aspect of fatigue, which is least safe. Also, the analysis of the results can determine which influencing factor is “the weakest link” among the drivers in the transport company, or where to direct measures in order to improve the road safety of the company, and therefore the local community.The study included five transport companies in Serbia, three of which are engaged in the carriage of passengers, and two transport goods. The survey used the survey method, the face face model, and 265 drivers of commercial vehicles participated, 16.6% of whom were found fatigued before the start of the shift.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 1189-1197
Author(s):  
B. Vijayalaxmi ◽  
Chavali Anuradha ◽  
Kaushik Sekaran ◽  
Maytham N. Meqdad ◽  
Seifedine Kadry

Lately, many of the road accidents have been attributed to the driver stupor. Statistics revealed that about 32% of the drivers who met with such accidents demonstrated the symptoms of tiredness before the mishap though at varying levels. The purpose of this research paper is to revisit the various interventions that have been devised to provide for assistance to the vehicle users to avert unwarranted contingencies on the roads. The paper tries to make a sincere attempt to encapsulate the body of work that has been initiated so far in this direction. As is evident, there are numerous ways in which one can identify the fatigue of the driver, namely biotic or physiological gauges, vehicle type and more importantly the analysis of the face in terms of its alignment and other attributes.


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