Outsourcing and the strategy of organizations in Mexico

Outsourcing has been a very commonly used strategy to increase productivity in a variety of organizations. In Mexico, it can be said that it has had a positive impact on employment rate. Nevertheless, there is a “dark side” in this strategy, since it has been used as a way to avoid direct hiring of employees and to evade fiscal and social security regulations. This document aims to analyze outsourcing from a regulatory and contractual approach, as well as its role as a way to increase the employment rate, and from a managerial perspective. As a result of this analysis, it was found that in our country outsourcing has been a successfully used strategy by many organizations of different sizes, but at the same time, the lack of an appropriate legislation has originated a series of unethical practices. In Mexico, in 2021 a new legal framework that tries to balance the relationship between firms and employees was approved. This paper ends with a reflection of the possible impacts of this new legislation.

Intergenerational Cooperation and the Social Contract

John Rawls made the enormously influential suggestion that society can be conceived of as a “cooperative venture for mutual advantage,” governed by a “theory of justice,” which is a set of principles that specify an acceptable division of the “benefits and burdens of cooperation.” It follows, however, that if there are no opportunities for mutually advantageous cooperation in a particular domain of social interaction, then these interactions cannot be governed by principles of justice. Certain commentators have argued that this analysis precludes the application of Rawlsian-style contract theory to questions of intergenerational justice, on the grounds that there can be no reciprocity between non-contemporaneous generations, and thus no possibility of intergenerational cooperation. Yet despite having become influential in the literature, this claim is incorrect, being based upon an overly narrow, direct conception of reciprocity. Many systems of cooperation, both in nature and in human society, are based on indirect reciprocity, where the individual from whom a benefit is received need not be the same as the individual to whom a benefit is provided. Once the possibility of indirect reciprocity is taken into account, one can see that there is no obstacle to the development of systems of intergenerational cooperation. The analysis of such systems provides the foundation for a contractual approach to questions of intergenerational justice.

The notion of ‘employer’: Towards a uniform European concept?

The growth in multilateral working relationships (e.g. agency work, chains of sub-contracting and corporate groups) is causing Member States to increasingly scrutinise their traditional, contractual approach to the notion of ‘employer’. So far, little attention has been paid to the boundaries and limits that EU law sets when defining the employer. The lack of attention may have come to an end with the recent AFMB judgment, in which the Court ruled, for the first time, that the concept of employer in a provision of EU law had to be given an autonomous and uniform interpretation throughout the EU. Starting from the AFMB judgment, the author analyses the concept of employer in EU law. The author finds that the concept of employer in EU law can be described as ‘uniform in its functionality’: in EU law, the national concept of the employer is never absolute, but the circumstances and the way in which the national concept must be set aside depend on the context and the objective of the European legislation in question. Through this functional approach, EU law partly harmonises the various national approaches to the concept of the employer. Nevertheless, a lack of specific reasoning on the part of the Court may grant the Member States considerable leeway to uphold their own views on the concept.

The International Architecture for Resolving Sovereign Debt Involving Private-Sector Creditors—Recent Developments, Challenges, And Reform Options

There have been significant developments in sovereign debt restructuring involving private-sector creditors since the IMF’s last stocktaking in 2014. While the current contractual approach has been largely effective in resolving sovereign debt cases since 2014, it has gaps that could pose challenges in future restructurings.

The market for the “old” and the “new” institutional economics

ABSTRACT This paper conceives of the market as an institution, and contrasts two theoretical approaches: Institutionalism, with an evolutionary and analytical bias, whose theoretical basis comes from “Old/Original” Institutionalism, and New Institutional Economics, with an analytical, contractual approach, linked to mainstream economics. Both approaches have given relevant contributions, as they consider the importance of institutions for economic performance. The limits of New Institutional Economics are particularly relevant, whose analysis of the operation of markets is centered on the logic of transaction cost economics as a determinant of economic performance. Evolutionary Institutionalism, in turn, sees the market within a broader scope, in which cost economies only partially explains economic performance, but it is not necessarily seen as a determining factor.

Corporate Board and Upper Echelons: The Case of the American Most Admired Firms

The purpose of the paper is to study the effect of board effectiveness on the Top Management Team demographic characteristics of 274 American firms. The research mobilizes theoretically the upper echelons, the agency and the cognitive theories and empirically the clustering and the discriminating analysis. The results indicate that the TMT demographic attributes are not tied systematically to the board efficiency according to contractual approach of corporate governance. The relationship between the board characteristics and the TMT traits is not linear. The study contributes to corporate governance knowledge by highlighting the strategic role of the boards dealing with the TMT choice.