The Development of Multiple Self‐Concept Dimensions During Adolescence

The purpose of this research was to analyze the development of self‐concept during adolescence. Participants included 484 teenagers (226 boys and 258 girls) from middle‐class families in the Basque Country region of Spain (M_age = 14.99, SD = 1.81 in Time 1 and M_age = 15.64, SD = 1.80 in Time 2). Longitudinal analysis found differences in the general school dimension. Six dimensions (math, verbal, general school, physical abilities, parent relationships and same‐sex relationships) reported a linear trend with a decreasing monotonic pattern; self‐esteem fit a cubic trend and physical appearance a quadratic trend line. Males showed higher means in self‐esteem, math, physical abilities, physical appearance, emotional stability and parent relationships; and females had higher values in verbal and general school.     

Regulation and the future of work: The employment relationship as an innovation facilitator

Digital transformation and the reorganization of the firm have given rise to new forms of work that diverge significantly from the standard employment relationship. Advocates of digital disruption suggest that the existing legal framework cannot accommodate “innovative” working templates and business models. This article, however, argues that labour regulation can continue to facilitate innovation, presenting the employment relationship as a flexible instrument, and standard forms of employment as the means of achieving efficiencies and cost advantages. First, they allow for the full exercise of managerial prerogative and attendant internal flexibility in workforce deployment, and, second, they constitute an effective device to deliver training and develop skills.     

Young people,social workers and social work education: the role of digital skills

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses a key issue in the development of youth-focused social work: the role of digital skills in the relationship between young people and social workers who work with these native digital users. To this end, we analysed data from the International Digital Economy and Society Index 2019 and Eurostat. Information from the sixth European Working Conditions Survey and a survey conducted by the Social Care Institute for Excellence and the British Association of Social Workers supported the empirical analysis. The main findings reveal a gap between the level of digital skills required in the labour market and the actual level of digital skills in both young people and social workers, despite efforts by both groups to improve their skills. Initiatives to foster digital skills are therefore recommended to bridge this digital divide. Lastly, it was concluded that both groups could act as mutual drivers of digital transformation.     

The roles of supply network centralities in firm performance and the moderating effects of reputation and export-orientation

Abstract

This study explores how supply network degree, closeness, and betweenness centralities affect firm performance, and the moderating effects of organizational reputation (measured by PageRank centrality) and export-orientation. The supply chain relationship empirical data are drawn from manufacturing and manufacturing service companies in Hong Kong, China. Social network analysis and moderated regression analysis were adopted to test the hypotheses for a sample of 814 focal firms with 3086 supply chain ties. The results indicate that in-degree and closeness centralities improve firm performance. Reputation is found to positively moderate the relationship between closeness and sales performance, but negatively moderates the relationship between betweenness and sales performance. Export-orientation has no effect on relationships. This study contributes to the literature by providing additional empirical evidence on the role of supply network position in firm performance. It also introduces PageRank centrality as a new measure of organizational reputation in a supply network.     

Learning in and from projects: the learning modes and a learning capability model

Abstract

The notion of ‘project delivery’ is well embedded in and across the management and organizational sciences literature – generating a narrative that reflects and recognizes the instrumental nature of projects and programmes in strategy execution. Project management, as a distinct and well-established body of research enquiry, has increasingly sought to focus our attention on the impacts of complexity, risk and uncertainty in projects; the corollary being a desideratum to strengthen our theoretical understanding of how insight and learning from projects may influence improvements to organizational efficiency. The wider literature suggests that organizational learning remains a challenging proposition, particularly in the context of organizations operating in environments of high complexity. In this paper, we enhance the conversation on organizational learning through a series of case studies, generating evidence of thirteen ‘learning modes’. The paper proposes that mature organizations tend to exhibit a greater number of learning modes and that there is a tendency to capture and socialize knowledge with a greater emphasis on the context of the learning situation rather than the learning artefact in isolation. The empirical evidence gathered in this paper forms the basis of a capability model, characterized by the thirteen modes of learning. The model intimates that learning occurs, and is more effective, when knowledge and information are enacted in practice through the learning modes which form a nucleus of the organizational learning capability. The research concludes with a 'call to action' that emphasizes the strategic importance of learning practices and routines in project oriented-organizations.     

Relationship between duration of second stage of labour and postpartum anaemia

Aim

To assess the relationship between the duration of the second stage of labour and postpartum anaemia during vaginal birth.

Testing for Serial Independence: Beyond the Portmanteau Approach

Portmanteau tests are typically used to test serial independence even if, by construction, they are generally powerful only in presence of pairwise dependence between lagged variables. In this article, we present a simple statistic defining a new serial independence test, which is able to detect more general forms of dependence. In particular, differently from the Portmanteau tests, the resulting test is powerful also under a dependent process characterized by pairwise independence. A diagram, based on p-values from the proposed test, is introduced to investigate serial dependence. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposal is evaluated in a simulation study and with an application on financial data. Both show that the new test, used in synergy with the existing ones, helps in the identification of the true data-generating process. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.