On the Use of Incentive Pay in Chinese State‐owned Enterprises: The Role of Hierarchy

Abstract. This paper looks at the wage system in Chinese state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) during the 1980s. While wages remained compressed, there is evidence for the use of incentive mechanisms. Wages were quite sensitive to firm performance, especially at higher levels of the hierarchy. One of the reform measures — the Internal Salary System, a system of intra‐firm contracts — has contributed significantly to this sensitivity. There is also some direct evidence that it enhanced the effectiveness of the bonus system, and that it helped to increase productivity. This goes towards explaining how the Chinese bonus system was able to overcome the free‐rider problems typical of team compensation.     

Conditions of Radical Transformation in State‐Owned Enterprises*

This study analyses the key contributors to radical organizational change in five New Zealand state‐owned enterprises during their ownership transition between 1985 and 1995. Abrupt government reform policies, organizations' market positions, realization of rapid technological innovation, proactive managerial actions and the new owners' strategic intent are established as key conditions of radical change in state‐owned enterprises. We integrate our findings with institutional theory and resource dependency theory to argue that organizational dynamics in times of uncertainty depend on de‐institutionalization of old and institutionalization of new patterns of resource dependency.     

The Educated Russian's Curse: Returns to Education in the Russian Federation during the 1990s

Abstract. This paper uses a representative sample of the Russian Federation, the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, to estimate the returns to education in this ex‐communist country. We tackle this classic issue in labor economics with the realistic expectation of obtaining results for Russia comparable in quality and reliability to those available in developed countries and other economies in transition. Using standard regression techniques we find that the returns to education in Russia are quite low compared with those reported in the literature on countries throughout the world, in almost no specification reaching higher than 5 per cent. Moreover, there is virtually no improvement in returns to education in the 1992–99 period, a result somewhat at odds with other studies using Russian data from similar time periods. When we instrument our main regressor using policy experiments from the 1960s, we find comparable results. We also perform a selectivity correction and discover even lower returns to education for men, although they become slightly higher for women. Additionally, we find extremely low returns to tenure, which can even become negative in certain specifications.     

Credential Effects and the Returns to Education in China

Using the China Household Income Project (CHIP) data for 1995 and 2002, we examine the returns to education in China, separating out credential effects from pure years‐of‐schooling effects. The results are broadly consistent with the implications of China moving towards a market‐oriented economy: increasing returns to education where both years of schooling and credentials from completing key phases are rewarded; a decline in the importance of credentials as firms have more discretion to select the best‐suited employees irrespective of their credentials; more emphasis on credentials in the state sector; less emphasis on credentials for long‐tenured employees for whom the employer has more opportunity to assess productivity without relying on credentials; and a greater importance of credentials for females for whom the value of such signals may be more important.     

Acquisitions of Chinese State‐Owned Enterprises by Multinational Corporations: Driving Forces,Barriers and Implications for HRM

This article explores the driving forces for, barriers to, and trends and patterns of acquisition of Chinese state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) by foreign investment and its implications for HRM and the experience of work for the workers. It questions the level of objectives alignment between the Chinese side and the FDI during the acquisition of Chinese SOEs. Issues related to the Chinese managerial skills and behaviour in acquisition negotiation are discussed as well as the policy making, administrative and practical role of the local government. The article argues that FDI's acquisition of Chinese firms creates unique management issues which require further research, particularly in the area of HRM, in order to establish the likely similarities and differences between acquisitions in other countries and those taking place in China and the implications of this for the globalizing businesses.     

Roy’s Safety‐First Portfolio Principle in Financial Risk Management of Disastrous Events

Roy pioneers the concept and practice of risk management of disastrous events via his safety‐first principle for portfolio selection. More specifically, his safety‐first principle advocates an optimal portfolio strategy generated from minimizing the disaster probability, while subject to the budget constraint and the mean constraint that the expected final wealth is not less than a preselected disaster level. This article studies the dynamic safety‐first principle in continuous time and its application in asset and liability management. We reveal that the distortion resulting from dropping the mean constraint, as a common practice to approximate the original Roy’s setting, either leads to a trivial case or changes the problem nature completely to a target‐reaching problem, which produces a highly leveraged trading strategy. Recognizing the ill‐posed nature of the corresponding Lagrangian method when retaining the mean constraint, we invoke a wisdom observed from a limited funding‐level regulation of pension funds and modify the original safety‐first formulation accordingly by imposing an upper bound on the funding level. This model revision enables us to solve completely the safety‐first asset‐liability problem by a martingale approach and to derive an optimal policy that follows faithfully the spirit of the safety‐first principle and demonstrates a prominent nature of fighting for the best and preventing disaster from happening.     

A Look at State‐Level Risk Assessment in the United States: Making Decisions in the Absence of Federal Risk Values

State environmental agencies in the United States are charged with making risk management decisions that protect public health and the environment while managing limited technical, financial, and human resources. Meanwhile, the federal risk assessment community that provides risk assessment guidance to state agencies is challenged by the rapid growth of the global chemical inventory. When chemical toxicity profiles are unavailable on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Integrated Risk Information System or other federal resources, each state agency must act independently to identify and select appropriate chemical risk values for application in human health risk assessment. This practice can lead to broad interstate variation in the toxicity values selected for any one chemical. Within this context, this article describes the decision‐making process and resources used by the federal government and individual U.S. states. The risk management of trichloroethylene (TCE) in the United States is presented as a case study to demonstrate the need for a collaborative approach among U.S. states toward identification and selection of chemical risk values while awaiting federal risk values to be set. The regulatory experience with TCE is contrasted with collaborative risk science models, such as the European Union's efforts in risk assessment harmonization. Finally, we introduce State Environmental Agency Risk Collaboration for Harmonization, a free online interactive tool designed to help to create a collaborative network among state agencies to provide a vehicle for efficiently sharing information and resources, and for the advancement of harmonization in risk values used among U.S. states when federal guidance is unavailable.     

Competitive Strategies and Firm Performance: a Comparative Analysis of Pure,Hybrid and ‘Stuck‐in‐the‐middle’ Strategies in Spanish Firms

The purpose of this study was to examine the viability of hybrid competitive strategies, which combine differentiation and cost elements, and their impact on organizational performance in comparison to pure strategies and ‘stuck‐in‐the‐middle’ combinations. Previous studies have focused above all on US data. The analysis carried out in this paper has centred on a multisectorial sample of 164 Spanish firms. The findings show that a large number of the organizations use different types of hybrid strategies and also that such strategies tend to be associated with higher levels of firm performance, particularly those strategies which place emphasis on a greater number of strategic dimensions, and specifically on innovation differentiation.     

乡镇企业产权改革、所有制结构及职工参与问题研究

运用改制企业及其职工问卷调查资料 ,本文研究表明:(1)县以上政府出于财政目标的需要 ,鼓励并主导了乡镇企业产权制度的改革 ,改革具有自上而下推动的特征 ,而并非完全像过去主流观点所认为的那样 ,改革完全是自下而上推动的结论;(2)地方 (社区 )政府、改制企业的原经营者、企业职工及社区全体居民在改革后具体企业产权模式的选择上 ,具有明显的鹰—鸽博弈特征 ,地方社区政府、改制企业的原经营者之间的博弈结果是改革后具体企业产权模式的选择的主要的决定力量。乡镇政府和企业经理共同控制了乡镇企业的改制 ,普通职工只有被动的参与权;(3)乡镇政府和原企业经理均无选择股份合作制的动力;(4)企业职工对于是否持股并不十分积极、其能否持股取决于多种因素;(5)职工对改制企业在激励机制、决策机制、管理机制等方面的进步给予积极的肯定;(6)股权结构对企业生产率影响不明显 ,它表明所有权结构只是生产率提高的必要条件 ,而非充要条件 ,它也不是改革最终走向“经营者持大股"的逻辑原因;(7)企业改制、特别是经营者持大股企业对就业、企业长期投资产生了积极影响 ,改制推进了企业经营水平、市场竞争力的提高。     

运用ISM分析我国服装企业信息化建设的影响因素

本文运用ISM原理,建立了我国服装企业信息化建设影响因素结构模型,在系统分析的基础上,提出了我国服装企业信息化建设的5个直接影响因素,并进一步探讨了解决这些问题的对策。     

Emerging Practice in Responsible Supply Chain Management: Closed‐Pipe Supply Chain of Conflict‐Free Minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo

Minerals originated from eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are blamed for financing violent conflict in the area over the past decade and have been called conflict minerals. They vividly demonstrate a key human rights issue facing responsible supply chain management. The conflict minerals issue has led to a significant shift in responsible supply chain management in two ways: extending producer responsibility to respect human rights in the total supply chain through establishing traceability and transparency; and developing legally binding supply chain responsibility. This article examines an emerging effort to source conflict‐free minerals using closed‐pipe supply chain in the DRC as a new strategy to respond to the above paradigm shift. By exploring whether this new strategy can contribute to conflict prevention in the DRC, this article argues that the closed‐pipe supply chain allows building long‐term relationship with various stakeholders and has the potential to transform socio‐economic structures in the producing communities, thereby leading to peacebuilding in the long run.     

Feedback Loops as Dynamic Processes of Organizational Knowledge Creation in the Context of the Innovations’ Front‐end

Feedback loops are instrumental in the organizational knowledge creation (OKC) process across the highly uncertain and dynamic innovation's front‐end. Therefore, managers should be aware of how these loops unfold, how to recognize meaningful patterns and how to steer them towards planned and emergent outcomes. Easy to say, difficult to practise! This empirical paper focuses on knowledge–conceptualization – the new knowledge's generation‐crystallization journey – and develops a unique model of feedback loops as dynamic processes of OKC in the context of the innovations’ front‐end. Using ten qualitatively studied innovations, the authors identify five front‐end OKC stages (generation, evaluation, expansion, refinement and crystallization) and pattern these based on their overlaps to explore the associated feedback loops. This model distinctively illustrates increasing–decreasing, diverging–converging and frequent negative‐cum‐positive loops, and illuminates the complex and rich patterns of loops not captured before.     

Assessing Major Accident Risks to Support Land‐Use Planning Using a Severity‐Vulnerability Combination Method: A Case Study in Dagushan Peninsula,China

Major accident risks posed by chemical hazards have raised major social concerns in today's China. Land‐use planning has been adopted by many countries as one of the essential elements for accident prevention. This article aims at proposing a method to assess major accident risks to support land‐use planning in the vicinity of chemical installations. This method is based on the definition of risk by the Accidental Risk Assessment Methodology for IndustrieS (ARAMIS) project and it is an expansion application of severity and vulnerability assessment tools. The severity and vulnerability indexes from the ARAMIS methodology are employed to assess both the severity and vulnerability levels, respectively. A risk matrix is devised to support risk ranking and compatibility checking. The method consists of four main steps and is presented in geographical information‐system‐based maps. As an illustration, the proposed method is applied in Dagushan Peninsula, China. The case study indicated that the method could not only aid risk regulations on existing land‐use planning, but also support future land‐use planning by offering alternatives or influencing the plans at the development stage, and thus further enhance the roles and influence of land‐use planning in the accident prevention activities in China.     

The Role of Local Context in the Cross‐border Acquisitions by Emerging Economy Multinational Enterprises

This paper explores the role of local context in cross‐border acquisitions by emerging economy multinational enterprises (EMNEs). It argues that the importance of local context has remained despite the increased global integration of the world economy. Hypotheses are tested using data on Indian acquisitions hosted in 70 countries over an eight‐year period. Results, which are consistent across number and value of cross‐border acquisitions, show that the local context in host countries offers contrasting benefits. Emerging economy multinational enterprises exploited these benefits by embedding in host countries through acquisitions. The acquisition strategy is conventional in the motives underpinning internationalization, but novel in its geographical clustering of host countries, and idiosyncratic owing to the EMNE's ability to draw on home country embeddedness. The paper develops theoretical implications and extends the concept of embeddedness, treating it as a series of internalization or quasi‐internalization decisions across a variety of local contexts by multinationals.     

An Empirical Study of the Volkswagen Crisis in China: Customers’ Information Processing and Behavioral Intentions

Product‐harm crises usually lead to product recalls, which may cause consumers concern about the product quality and safety. This study systematically examines customers’ immediate responses to the Volkswagen product recall crisis in China. Particular attention was given to customers’ responses to the risk information influencing their behavioral intentions. By combining the protective action decision model and the heuristic‐systematic model, we constructed a hypothetical model to explore this issue. A questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data involving 467 participants drawn from the customers of Volkswagen. We used structural equation modeling to explore the model. The results show that customers’ product knowledge plays an important role in their responses to the crisis. Having more knowledge would make them perceive a lower risk, but they might need even more information, making them more likely to seek and process information, and subsequently increasing their positive behavioral intentions toward the firm (that is pro‐firm behavioral intentions). Risk perception increased customers’ information needs, information seeking, and information processing but decreased their pro‐firm behavioral intentions. In addition to promoting information seeking, information needed to also facilitate customers’ systematic processing and thus increase their behavioral intentions to take corrective action. Customers’ behavioral intentions were also spurred by systematic processing, but failed to be predicted by information seeking. In summary, theoretical and practical implications and suggestions for further research are also discussed.     

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Education,Feedback, & Task Clarification to Increase Workplace Physical Activity

ABSTRACT

Modern office workers spend the majority of their work days in sedentary positions. The risk of preventable diseases such as cardiovascular disease and various cancers increase with increased sedentary time. Thus, targeting office worker health by increasing physical activity is imperative to improve long-term risk factors. This study measured physical activity in the workplace using a commercially-available accelerometer and evaluated the extent to which feedback, and feedback and task clarification increased workplace physical activity relative to a recommended guideline to move every 30-minutes. Results indicated that feedback increased workplace physical activity to varying degrees for 4/8 participants. A social validity questionnaire indicated that workplace variables (e.g., type of task, meetings, deadlines) prevented physical activity. These variables will need to be addressed in future studies.     

新形势下标准化促进创新的趋势及我国应对

在新一轮科技革命与全球政治经济不确定性增大的背景下,标准化与创新的相互作用显现出新趋势。文章通过梳理国际国外发挥标准化促进创新最新政策与实践的基础上,提出我国应在前沿技术领域标准化活动中确立市场的决定性作用,合理发挥政府在重要领域的标准化活动中的作用,从多方面构建与完善标准化促进创新的制度安排。     

The Myth of Restructuring, ‘Competent’ Managers and the Transition to a Market Economy: a Romanian Tale

A great deal of rhetoric surrounds the transformation from socialism to free-market capitalism. This paper explores to what extent the restructuring of Romanian companies has been an attempt to pay lip-service to prevailing rhetoric and to what extent it has been premised upon economic rationality. To restructure along structural, technological, financial but primarily managerial fronts has become a cultural value which is applauded, praised and heralded as the only way forward by the Romanian institutions of the transition. The companies under the study subscribe to such rhetoric only when they regard it as being embedded in economic rationality, as is the case with structural, financial and technological restructuring. Managerial restructuring, on the other hand, is not regarded as a technical necessity, given the view held by existing senior managers that skills and qualities acquired in the socialist regime are still appropriate to run a business successfully in the free-market economy.     

开放资本市场:应对“三资企业”“独资化”发展倾向的策略取向

跨国公司在中国的发展所呈现的“独资化”趋势有其逻辑上的必然性 ,对三资企业“独资化”发展的福利分析表明其对中方存在不利影响。本文提出了开放资本市场、允许跨国公司在华上市的建议 ,作为遏制三资企业“独资化”趋势的对策 ,并从跨国公司在华子公司上市后的成本收益分析、中方投资者的成本收益分析和促进中国股市规范发展的溢出效应３个方面阐明了该项策略建议的可行性。随着中国对外开放的深入 ,对跨国公司在中国发展的研究正逐步从单一地对投资产业分布的考察向解析公司股权结构扩展。本文正是运用有关股权结构的理论 ,分析了三资企…