Safety sans Frontières: An International Safety Culture Model

The management of safety culture in international and culturally diverse organizations is a concern for many high‐risk industries. Yet, research has primarily developed models of safety culture within Western countries, and there is a need to extend investigations of safety culture to global environments. We examined (i) whether safety culture can be reliably measured within a single industry operating across different cultural environments, and (ii) if there is an association between safety culture and national culture. The psychometric properties of a safety culture model developed for the air traffic management (ATM) industry were examined in 17 European countries from four culturally distinct regions of Europe (North, East, South, West). Participants were ATM operational staff (n = 5,176) and management staff (n = 1,230). Through employing multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, good psychometric properties of the model were established. This demonstrates, for the first time, that when safety culture models are tailored to a specific industry, they can operate consistently across national boundaries and occupational groups. Additionally, safety culture scores at both regional and national levels were associated with country‐level data on Hofstede's five national culture dimensions (collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and long‐term orientation). MANOVAs indicated safety culture to be most positive in Northern Europe, less so in Western and Eastern Europe, and least positive in Southern Europe. This indicates that national cultural traits may influence the development of organizational safety culture, with significant implications for safety culture theory and practice.     

Environmental Management — the European Way

While international agreements, international standards, and internationally operating companies have left behind the idea of national borders for environmental management issues, research is still lagging behind in describing developments in this area from an international perspective. The European Business Environmental Barometer (EBEB) is a quantitative survey of the state and development of environmental management in Europe and one of the first to regularly provide results on this issue at a European level. It covers topics such as perceived environmental impact, environmental stakeholders, corporate environmental activities, and environmental management (systems).The results presented in this article are drawn from the latest completed round of the EBEB during which data was gathered in 1997/98. The questionnaire-based survey includes information on more than 2,800 companies from the producing sector with 50 or more employees in 11 European countries.¹     

Strategic Responses by European Companies to the Diversity Challenge: an Online Comparison

Diversity management is a rethinking and reframing of equality management. It has particular significance in Europe with its increasingly diverse populations, homogenous leaders and aging workforce. Corporate websites are often the first point of call for prospective recruits, partners and investors, and they often contain ‘diversity statements’. This study investigates the web-based promotion of ‘diversity’ by 241 leading companies in eight European countries. This paper focuses particularly on the drivers and stages of diversity management and finds large differences across Europe. It identifies drivers for diversity management as better performance, enhancing corporate reputation and meeting stakeholder needs. The authors also found six stages of diversity management implementation and discuss their implications for human resource management.     

The transfer of culturally-grounded management techniques: The case of business reengineering in Germany

Business process reengineering (BPR) continues to sweep across Europe with fervour. The rhetoric of radical performance improvement is too great to ignore, given the state of many European companies. In many cases the reengineering drive has been orchestrated by American companies either moving into Europe or implementing strategies dictated from their US base. Yet reengineering is essentially an American concept, packaged so as to appeal to that country's psyche. This article examines the transfer of culturally-grounded management techniques, in this case BPR, making specific reference to the German business and cultural context.     

THE EROSION IN EUROPEAN MANUFACTURING

The competitiveness of Western European manufacturing is slowly being eroded away and European firms must act decisively to halt this decline. Costs in Europe are high and getting higher. Productivity is not keeping pace. European manufacturers have adopted some of the ideas that have proved useful to manufacturers elsewhere around the globe, but they need to do more. Many European countries remain net exporters of direct investment. If the erosion is to be halted, European manufacturers must address overcapacity, particularly among the many small factories there, inappropriate plant locations, and company organizations that foster too much country-specific independence.     

Culture: A key to management communication between the Asian-Pacific area and Europe

Western culture, and therefore Western management methods and thinking, has devalued other cultures, and it has been assumed that the high culture of dominant nations has taken over. But this is not so; cultures of everyday life are complex and not easily destroyed. They are also systems in motion, that can adapt easily.Tzöl Zae Chung explains the striking differences between Asian and European thinking and ways of managing and doing business. Misunderstandings can occur if two cultures meet without adequate prior preparation. But increasingly, Japanese management methods are revitalizing Asian values and attracting attention. The cultural factor in globalization — especially in the ‘triad’ of trade between the US, the Asian-Pacific region and Europe is becoming critically important.     

Advancing our understanding of cultural heterogeneity with unsupervised machine learning

National boundaries and country averages are commonly used as delimiters and proxies for culture. By doing so, not enough attention is paid to cultural heterogeneity within and overlays between countries. Deploying a Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM) as an unsupervised machine learning technique on 106,382 individual-level survey data from 66 countries, this article identifies distinct worldwide cultural prototypes, isolates dominantly occurring prototypes within countries, and uses them to calculate cultural core values. It also provides new measures for within-country cultural heterogeneity, between-country cultural differences, and cultural isolation. The results not only show the usefulness of machine learning algorithms in inductive international business research, but also have managerial relevance for international marketing and management.     

All on board? New evidence on board gender diversity from a large panel of European firms

Using a unique database of over 20 million firms over two decades, we examine industry sector and national institution drivers of the prevalence of women directors on supervisory and management boards in both public and private firms across 41 advanced and emerging European economies. We demonstrate that gender board diversity has generally increased, yet women remain rare in both boards of firms in Europe: approximately 70% have no women directors on their supervisory boards, and 60% have no women directors on management boards. We leverage institutional and resource dependency theoretical frameworks to demonstrate that few systematic factors are associated with greater gender diversity for both supervisory and management boards among both private and public firms: the same factor may exhibit a positive correlation to a management board, and a negative correlation to a supervisory board, or vice versa. We interpret these findings as evidence that country-level gender equality and cultural institutions exhibit differentiated correlations with the presence of women directors in management and supervisory boards. We also find little evidence that sector-level competition and innovativeness are systematically associated with the presence of women on either board in either group of firms.     

The impact of corporate sustainability performance on information asymmetry: the role of institutional differences

This paper empirically investigates whether corporate sustainability performance (CSP) affects information asymmetry (IA) for European firms listed in the STOXX Europe 600 from 2002 to 2013. We find a significantly negative effect of CSP on IA. By exploiting institutional differences between the European countries, we determine that the negative effect of CSP on IA is more pronounced in liberal market economies compared to coordinated market economies, thus pointing to a substitutive effect of CSP and economic coordination. Further, the impact is greater in countries with stricter disclosure requirements. In such countries, there is generally a greater appetite for company-specific information. However, disclosure requirements fulfil this need only partially because they concentrate on the corporate governance dimension of corporate sustainability. Hence, information on the social pillar especially matters to investors in a complementary manner and drives the overall effect. Our study contributes to the literature on the positive capital market effects of CSP by showing the proposed effect in European capital markets and the institutional determinants of its strength.     

人文视野下的中西方管理思想比较

在承认管理理论具有超越地域文化的普适性基础上,以中西方管理思想的比较为逻辑起点,通过比较中西方在管理视角、管理基点、管理方法、管理行为和管理原则等方面存在诸多的差异,力图为管理理论在中国的学科建设中建立不同于西方的测量维度,提供可资观察和应用的理论工具。     

HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY,MANUFACTURING, AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: AN ALTERNATE PERSPECTIVE ON SCHMENNER'S HYPOTHESES

Two simultaneous developments took place during the so‐called Industrial Revolution (1760–1830): the industrialization of Britain and other countries in Europe and the deindustrialization of a number of non‐European countries, including India. I identify international relations as a major driver of the three components—demand, innovations, and capital formation—of the Industrial Revolution. I also offer an alternate perspective on hypotheses proposed by Schmenner in the preceding article in this issue.     

Comparing European companies

As Europe gears up to a Single Internal Market, so there is greater need for information to allow the investor to compare companies operating in the several European countries.Financial information on profits, asset values, return on investment, etc are published in Annual Reports. But problems of interpretation still remain if one wishes to compare performance between, say, a French and a British company, or a Spanish and a German one.     

Building cultural intelligence: insights from project management job advertisements

This paper examines how organisations that conduct worldwide recruitment of project management professionals can derive insight from the cultural preferences stated within project management job advertisements. Drawing on project management practitioner job advertisements placed by 2040 organisations across seven countries and seven industries, we employ Hofstede’s national cultural framework to categorise cultural preferences which the organisations persistently replicate in their specifications of desired candidate project management practitioner competency. To map global trends and national variations, data analysis is undertaking and utilising exploratory data analysis, Poisson regression and negative binomial regression are used. The paper finds that specific national cultural dimensions – ‘Collectivism’, ‘Uncertainty Avoidance’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘Power Distance’ – are the most salient cultural denominators for advertised project management positions, while this is not the case with ‘Masculinity’ and ‘Individualism’. The findings raise issues about which organisations should seek to become more culturally intelligent, and which relate to the adaptiveness of the cultural preferences that they articulate through their job advertisements, both to project tasks and to cultural contexts for projects.     

Institutional Dynamics in European Industrial Relations

Since the end of the 1970s, all European systems of industrial relations have experienced some common developments. In order to shed some light on this subject we look for common as well as specific changes within some selected systems of industrial relations in Europe. Therefore, we deal with the moving forces behind these tendencies which are, on the whole, global in character. We discuss the institutional responses to these general developments in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. These countries have been chosen because their industrial relations are generally seen as belonging to different types of systems. We conclude that many responses are still national specific and, in line with the distinguished national logics of collective action, to be defined respectively as the logic of contract, the logic of opposition and the logic of cooperation. At the end some reflections about the future of European industrial relations are presented.     

Strategic reactions to the abolition of duty free:: Examples from the European airport sector

The abolition of duty free and tax free sales to intra-EU passengers on June 30 1999 curtailed the opportunity for airport authorities to generate retail related income. Prior to abolition, approximately 40 per cent of all duty free sales were between European Union countries. Since the abolition, airport authorities have had to identify alternative ways in which revenue could be generated.The paper is based upon interviews conducted with key decision-makers in the European airport industry. It details the strategies pursued by the industry prior to abolition and highlights the range of initiatives undertaken by the industry since July 1999. Finally a series of conclusions are drawn as to the future of the duty free industry within Europe.     

Economic Growth,Employment and Labour Force Development in Western Europe: Trends and Prospects to the Year 2000

ABSTRACT: One of the most disquieting features of the situation prevailing in many European market-economy countries over the last fifteen years has been the persistence of high levels of unemployment. Employment and labour force prospects were recently examined by the experts of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe as part of the process for the preparation of an Overall Economic Perspective to the Year 2000. The purpose of this paper is to briefly present some of the scenarios which were prepared for this project and to examine some of their main implications, particularly with respect to the overall labour demand and supply balance in western Europe. Particular attention is paid in the paper to the process of working time reduction, the emergence of new patterns of work and their possible impact on employment prospects.     

RANKING ECONOMICS DEPARTMENTS IN EUROPE: A STATISTICAL APPROACH

We provide a ranking of economics departments in Europe and we discuss the methods used to obtain it. The JEL CD‐ROM serves as a database for a period covering ten years. Journals are ranked using a combination of expert opinions and citation data to produce a scale from 1 to 10. The publication output and habits of fifteen European countries plus California are then compared. Individuals with a contribution greater than a predetermined minimum level are regrouped into departments which are ranked according to their total scores. A standard deviation is provided to underline the uncertainty of this ranking. (JEL: I29, D63, C12, C14)     

Taxes and Women in the Labour Force in a Southern European Country: The Case of Portugal

On looking at the female labour supply in Europe, it is immediately noticed that there is a large variation among countries. One possible explanation for this fact is that different countries have different tax policies, leading to variations in incentive and costs. This has been investigated in papers such as that of Gustafsson (1992a,b) for countries such as Germany and Sweden. The same exercise has been performed by the present authors for a low-income, southern European country, Portugal, which has one of the highest rates of female participation (out of line with neighbouring countries). Female labour supply does not seem to be very sensitive to fiscal policies, as those policies have only a small influence on the take-home wage. This result appears to be independent of the fact that the female labour supply shows a higher elasticity to wages than that which has been reported for other countries. The present authors also show that Portuguese women contribute a much larger proportion of family earnings than do their counterparts in Sweden and Germany, and that the Portuguese fiscal system is rather neutral. Further studies with data from other countries are needed in order to shed more light on the issue of tax harmonization.     

The Analysis of International Tourists in South Australia

Based on the situation in SA and the principle of sustainable development of tourism industry, the target market of tourism in SA is "environmental-cultural traveler". Compared with the whole country, the change of the numbers of international tourists in SA is apparently much greater. Most European tourists are very interested in SA tourism attractions, and the SA' s share in Europe is much higher than any other parts of the world. European tourists also spend more nights in Australia than any other parts of the world. This is inevitably the result of advanced cultural tourism.     

Strategy and Opportunism in European Retail Internationalization

Europe in recent years has witnessed an increase in the amount of cross‐border operations by retailers. The retail sector has undergone substantial structural change characterized by the emergence of a group of rapidly‐growing large retailers, a redefinition of the balance of internalized and externalized functions and a need to respond to the cultural variety present in Europe that becomes evident as retailers move out of their domestic markets. The over‐arching requirement for these large retailers is to grow and gain scale economies. Internationalization of operations has become a requirement for these large firms. It is argued that the established academic conceptualizations of internationalization are unsatisfactory in not addressing this overriding requirement for growth. There is great variety in the international activity in retailing, with the absence of pattern being one of the few generalities. It is proposed that consideration of opportunism may be a better way to gain understanding of retailer activity than trying to fit activity into deterministic strategic models. The experiences of five West European retailers entering and building retail networks in Poland is provided as evidence for this view. Suggestions are made for future work exploring this issue of opportunism as a process in international retailing.