RISK AVERSION RELATES TO COGNITIVE ABILITY: PREFERENCES OR NOISE?

Recent experimental studies suggest that risk aversion is negatively related to cognitive ability. In this paper we report evidence that this relation may be spurious. We recruit a large subject pool drawn from the general Danish population for our experiment. By presenting subjects with choice tasks that vary the bias induced by random choices, we are able to generate both negative and positive correlations between risk aversion and cognitive ability. Our results suggest that cognitive ability is related to random decision making rather than to risk preferences. (JEL: C81, C91, D12, D81)     

From Customer‐Oriented Strategy to Organizational Financial Performance: The Role of Human Resource Management and Customer‐Linking Capability

Drawing on the organizational capabilities literature, the authors developed and tested a model of how supportive human resource management (HRM) improved firms’ financial performance perceived by marketing managers through fostering the implementation of a customer‐oriented strategy. Customer‐linking capability, which is the capability in managing close customer relationships, indicated the implementation of the customer‐oriented strategy. Data collected from two emerging economies – China and Hungary – established that supportive HRM partially mediated the relationship between customer‐oriented strategy and customer‐linking capability. Customer‐linking capability further explained how supportive HRM contributed to perceived financial performance. This study explicates the implication of customer‐oriented strategy for HRM and reveals the importance of HRM in strategy implementation. It also sheds some light on the ‘black box’ between HRM and performance. While making important contributions to the field of strategy, HRM and marketing, this study also offers useful practical implications.     

COMMUNITY AND CARE WORK IN A WORLD OF CHANGING IDEOLOGIES

Seymour B. Sarason, one of the founders of community psychology, has stated the need for developing barometers of community changes. The authors present a methodology for identifying societal ideologies, ideological shifts and power relations as reflected by the language of public discourse. As a case study, systematic analyses of changes in the Norwegian language over the last two decades are presented. It is demonstrated how Norwegian society has been gradually transformed from a traditional Scandinavian welfare society towards the values and ideals of neo-liberalist market ideology: for instance, language reflects and supports competitive practices increasingly being applied to public service provision. Another example is that the public discourse of individual rights has gradually been overshadowing the discourse of community duties and obligations. On the other hand, the analyses also reveal counter-ideologies, reflected, for example, in the launching of new words and expressions critical to neo-liberalist ideology.     

Movers and Stayers: A Study of Emigration from Sweden 1993–2014

A standard proposition in the migration literature is that emigrants are not drawn randomly from their source population, but rather compose a self-selected group in terms of labour market characteristics. Such self-selection refers to observed characteristics, such as education, or occupation, as well as unobserved characteristics such as cognitive abilities. However, due to data limitations, most previous studies on selectivity have analysed immigrants’ characteristics at destinations rather than using data from their source countries. This paper assesses emigrants’ selectivity patterns by following the full-risk population of natives over a long period of time (over 20 years). It also includes an innovative measure of selectivity on unobserved characteristics—namely, school performance—as a proxy for individual motivation and cognitive abilities, and it compares it to the widely used measure of income residuals. We use Swedish register data and assess the probabilities of leaving Sweden between 1993 and 2014 among men and women born in Sweden between 1975 and 1978. We further look for differences among Swedish emigrants who chose different countries of destination. The findings suggest that emigrants are positively self-selected in terms of their observed characteristics, whereas selectivity patterns in terms of unobserved characteristics are more complex. When we assess unobservable characteristics using compulsory school grades as a proxy, emigrants are found to be positively self-selected, while when using income residuals, we find that the effect is U-shaped. Individuals leaving to non-Nordic countries are also found to be more positively self-selected than those heading to neighbouring countries. We discuss these findings and their implications in light of economic and sociological theories.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10680-022-09634-3.     

On the Differential Attachments of Migrants from Central and Eastern Europe: A Typology of Labour Migration

In this article we develop an empirically grounded typology of labour migration patterns among migrants from Central and Eastern Europe, based on two dimensions: attachment to the destination country and attachment to the country of origin. We conducted a survey (N=654) among labour migrants in the Netherlands from Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. We found four migration patterns in our data: (i) circular migrants (mostly seasonal workers) with weak attachments to the country of destination, (ii) bi-nationals with strong attachments to both the home country and that of destination, (iii) footloose migrants with weak attachments to both the home and the destination country, and (iv) settlers with weak attachments to the home country. Our findings demonstrate the relevance to the debate on transnationalism and integration of distinguishing different migration patterns. Successful integration in Dutch society can go hand-in-hand with ‘strong’ as well as with ‘weak’ forms of transnationalism. The bi-national pattern shows a tendency to strong transnationalism, while the settlement pattern demonstrates less transnational involvement with the country of origin.     

Migrant and asylum-seeker children returned to Kosovo and Albania: predictive factors for social–emotional wellbeing after return

The return of rejected asylum seekers has a high priority on the national agendas of European States. In order to make well-informed asylum decisions involving children, knowledge of how asylum-seeker children fare after their return to their countries of origin is needed. This study aims to gain knowledge about the child-rearing environment and the social–emotional wellbeing of migrant children who have returned to Kosovo and Albania after a stay in a European host country. Based on a sample of 106 returned families, the study investigated the predictive factors for children’s social–emotional wellbeing using regression analyses. The findings show that procedural characteristics and ethnicity predict wellbeing, mediated through the quality of the child-rearing environment. The most vulnerable children did not have a stable resident status in the host country, belonged to a minority ethnic group and were older adolescents. The findings indicate that the wellbeing of returned children is not only dependent on conditions after repatriation, but also on the conditions which the families left in the host country. To enable sustainable return in a child’s best interests, the needs of vulnerable families and children should be thoroughly assessed prior to return, and reintegration support should be tailored to their situation.     

Multilevel governance from below: how Dutch cities respond to intra-EU mobility

ABSTRACT

‘Intra-EU mobility’ from new member states provides a governance challenge to European countries like the Netherlands. Freedom of movement within the EU enables mobility but also has important social consequences at the urban level in particular. This article discusses to what extent local, national and European governments have interacted in the governance of ‘intra-EU movement’ and how this has affected their policies regarding migrants from Central and Eastern Europe in particular. Focusing on the Dutch case, including the cities of The Hague and Rotterdam, this article shows a development from a decoupled relationship, to localist governance and only recently evidence of emerging ‘multilevel governance’. Speaking to the broader literature on multilevel governance, this article firstly shows that in spite of its broad theoretical application, multilevel governance should be seen as one of the varied types of governance in a multilevel setting. And secondly, it shows how and why local governments can play a key role in the bottom-up development of governance in a multilevel setting.     

STIRring the grid: engaging energy systems design and planning in the context of urban sociotechnical imaginaries

Since the first electrification systems were established in the United States between 1910 and 1930, energy systems governance at the municipal level has included competing visions for how engineering design and energy policy-making should foster particular social outcomes. Using Phoenix as a representative metropolitan area, and the cases of distributed generation and in-home power management devices as examples, this paper explores how the norms and values embedded in energy systems design and planning shape how residents experience change in the energy grid. Through these case studies, the authors argue that such “sociotechnical imaginaries” – collectively formed visions of social life related to science and technology development – are a crucial, yet overlooked, pathway for social science to engage in fostering socially reflexive mechanisms in energy development. To conclude, the authors outline a research program for applying the established methodology of socio-technical integration research (STIR) in order to develop socially reflexive capacities in municipal energy producing, regulating, and planning institutions. Such a program has the ability to produce a deeper intellectual understanding of how energy development occurs, and in doing so generate new pathways for fostering cultural and material changes in the structure of contemporary energy systems.     

Online reach correction in 6- and 11-month-old infants

The current study investigated the development of online reach control. Six- and 11-month-old infants reached for a toy while their hand position was tracked. The toy either remained stationary (baseline trials) or unexpectedly displaced left- or rightward during the reach (perturbation trials). To obtain a measure of online reach correction, we compared reaches in the perturbation trials to reaches in baseline trials using autoregression analysis. Infants of both age groups adjusted their reach trajectories in the direction of the displacement. Moreover, we divided the reaching movements into movement units, defined as the submovements of a reach between local minima in hand speed. Eleven-month-old infants adjusted their reach within the span of a single movement unit; corrections in 6-month-olds spanned multiple movement units. These results suggest that the reach control system has a rudimentary replanning capacity by 6 months of age, which, with age, further develops to a more sophisticated online control mechanism for ongoing reaches.