Changes at Corporate Headquarters: Review,Integration and Future Research

In modern corporations, the corporate headquarters (CHQ) unit is considered central to the fortunes of the overall firm. In light of ever‐changing environments, changes at the CHQ have become a crucial concern in management research and practice, and scholars have studied a variety of changes at the CHQ. Despite the common focus on the CHQ entity and the potential for cross‐fertilization across several research tracks, a coherent picture of this dispersed body of knowledge is lacking. This paper reviews 25 years of research on changes at the CHQ. In so doing, it advances a common language and an overarching framework that integrates the existing knowledge in the intellectual domains of strategy, organizational design and international business research. On this basis, the authors suggest directions for future research to advance knowledge of: (1) the pressure for and resistance to changes at the CHQ; (2) interrelationships among changes at the CHQ; (3) change processes at the CHQ; (4) agents involved in changes at the CHQ; and (5) adaptive and disruptive effects of changes at the CHQ. Overall, the study provides a conceptual basis for combining the existing knowledge of changes at the CHQ and serves as a guide for future research.     

Mobility as a stratifying factor in housing: dwelling-in-place contra dwelling-on-the-move in Sweden

Housing is almost entirely overlooked in mobility studies. Yet mobility is intrinsically linked to housing, not only for the cybernetic elite or global nomads, but also for the middle class. Through a comparative case study of two extreme cases of housing, the Markeliushus from 1935 and Victoria Park from 2009, this study found that mobility has been continuously linked to discourses and practices of housing the modern Swede. Furthermore the findings suggest that two contrasting housing forms have evolved: dwelling-in-place and dwelling-on-the-move. I argue that these two housing forms are part of an evolving stratification of housing based on mobility. The article concludes that mobility has become an entry point for disaffiliation by privileged groups, accessible through housing.     

Navigations between regulations and gut instinct: the unveiling of collective memory in decision‐making processes where teenagers are placed in residential care

The decision to take a young person away from his or her family into out‐of‐home care and treatment is the most drastic intervention within the statutory powers bestowed upon social services. The results of reports on the quality of residential treatment reveal that state supervision has not proven to be a good substitute for parental care. In this paper we analyse the decision‐making process when young persons are placed in residential care. Focus groups and individual interviews with different stakeholders were conducted. The results show that the placements are a collective process involving negotiations between the different parties with a coordinating social worker in the middle, with the aim to bring something to build hope on in often desperate situations, regardless of the specific treatment method used. To inform the process, the social workers draw on a ‘collective memory’ shared among colleagues in the department. Important signs of quality of a residential unit were the relational and collaborative competence from the staff. The inclination to use soft, diffuse information in decision‐making shows a striking lack of evidence upon which social workers can build well‐informed and knowledge‐based decisions.     

STATISTICAL INFERENCE OF TRANSMISSION FIDELITY OF DNA METHYLATION PATTERNS OVER SOMATIC CELL DIVISIONS IN MAMMALS

We develop Bayesian inference methods for a recently-emerging type of epigenetic data to study the transmission fidelity of DNA methylation patterns over cell divisions. The data consist of parent-daughter double-stranded DNA methylation patterns with each pattern coming from a single cell and represented as an unordered pair of binary strings. The data are technically difficult and time-consuming to collect, putting a premium on an efficient inference method. Our aim is to estimate rates for the maintenance and de novo methylation events that gave rise to the observed patterns, while accounting for measurement error. We model data at multiple sites jointly, thus using whole-strand information, and considerably reduce confounding between parameters. We also adopt a hierarchical structure that allows for variation in rates across sites without an explosion in the effective number of parameters. Our context-specific priors capture the expected stationarity, or near-stationarity, of the stochastic process that generated the data analyzed here. This expected stationarity is shown to greatly increase the precision of the estimation. Applying our model to a data set collected at the human FMR1 locus, we find that measurement errors, generally ignored in similar studies, occur at a non-trivial rate (inappropriate bisulfite conversion error: 1.6% with 80% CI: 0.9-2.3%). Accounting for these errors has a substantial impact on estimates of key biological parameters. The estimated average failure of maintenance rate and daughter de novo rate decline from 0.04 to 0.024 and from 0.14 to 0.07, respectively, when errors are accounted for. Our results also provide evidence that de novo events may occur on both parent and daughter strands: the median parent and daughter de novo rates are 0.08 (80% CI: 0.04-0.13) and 0.07 (80% CI: 0.04-0.11), respectively.     

Dual Career Couples – eine Konstellation fürs Life-Coaching

The author discusses “Dual Career Couples” (DCC’s) with children and the counselling with them. She analyzes the history of discussion of this issue in the USA and in the German speaking countries and she presents the advantages, the main topics and also the special problems of these couples. It is a matter of the relation of the couple to others on the one hand and between themselves on the other hand. These couples should be supported by the companies of their work as well as by life-coaching. Life-coaching stresses three main issues: how to support the affective relationship, the balance between giving and taking, and how to organize the family management.     

Derivatives and Fisher information of bivariate copulas

Data sets with complex relationships between random variables are increasingly studied in statistical applications. A popular approach to model their dependence is the use of copula functions. Our contribution is to derive expressions for the observed and expected information for several bivariate copula families, in particular for the Student’s $t$ -copula. Further likelihood derivatives which are required for numerical implementations are computed and a numerically stable implementation is provided in the R-package VineCopula. Using a real world data set of stock returns, we demonstrate the applicability of our approach for the routinely calculation of standard errors. In particular, we illustrate how this prevents overestimating the time-variation of dependence parameters in a rolling window analysis.