Expediting youth's entry into employment whilst overlooking precariousness: Flexi‐employability and disciplinary activation in Hong Kong

With an emphasis placed on supply‐side interventions such as skills training and incentives enhancement, active labor market polices (ALMPs) are strongly promoted by international organizations and widely adopted across different welfare regimes to boost employment rates. This article first presents the under‐examined relationship between ALMPs and employment precariousness, which has posed a challenge to the neoliberal notion of employability and activation. Youth‐focused employment policies tend to speed up employment entry whilst downplaying the risk of precariousness and the importance of job quality, and thus further reinforcing the belief that engaging in precarious employment is tolerable if not inevitable. The article then examines the case of Hong Kong, which illustrates that its relatively low rate of youth unemployment may conceal the unfavorable employment conditions confronted by youth. It is argued that the service‐led employment policies and short‐term vocational training define the employability of young workers in terms of labor flexibilities. The coined phase of “flexi‐employability” is characterized by promoting youth's readiness for, and adaptability to, the volatilities and changing demands of the labor market. Arguably, the disciplinary approach to youth activation would only strengthen the work‐first principle by enforcing young people to take up jobs available and leave welfare as soon as possible, but without thoroughly addressing the risks and insecurities generated by the labor market in undermining their well‐being.     

Parenting,Uncertainty, and Expert Advice: How Privileged American Families Work with Private Counselors in Their Children's College Race

This article uses privileged families who hire Independent Educational Consultants (IECs) as an instance to examine how privileged parents collaborate with individuals whom they consider educational experts to support their children in the college race. We argue that advantaged parents' anxieties about their children have created a market for IECs who provide expert advice in order to mitigate the uncertainties that these parents experience and to manage various goals that they want to achieve at an important turning point in their children's lives. Drawing primarily on interviews with parents who work with IECs, we introduce the concept of “collaborative cultivation” to analyze the processes whereby advantaged parents rely on the expertise and expert status of private counselors to cope with their and their children's vulnerability in the college race while at the same time preparing their children for the unknown future. The parental method of “concerted cultivation” reveals how elite parents rely on individuals they perceive as experts to establish “bridges” between their own social worlds and the academic worlds that appear to beyond their control. This bridging labor points to the myriad cultural beliefs enacted to justify the child‐rearing goals that privileged parents wish to accomplish by working with IECs.     

Essential Micro‐foundations for Contemporary Business Operations: Top Management Tangible Competencies,Relationship‐based Business Networks and Environmental Sustainability

Although various studies have emphasized linkages between firm competencies, networks and sustainability at organizational level, the links between top management tangible competencies (TMTCs) (e.g. contemporary relevant quantitative‐focused education such as big data analytics and data‐driven applications linked with the internet of things, relevant experience and analytical business applications), relationship‐based business networks (RBNs) and environmental sustainability have not been well established at micro‐level, and there is a literature gap in terms of investigating these relationships. This study examines these links based on the unique data collected from 175 top management representatives (chief executive officers and managing directors) working in food import and export firms headquartered in the UK and New Zealand. Our results from structural equation modelling indicate that TMTCs are the key determinants for building RBNs, mediating the correlation between TMTCs and environmental sustainability. Directly, the competencies also play a vital role towards environmental practices. The findings further depict that relationship‐oriented firms perform better compared to those which focus less on such networks. Consequently, our findings provide a deeper understanding of the micro‐foundations of environmental sustainability based on TMTCs rooted in the resource‐based view and RBNs entrenched in social network theory. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings, and we provide suggestions for future research.     

The relation between coopetition and innovation/entrepreneurship

This special issue is an outcome of the 2017 Global Innovation and Knowledge Academy (GIKA) Conference, which took place at ISEG School of Economics and Management, Lisbon, Portugal, between June 28th and 30th, 2017. As the seventh of its kind, the 2017 GIKA Conference continued to attract the attention of scholars from around the world, receiving more than 600 submissions, only 300 of which were accepted for presentation at the conference. The topic of this special issue—the relation between coopetition and innovation/entrepreneurship—had an own track at the GIKA Conference, which served as a first round review for some of the submissions to the journal. The special issue was also open for external submissions.     

Women's Marriage Behavior Following a Premarital Birth in Sub‐Saharan Africa

This study examines the relationship between premarital childbearing and the timing of women's entry into their first marriage in sub‐Saharan Africa. The study shows that African women who have a premarital birth generally experience later transitions to marriage than do their childless peers. Although the birth of a child precipitates a quicker transition to marriage initially, unmarried mothers, on average, marry at older ages than their childless peers and remain single for between 2 and 14 years. Evidence from a subsample of countries confirms that the time between having a child and first marriage has lengthened slightly in some countries; however, this reflects mainly the overall trend toward later marriage, rather than a further bifurcation of the marital trajectories of mothers versus childless women. The study raises policy concerns about the welfare of Africa's single mothers and their children.     

Entrepreneurial Motivations and Capabilities of Migrant Entrepreneurs in Australia

This article presents findings on immigrant entrepreneurship in Australia. The relationship between the entrepreneurial start‐up motivation, co‐ethnic preferences and entrepreneurial capabilities of established immigrant businesses are explored. We analyse data collected with a self‐administered survey questionnaire from 157 immigrant entrepreneurs in Melbourne's suburbs. Our findings show that immigrant entrepreneurs who report a high level of individual achievement as their start‐up motivation also report high levels of entrepreneurial capabilities in terms of opportunity recognition, managerial innovativeness and proactiveness. Immigrant entrepreneurs who are highly influenced by co‐ethnic preferences on staff employment and customer targeting report higher opportunity recognition than those who have a co‐ethnic preference on suppliers. We provide important insights and explanations for these findings and their implications for Australian immigrant entrepreneurs and policymakers.     

“He invited me and didn't ask anything in return” Migration and Mobility as Vulnerabilities for Sexual Exploitation among Female Adolescents in Mexico

Although human trafficking is recognized as a major human rights violation, there is limited evidence regarding the vulnerabilities that contribute to female adolescents’ risk of being forced or coerced into the sex trade. Vulnerabilities such as gender‐based violence, economic and social inequalities have been shown to shape the risk of sexual exploitation among adolescents. In‐depth interviews (n=18) with current sex workers who reported being deceived or forced into the sex trade as adolescents (<17 years old) were analysed to explore their experiences of migration and mobility in Mexico. Driven by socio‐economic and vulnerabilities in home communities, adolescents often engaged in internal migration and mobility to other Mexican communities and states. Migration and mobility further predisposed them to social isolation, economic hardship and abuse, which were used as tools to trick them into the sex trade. Policies that support safer migration for adolescents in origin, transit, and destination communities are needed.     

Family Characteristics and Mate Selection: Evidence From Computer‐Assisted Dating in Japan

Research on mate selection rarely considers singles' preferences for their future partners' family configurations and experiences. Using online dating records from a matchmaking agency in Japan, a society with a strong emphasis on family and kinship, we examine how singles' responses to date requests correspond to potential mates' family circumstances. Results showed that singles' preferences for potential partners' family characteristics stem from a concern about future obligations toward the partner's family and stereotypes associated with certain family traits. Singles are less likely to accept requests from those from large families, which are seen as traditional. Being from a large family, however, hampers individuals' dating chances more if they are firstborn and have no brothers, two conditions that make them the designated child to care for elderly parents. We also find that Japanese singles seek partners with more of the universally valued family traits rather than traits similar to their own.     

THE CREDIT‐CHANNEL TRANSMISSION MECHANISM AND THE NONLINEAR GROWTH AND WELFARE EFFECTS OF INFLATION AND TAXES

With the credit‐channel effect driven by the central bank's open market operations, this paper's model easily gives rise to the nonlinear inflation‐growth nexus, which is evidenced by a number of cross‐country empirical studies. The threshold level of the inflation rate is found to be lower when tax rates are higher. The presence of the credit‐channel effect also provides the rationale for setting positive (and smaller than 1) tax rates on consumption, labor income, and capital income. The optimal tax rates rise as the inflation target declines. Under a fiscal policy rule where labor and capital income taxes move proportionally to each other, the optimal capital income tax rate could be higher than the optimal labor income tax rate. Under a sufficiently large central bank balance sheet, the credit‐channel effect will be so weak that inflation and all kinds of taxes are growth and welfare repressing. This provides a rationale for central banks that have implemented quantitative easing policies to shrink their balance sheets. (JEL E58, E62, O42)