Forced cooperation from above: the case of Sweden's establishment reform

In December 2010, significant parts of Swedish integration policy were changed. Through the ‘establishment reform’, a centralization was implemented in which the national level overtook the responsibility of municipalities for the establishment of newly arrived immigrants. In today's system, the responsibility is shared between several authorities, the municipalities, and publicly financed private actors. Recent governmental reports have described the current situation as being characterized by coordination problems and shortcomings in accountability. This policy creates an institutional landscape that spans both vertical and horizontal dimensions, reflecting several levels of the public administration and actors that originate from several sectors. The purpose of this article is to explore the governance of Swedish integration policy, with a theoretical focus derived from the ideal types of hierarchy, market, and network. We examine one Swedish region in which parts of the establishment reform were applied as a pilot project before being applied to the rest of Sweden. The theoretically driven results are unexpected in that they reveal traits of governance steering but also of top-down perspectives and restrictions for involved actors in a way that counteracts theoretical logics.     

Polysubstance use patterns in underground rave attenders: a cluster analysis

Drug use in mainstream rave parties has been widely documented in a large number of studies. However, not much is known about drug use in underground raves. The purpose of this study is to find out the polysubstance use patterns at underground raves. Two hundred and fifty-two young people between the ages of 18 and 30 who went to underground raves were interviewed. They were given a questionnaire to collect information on drug use at raves. Ravers used a mean of 4.9 different drugs at the last rave they had been to. Over 75% of them used tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, and amphetamine, and over half also used powder ecstasy. Two differentiated use patterns were found: one pattern concentrated more on the use of stimulants and the other on the use of hallucinogens. Underground ravers have a "standard" sociodemographic profile. The use of drugs is much higher than equivalent age group. Higher drug use prevalence than in mainstream rave parties is also observed. Different patterns of use appear which will be necessary to consider in designing preventions and risk reduction strategies,     

DISCRIMINATION AND EMPLOYMENT PROTECTION

We study a search model with employment protection legislation. We show that if the output from the match is uncertain at the hiring stage, a discriminatory equilibrium may exist in which workers with the same productive characteristics are subject to different hiring standards. If a bad match takes place, discriminated workers will take longer to find another job, prolonging the costly period for the firm. This makes it less profitable for firms to hire discriminated workers, thus sustaining the discrimination. In contrast to Becker's model, the existence of employers with a taste for discrimination may make it more profitable to discriminate, even for firms without discriminatory preferences.     

An Auction Mechanism for Pricing and Capacity Allocation with Multiple Products

We consider a pricing and short‐term capacity allocation problem in the presence of buyers with orders for bundles of products. The supplier's objective is to maximize her net profit, computed as the difference between the revenue generated through sales of products and the production and inventory holding costs. The objective of each buyer is similarly profit maximization, where a buyer's profit is computed as the difference between the time‐dependent utility of the product bundle he plans to buy, expressed in monetary terms, and the price of the bundle. We assume that bundles' utilities are buyers' private information and address the problem of allocating the facility's output. We directly consider the products that constitute the supplier's output as market goods. We study the case where the supplier follows an anonymous and linear pricing strategy, with extensions that include quantity discounts and time‐dependent product and delivery prices. In this setting, the winner determination problem integrates the capacity allocation and scheduling decisions. We propose an iterative auction mechanism with non‐decreasing prices to solve this complex problem, and present a computational analysis to investigate the efficiency of the proposed method under supplier's different pricing strategies. Our analysis shows that the problem with private information can be effectively solved with the proposed auction mechanism. Furthermore, the results indicate that the auction mechanism achieves more than 80% of the system's profit, and the supplier receives a higher percentage of profit especially when the ratio of demand to available capacity is high.     

Karl Polanyi: a theorist of mixed economies

Theory and Society - Karl Polanyi’s scholarship is interpreted in radically different ways. The “hard” reading of Polanyi sees him as a radical socialist; the “soft”...     

How market entry order mediates the influence of firm resources on new product performance

Building from the resource-based view of the firm and the first-mover advantage literature, this paper asserts that the entry order in a new product-market affects how the firm's resources and capabilities influence the product's performance. This proposition is tested on a sample of 136 product launches by Spanish manufacturing firms. The empirical analysis reveals that firms with superior managerial and R&D resources achieve superior new product performance when an early-entry strategy is adopted. Manufacturing resources also contribute positively to the success of new products, but this effect is weakened by the difficulties and inconveniences that firms with advantages in operations face when they attempt to pioneer a new market. The results regarding the influence of marketing resources on new product performance are not conclusive.     

Conditional occupational segregation of minorities in the US

We analyze the role of the demographic and human capital characteristics of minorities in the US in explaining their high occupational segregation with respect to whites and the extent to which they are locked into low-paying jobs. We measure conditional segregation based on an estimated counterfactual distribution in which minorities are given the relevant characteristics of whites. Our results show that the different levels of attained education by ethnicity and race explain a substantial share of occupational segregation among non-whites in the US, while English skills or immigration status are especially relevant for explaining segregation among Hispanics and Asians.     

A Matter of Learning: How Human Resources Affect Organizational Performance

Recently, a number of studies have tried to examine the processes that explain the influence of high performance work systems (HPWS) on company performance, in an attempt to understand which variables mediate this relationship and to what extent they do so. The importance of the organizational learning capability (OLC) construct has traditionally been outlined as being essential for a company's survival and effective performance. Thus, it seems important to establish whether HPWS can be considered an antecedent of OLC, and consequently to confirm whether OLC acts as a mediating variable in the HPWS–company performance linkage. Bearing in mind that HPWS represent a ‘bundle’ of mutually reinforcing, overlapping and synergistic individual human resource practices, this positive connection between HPWS and OLC seems reasonable. We tested our hypotheses by applying a structural equation methodology to a sample of 163 Spanish companies. Our findings show that the effects of HPWS on organizational performance are mediated by OLC.