Narratives and Performance - The Case of Stock-broking

The performance of individual stockbrokers differs. This paper aims at explaining these differences, or at least at making some sense of them. In a study of fourteen stockbrokers, the high performing brokers described their working life in a systematically different way, compared to the low performing brokers. The high and low performing brokers gave fundamentally different accounts of what, from an outsider’s viewpoint, seemed to be very similar work and working conditions. The brokers’ different accounts are interpreted and reconstructed into two opposing narratives of stockbrokers’ world of working. In an ideal typical sense these two narratives explain, or at least make sense of, the stockbrokers’ different levels of performance.narratives; performance; stock-broking; phenomenography; competence; work; interaction; alienation

Boundaryless Management - Creating, transforming and using knowledge in inter-organizational collaboration. A literature review

Current literature on organizations often argues that firms are becoming increasingly dependent on knowledge residing outside their own boundaries requiring organizations to increase their entrepreneurial abilities and make their boundaries more flexible and permeable. This paper reviews the literature on what might be called interorganizational knowledge work. Implied in this focus is an assumption of clear organizaitonal boundaries. Rather than taking these boundaries and their importance for granted, the current review, however, aims at relativizing these boundaries. By focusing the empirical phenomenon of collaboration between individuals in different organizations, four different streams of literature with different constructions of the organizational boundary and its importance were identified: the literature on learning in alliances and joint ventures, the literature on collaboration in industrial networks, the literature on social networks and communities of practice and finally the literature on geographical clusters and innovation systems. The above four streams of the literature are reviewed with a special focus on the following three questions: 1. What is the role of (organizational) boundaries in interorganizational knowledge work? 2. What do we know about how these boundaries can be overcome? 3. What are the implications for managing interorganizational knowledge work spelled out in the literature?Interorganizational collaboration; Knowledge Management; Literature review

Law and Film - a Complicated Marriage - Intellectual Property as a Hindrance for the Artistic Freedom in Film.

The purpose of this essay is to analyse, from a Swedish legal perspective, if the concept of intellectual property is a hindrance for the concept of artistic freedom in film and make suggestions on how such a problem can be handled. After using mainly a legal realism approach and both Internet and literature sources the conclusions are that intellectual property is a hindrance for the artistic freedom in film, due to the big influence that intellectual property has on what is transmitted through films, that this is a problem and that mandatory changes (legislation) should be done for artistic films

The commodity-consumer price connection: fact or fable?

The recent surge in commodity prices has rekindled interest in their power to predict consumer price inflation. But is this interest warranted? In examining the empirical relationship between commodity prices and consumer price inflation, this article finds that commodities' reputation as useful leading indicators of inflation is actually based more on fable than fact. Testing eight commonly used indexes, the authors conclude that although commodities had some predictive power in the past, the commodity-consumer price connection has broken down in the more recent period. They argue that this shift primarily reflects the diminished role of traditional commodities in U.S. production and the "sterilization" of some inflation signals by offsetting monetary policy actions.Prices ; Consumer price indexes ; Inflation (Finance)

Is the political business cycle for real?

This paper's macroeconomic model combines features from both real and political business cycle models. It augments a standard real business cycle tax model by allowing for varying levels of government partisanship and competence in order to replicate two important empirical regularities: First, that on average the economy expands early under Democratic presidents and contracts early under Republican presidents. Second, that presidents whose parties successfully retain the presidency have stronger-than-average growth in the second half of their terms. The model generates both of these features in conformity with U.S. post-World War II data.Business cycles

Is the Political Business Cycle for Real?

This paper constructs and examines a macroeconomic model which combines features from both real and political business cycle models. We augment a standard real business cycle tax model by allowing for varying levels of government partisanship and competence in order to replicate two important empirical regularities: First, that on average the economy expands early under Democratic Presidents and contracts early under Republican Presidents. Second, that Presidents whose parties successfully retain the presidency have stronger than average growth in the second half of their terms. The model generates both of these features that conform to U.S. Post World War II data.Political business cycle

The expression of non-actual motion in Swedish, French and Thai

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.Dynamic descriptions of static spatial situations, such as the road goes through the forest have attracted a lot of attention across different semantic theories. Analyses in terms of fictive motion and subjective motion have proposed that such expressions are strongly motivated by universal cognitive and conceptual factors. I present theoretical arguments for the conflation of several different motivations in the literature. Instead of a single general motivation, three distinct experiential motivations are presented under the term non-actual motion. These experiential motivations are used to design an elicitation tool for investigating non-actual motion cross-linguistically. Elicited descriptions from speakers of Swedish, French and Thai suggest that such descriptions are conventionalized in all three languages, which supports the universal character of non-actual motion across languages. However, in expressing non-actual motion, the language-specific resources for expressing actual motion are used

The (After) Life-Cycle Theory of Religious Contributions

We construct and estimate an economic model of religious giving. We employ a dynamic consumer optimization model with mortality in which intra-temporal utility stems from both consumption and religious contributions. Individuals also decide how to allocate resources between religious contributions (which have both a this-life consumption value and an after-life investment value) and other consumption expenditures. If religious contributions do not have an after-life investment value, the ratio of contributions to consumption expenditures should be unrelated to the probability of death. However, if there is an investment value from religious giving, individuals should allocate a greater share of their income to religious contributions as their probability of death increases. We estimate the model using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey on the consumption and religious contribution patterns of a repeated cross-section of households and of a synthetic cohort panel. We find strong evidence that individuals behave as if religious contributions have a value in the after-life, in a manner consistent with the after life-cycle model. The estimates of the structural parameters of the model also imply that while after-life investment considerations (i.e. impending death) are an important determinant of the life-cycle profile of religious contributions, within-life (i.e. religious consumption) factors pin down a household’s average level of religious contributions over a lifetime.god, life-cycle, consumption, religion, tithing

Flexibilitet och hållbarhet i arbetslivet - om chefers syn på organisering av arbete i ett hälsofrämjande och hållbarhetsperspektiv

Inledning Kunskapsintensiva branscher präglas av snabba omställningar och kräver ständig anpassning till ny teknologi. Det avspeglar sig i verksamheternas organisering av arbete och för den enskilde individen i påverkan på arbetsförhållanden och arbetsbelastning. För en ökad förståelse om hur arbetets organisering påverkar arbetsförhållanden är det av intresse att studera chefers strategier i organisering av arbete och hur det kan relateras till medarbetarnas välbefinnande. Syfte Studiens syfte är att ur ett hälsofrämjande och hållbarhetsperspektiv beskriva och förklara chefers syn på hur krav på flexibilitet påverkar organisering av arbete respektive medarbetares arbetsförhållanden och arbetsbelastning. Metod Halvstrukturerade intervjuer genomfördes under april/maj 2017. Via snöbollsurval samlades datamaterial in från första och andra linjens chefer. Materialet analyserades med latent tematisk innehållsanalys. Resultat Studiens resultat indikerar att arbetsförhållanden och arbetsbelastning påverkas av krav på flexibilitet. Rörliga mål och snabba omställningar påverkar både arbetsförhållanden och arbetsbelastning och bidrar till att arbetsprocesser upplevs otydliga. Trots att cheferna har inflytande på arbetets organisering upplevs det svårt att skapa förutsättningar för en hälsofrämjande och hållbar arbetsmiljö. Brister i organiseringen av strategiska mål och brist på organisatoriskt stöd anges som främsta orsaker. Cheferna anser det viktigt att finnas tillgängliga för sina medarbetare i frågor som rör välbefinnandet men menar samtidigt att det inte finns något naturligt forum för att prata om frågor som rör arbetshälsa. Slutsats Ur ett arbetshälsoperspektiv indikerar studiens resultat att ökade krav på flexibilitet kan ge upphov till diffusa gränsdragningar och tvetydigheter, vilket i sin tur ökar risken för instabila arbetsförhållanden och överbelastning. Genom att integrera frågor som rör välbefinnande och arbetshälsa med verksamheternas strategiska utvecklingsmål samt erbjuda chefer aktivt kunskapsstöd skapas förutsättningar för att stävja negativa effekter orsakade av höga krav på flexibilitet och effektivitet