Externalizing, internalizing and fostering commitment: the case of born-global firms in emerging economies

This paper examines the HR practices of mature born-global firms from twenty-nine emerging economies. Through an examination of large scale survey data the paper questions the extent to which firm size impacts the employment of temporary workers, the employment of skilled workers and the extent of employee training. Findings suggest that as firm size increases the use of temporary workers decreases, the number of skilled workers increases and the number of employees receiving training also increases. The paper highlights how born-global firms are able to shift away from externalized, market-based approaches towards more internalized, commitment-based approaches in order to survive, adapt and grow

The Internationalization of Born-Digital Companies

The impact of the digitalization phenomenon on international entrepreneurship and international business has, until now, received little attention from the research community, and the major models of internationalization do not fully address the digitalized type of company. In response, this chapter aims to conceptualize the idea that the emergence of born-digitals presents a distinct phenomenon of an internationalizing enterprise. We do so using an explorative approach based on a conceptual framework. We conduct the study through a conceptual, theoretical research model, classifying born-digital firms on two dimensions: their degree of digitalization and their degree of internationalization. The theoretical contributions of this research are to offer a descriptive approach to the new phenomenon formed by international born-digital firms, and to help develop the corresponding firm typology. In terms of management, this research suggests a series of strategies used by born-digital companies, strategies that can be helpful in facilitating entrepreneurial opportunities for a leaner internationalization process.Post-print / Final draf

The production of nominal and verbal inflection in an agglutinative language: evidence from Hungarian

The contrast between regular and irregular inflectional morphology has been useful in investigating the functional and neural architecture of language. However, most studies have examined the regular/irregular distinction in non-agglutinative Indo-European languages (primarily English) with relatively simple morphology. Additionally, the majority of research has focused on verbal rather than nominal inflectional morphology. The present study attempts to address these gaps by introducing both plural and past tense production tasks in Hungarian, an agglutinative non-Indo-European language with complex morphology. Here we report results on these tasks from healthy Hungarian native-speaking adults, in whom we examine regular and irregular nominal and verbal inflection in a within-subjects design. Regular and irregular nouns and verbs were stem on frequency, word length and phonological structure, and both accuracy and response times were acquired. The results revealed that the regular/irregular contrast yields similar patterns in Hungarian, for both nominal and verbal inflection, as in previous studies of non-agglutinative Indo-European languages: the production of irregular inflected forms was both less accurate and slower than of regular forms, both for plural and past-tense inflection. The results replicate and extend previous findings to an agglutinative language with complex morphology. Together with previous studies, the evidence suggests that the regular/irregular distinction yields a basic behavioral pattern that holds across language families and linguistic typologies. Finally, the study sets the stage for further research examining the neurocognitive substrates of regular and irregular morphology in an agglutinative non-Indo-European language

Anaphoric biases of null and overt subjects in Italian and Spanish: a cross-linguistic comparison

The present study explores the cross-linguistic differences between Spanish and Italian in the anaphoric interpretation of null subjects and overt pronominal subjects. The availability of null subjects in a language is determined by the parametric settings of its syntax, but their felicitous use as an alternative to overt pronouns depends on contextual conditions affecting how different expressions retrieve their antecedents in the discourse. According to Accessibility Theory, at least some of these principles must have universal validity; however, up to now no experimental research has been carried out with the aim of comparing directly the interpretation of anaphoric dependencies in two typologically similar null subject languages. In this paper, we report the results of two pairs of self-paced reading experiments carried out in Spanish and in Italian. The results show a similar pattern for the resolution of null subjects, as predicted by Accessibility Theory, whereas the resolution of overt pronouns seems to diverge. This suggests that subtle differences restricted to the scope of the overt pronoun yield systematic variation between the two languages