The German Journal of Human Resource Management as a permeable enclave

Journal editors who publish papers authored by colleagues and former graduate students have been charged with practicing favoritism, with the implication that the papers in question are of lower quality than those written by scholars with no ties to the editor. Using citation analysis, the authors find strong evidence that although journal editors occasionally publish subpar papers authored by colleagues and former graduate students, on balance their use of professional connections enables them to identify and 'capture' high-impact papers for publication. This implies that a practice interpreted as favoritism by many scholars in fact serves to enhance efficiency in the market for scientific knowledge. Copyright 1994 by University of Chicago Press.

A modification of economic analysis to incorporate incomplete information and uncertain foresight as axioms is suggested here. This approach dispenses with “profit maximization”; and it does not rely on the predictable, individual behavior that is usually assumed, as a first approximation, in standard textbook treatments. Despite these changes, the analytical concepts usually associated with such behavior are retained because they are not dependent upon such motivation or foresight. The suggested approach embodies the principles of biological evolution and natural selection by interpreting the economic system as an adoptive mechanism which chooses among exploratory actions generated by the adaptive pursuit of “success” or “profit.” The resulting analysis is applicable to actions usually regarded as aberrations from standard economic behavior as well as to behavior covered by the customary analysis. This wider applicability and the removal of the unrealistic postulates of accurate anticipations and fixed states of knowledge have provided motivation for the study.

THIS paper derives and tests some implications about differences in behavior resulting from differences in property right arrangements, and in particular, between proprietary for-profit and nonproprietary not-for-profit hospitals (hereafter referred to as proprietary and nonproprietary hospitals respectively) . The arrangements in nonproprietary nonprofit enterprises are different from those in proprietary profit-seeking organizations because (1) certain rights or claims to benefits in nonproprietary organizations are not transferable by sale as they are in proprietary organizations, and (2) managers or workers in nonprofit organizations do not have exclusive claim on residual products (the current flows of money and nonmoney benefits) that is characteristic of for-profit enterprises.

T HE cyclical behavior of labor markets reveals a number of puzzling features for which there are no truly satisfying explanations. Included among these are (1) occupational differences in the stability of employment and earnings, (2) the uneven incidence of unemployment, (3) the persistence of differential labor turnover rates, and (4) discriminatory hiring and firing policies. I believe that the major impediment to rational explanations for these phenomena lies in the classical treatment of labor as a purely variable factor. In this paper I propose a short-run theory of employment which rests on the premise that labor is a quasi-fixed factor. The fixed employment costs arise from investments by firms in hiring and training activities. The theory of labor as a quasi-fixed factor is developed in Part I. In Part II, the implications of this theory are subjected to various empirical tests. Finally, Part III turns to an examination of alternative theories and an extension of my theory to a theory of occupational wage differentials. The concept of labor as a quasi-fixed factor is, in my opinion, the relevant one for a short-run theory of employment. Its implications are amenable to empirical verification and are, in the main,

What Can Regulators Regulate? The Case of Electricity

Market Insurance, Self-Insurance, and Self-Protection

CONTROVERSY over the relative efficiency of public versus private enterprise has a long history in economic thought. Many of the same issues that concerned Chadwick and Mill in their debates in the 1850s over nationalizing certain British industries and von Mises and Hayek versus Lange and Lerner in their well-known exchanges about the efficacy of a centrally planned economy continue to come up in the literature.1 In fact the modern property rights theory of the firm, postulated by theorists such as Alchian, Becker, and Demsetz follows in the tradition of von Mises and Hayek in stressing the impact on economic efficiency of alternative ownership forms. Special emphasis is placed on cost-reward arrangements within private and public enterprises in this approach to the theory of the firm. Where a direct connection between productivity and reward is severed, as in public enterprises, production will be less economically efficient. While this is a very appealing approach to firm behavior, it is yet to be subjected to a rigorous test with respect to firm costs. De Alessi purports to examine the implication of the property rights theory for managerial tenure.2

This paper draws a remarkably simple bridge between auction theory and incentive theory. It considers the auctioning of an indivisible project among several fi rms. The firms have private information about their future cost at th e bidding stage, and the selected firm ex post invests in cost reduct ion. The authors show that (1) the optimal auction can be implemented by a dominant strategy auction that uses information about both the first bid and the second bid; (2) the winner faces a (linear) incenti ve contract; (3) the fixed transfer to the winner decreases with his announced expected cost and increases with the second lowest announce d expected cost; and (4) the share of cost overruns borne by the winn er decreases with the winner's announced expected cost. Copyright 1987 by University of Chicago Press.

This paper describes how the composition of the labor force changes with economic development. It considers recent trends in women's labor force participation and the type of jobs held in various sectors as national per capita income increases. The paper notes that women are more likely to work in the family or informal labor market if the labor costs to firms exceed the opportunity costs of female labor to family enterprises. Firms are at a relative disadvantage compared with families in the employment of less experienced and less skilled labor, presumably because their labor costs are affected by such regulations as minimum wage, social insurance premiums and limits on firing. In Asia and Africa, an increase in the proportion of employment in firms within the major sectors accounts for most of the rapid growth in women's overall share of wage employment. In Latin America, however, growth in the proportion of firm employment has been slower than elsewhere, and the share of women in wage employment has even fallen overall in several countries. It is not unreasonable to assume that women have lost more than men from market regulations and distortions, but little research has addressed this proposition. If it is true, however, these interventions in the labor market may be responsible for slowing women's transition from nonmarket and family work to firm employment. This in turn may affect the rate and structure of economic growth.

This article analyzes HRM trend in Taiwan by reviewing 117 human resource journal articles. Source of the articles are predominantly collected from 7 local management journals during years of 1993 till 2002. We mainly examine the representative trends by using human resource functional typology and divide into 8 categories including ”Strategic Human Resource Management” and others. In longitudinal aspect, HRM researches have increased in recently years. Stable quantity of papers was published in the categories of ”Compensation”, ”Training and Development”, ”International Human Resource Management” and ”Human Resource Planning” over the years. However, articles published in the categories of ”Strategic Human Resource Management” and ”Recruitment and selection” grow rapidly in recent years. From the quantitative aspect, papers categorize in ”International Human Resource Management” outnumbers all other categories. Then comes ”Training and Development” and ”Compensation and Benefit” also consist of relative quantity of papers in those categories. Finally, least amount of articles is categorized in ”Performance Management”. Most of the research (87%) are quantitative research. From the journal aspect, the ratio of human resource research between all research continues to progress from 1998. ”Training and Development” and ”International human resource management” are the most popular topics between journals. ”Sun Yat-sen Management Review” and ”Journal of Human Resource Management” have the most human resource papers comparing to other journals.

Institutional Quality and Income Distribution

Objective To study the scientific human resource (HR) management for further enhancing clinical nursing and providing good service of nursing,so as to put into basic nursing effect and improve patients' satisfaction degree.Methods 2 demonstration points of good nursing wards were selected as experimental units,we carried out responsibility for basic nursing,enhanced HR management of personneland strengthened post training and set up service concept, established logistics support system,improved indemnificatory measurement and decrease nurses' itinerancy.Results The patients' satisfaction degree for nurses increased by generalizing experiment unit.At the same time,nurses' general diathesis had also improved.Conclusions Enhancing scientific HR management is the key to carry out basic nursing. Key words: Good service of nursing; Basic nursing; Human resource management

THE new economic approach to political behavior seeks to develop a positive theory of legislation, in contrast to the normative approach of welfare economics. The new approach asks why certain industries and not others become regulated or have tariffs imposed on imports or why income transfers take the form and direction they do, in contrast to asking which industries should be regulated or have tariffs imposed, or what transfers should be made.

Over the last decades, human resource management has received increasing attention in family business scholarship. However, works on human resource management in the context of family firms remain relatively low as compared to the more general body of studies on human resource management. This article introduces our special issue of the German Journal of Human Resource Management, which discusses facets of how family firms configure human resource management and set human resource practices. We first give a brief overview on the conceptual and empirical research that relates to and informs human resource management within family firms, resulting in a human resource system framework. We then discuss ideas for future human resource management research, namely, the influence of the owning family on human resource orientation, non-family employees as human resource recipients and the role of human resource professionals in delivering human resource management. Furthermore, we call for making psychological foundations part of the human resource management scholarship agenda. There is still work to be done before human resource management can find its ‘place in the sun’ in the family business community. Hence, this special issue contributes to developing family business human resource management scholarship further by offering the human resource system framework, by suggesting directions for future research and by advancing our conceptual and empirical understanding of human resource management in the context of family firms.

Strategic human resource management (SHRM) has been an important strand of research in the HRM field for over three decades, and has attracted heated debates in recent years. One main critique of the state of SHRM research is its increasing detachment from HRM practice, in the pursuit of more theoretical rigor and methodological sophistication. Our review article has two main tasks. First, we review SHRM research published in two leading HRM journals—Human Resource Management and Human Resource Management Journal—in the light of the criticisms on SHRM research and use this as a backdrop of our second task. Second, we critically examine SHRM research conducted in the Chinese context by drawing on a systematic review on extant literature. In doing so, we draw on a wider range of HRM journals such as Human Resource Management Review, The International Journal of Human Resource Management, and so forth. We find that while the trend of psychologization in SHRM research is gathering pace, the range of theoretical perspectives mobilized to inform the studies is actually expanding. We call for SHRM research to be more contextualized and more practical phenomenon‐driven SHRM research. We indicate several avenues for future research, using China as an example.