Arthur Bert, Timothy MacDonald and Thomas Herd
Today, with years of corporate experience in managing mergers and acquisitions, there is little excuse for deals that don’t create value. Regrettably failure is the case more…
Abstract
Today, with years of corporate experience in managing mergers and acquisitions, there is little excuse for deals that don’t create value. Regrettably failure is the case more often than not. Depending on the industry, a top‐performing merger can increase shareholders’ wealth anywhere from 4 to 65 percent above industry averages. But such rewards only go to companies that understand that merger success is built on two main factors: timing and execution. A.T. Kearney’s findings indicate that a company has just two years to make the deal work. After year two, the window of opportunity on forging merger synergies has all but closed. This article highlights the reasons why timing is so important to merger success, and lays out the seven ground rules‐from selecting leaders quickly, and establishing clear goals, to managing risks and expectations – that leading acquirers abide by to ensure merger success.
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The GLC Housing Authority, the largest municipal housing authority in the world, has more than 200 000 dwellings to maintain. To do this it employs on housing maintenance alone…
Abstract
The GLC Housing Authority, the largest municipal housing authority in the world, has more than 200 000 dwellings to maintain. To do this it employs on housing maintenance alone some 4 000 men operating from eight district centres. Every year 800 000 defects are reported by tenants. These defects cover the whole range of household repairs and require the services of carpenters, plumbers, bricklayers, plasterers, electricians, painters and glaziers. There are also mobile teams of drain and dust chute cleaners, fencing and boarding‐up workers and gardeners. In addition to household repairs and preventive maintenance, there is periodic inspection of all high rise blocks, resurfacing of courtyards and estate roads, large scale replacement of fencing and redecoration of all vacant dwellings. Most of the estates in which houses and flats are grouped are in Greater London, but there are also 15 cottage estates outside the area and 18 groups of old people's bungalows in seaside towns.
Meltem Aksoy, Seda Yanık and Mehmet Fatih Amasyali
When a large number of project proposals are evaluated to allocate available funds, grouping them based on their similarities is beneficial. Current approaches to group proposals…
Abstract
Purpose
When a large number of project proposals are evaluated to allocate available funds, grouping them based on their similarities is beneficial. Current approaches to group proposals are primarily based on manual matching of similar topics, discipline areas and keywords declared by project applicants. When the number of proposals increases, this task becomes complex and requires excessive time. This paper aims to demonstrate how to effectively use the rich information in the titles and abstracts of Turkish project proposals to group them automatically.
Design/methodology/approach
This study proposes a model that effectively groups Turkish project proposals by combining word embedding, clustering and classification techniques. The proposed model uses FastText, BERT and term frequency/inverse document frequency (TF/IDF) word-embedding techniques to extract terms from the titles and abstracts of project proposals in Turkish. The extracted terms were grouped using both the clustering and classification techniques. Natural groups contained within the corpus were discovered using k-means, k-means++, k-medoids and agglomerative clustering algorithms. Additionally, this study employs classification approaches to predict the target class for each document in the corpus. To classify project proposals, various classifiers, including k-nearest neighbors (KNN), support vector machines (SVM), artificial neural networks (ANN), classification and regression trees (CART) and random forest (RF), are used. Empirical experiments were conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method by using real data from the Istanbul Development Agency.
Findings
The results show that the generated word embeddings can effectively represent proposal texts as vectors, and can be used as inputs for clustering or classification algorithms. Using clustering algorithms, the document corpus is divided into five groups. In addition, the results demonstrate that the proposals can easily be categorized into predefined categories using classification algorithms. SVM-Linear achieved the highest prediction accuracy (89.2%) with the FastText word embedding method. A comparison of manual grouping with automatic classification and clustering results revealed that both classification and clustering techniques have a high success rate.
Research limitations/implications
The proposed model automatically benefits from the rich information in project proposals and significantly reduces numerous time-consuming tasks that managers must perform manually. Thus, it eliminates the drawbacks of the current manual methods and yields significantly more accurate results. In the future, additional experiments should be conducted to validate the proposed method using data from other funding organizations.
Originality/value
This study presents the application of word embedding methods to effectively use the rich information in the titles and abstracts of Turkish project proposals. Existing research studies focus on the automatic grouping of proposals; traditional frequency-based word embedding methods are used for feature extraction methods to represent project proposals. Unlike previous research, this study employs two outperforming neural network-based textual feature extraction techniques to obtain terms representing the proposals: BERT as a contextual word embedding method and FastText as a static word embedding method. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no research conducted on the grouping of project proposals in Turkish.
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Patrick Arthur and Samuel Koomson
There is evidence of country-level contextual variations regarding the benefits of practical experience acquired by students during higher education. This paper, therefore…
Abstract
Purpose
There is evidence of country-level contextual variations regarding the benefits of practical experience acquired by students during higher education. This paper, therefore, analyses the benefits of student internships in the Ghanaian context.
Design/methodology/approach
In Study 1, two structured but distinct surveys were distributed to senior members and students of six specialised technical education institutions (TIs). Study 2 involved in-depth interviews with the heads of organisations in the tertiary education sector, including trade groups, industries and government agencies.
Findings
Internship provides soft skills, confidence, career development, sense of responsibility, employability, income, knowledge sharing and networking for students/interns. For TIs, it contributes to the professional development of faculty supervisors and helps them to update the content they teach. For employers, it unveils talented and promising students who can be employed immediately after graduation at a relatively cheaper cost.
Research limitations/implications
There is still the need for additional research in different contexts: both developed and developing economies to clear doubts on the controversies surrounding the relevance of internship in the 21st century.
Practical implications
TIs should continue to champion student internship programmes. This study highlights the need for employers to place internship students in areas that relate to their fields of study. It also underscores the need for students to embrace internship since it is the cornerstone to their employability in the labour market.
Social implications
Undeniably, student internships provide a critical platform for career beginners.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to knowledge by offering contextual literature in Ghana on the benefits of student internship programme for interns/students, TIs and employers, all together.
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Once a year a reference source is published in Surrey, England, that brings visitors such as the military attachés from the Chinese and former Soviet embassies in London to…
Abstract
Once a year a reference source is published in Surrey, England, that brings visitors such as the military attachés from the Chinese and former Soviet embassies in London to Surrey. The source these individuals and organizations are so eager to obtain is Jane's Fighting Ships (JFS), an annual naval compendium which has summarized international naval trends and developments for nearly a century.
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Nick Deschacht, Ann-Sophie De Pauw and Stijn Baert
The purpose of this paper is to test hypotheses regarding the importance of employee preferences in explaining sticky floors, the pattern that women are, compared to men, less…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to test hypotheses regarding the importance of employee preferences in explaining sticky floors, the pattern that women are, compared to men, less likely to start to climb the job ladder.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use original data obtained using a survey and a vignette study in which participants had to score the likeliness with which they would accept job offers with different promotion characteristics.
Findings
The main findings are that young female professionals have a less pronounced preference for more demanding and less routinary jobs and that this effect is mediated by the greater risk aversion and anticipated gender discrimination among women. No gender differences were found in the relative likeliness to apply for jobs that involve a promotion in terms of job authority.
Research limitations/implications
The vignette method assumes that artificial settings with low stakes do not bias results. Another limitation follows from the focus on inter-organizational promotions among young professionals, which raises the question to what extent the results can be generalized to broader settings.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the literature on gender differences in careers by measuring the impact of employee preferences on gender differences in career decisions.
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Surendra Babu Talluri, Bert Schreurs and Nishant Uppal
Though the recent conceptualization of career sustainability, defining its indicators and dimensions prompted an important field of careers research, empirical research is still…
Abstract
Purpose
Though the recent conceptualization of career sustainability, defining its indicators and dimensions prompted an important field of careers research, empirical research is still in its infancy. The current study empirically investigates how proactive personality, career adaptability and proactive career behaviors promote career sustainability based on the career construction model of adaptation.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors used a two-wave survey design to collect data from 414 full-time working professionals representing different organizations located in India. The authors tested the proposed hypotheses using structural equation modeling in IBM SPSS AMOS.
Findings
Results supported a serial indirect effect model with career adaptability and proactive career behaviors carrying the effect of proactive personality on career sustainability.
Originality/value
The study contributes to the emerging sustainable careers literature by unveiling the role of individual factors in career sustainability. Furthermore, the authors investigated these relationships through the complete career construction model of adaptation. By doing so, the current study contributes to careers literature by revealing the linkage between the career construction model of adaptation and career sustainability.
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This paper discusses the factors to consider when designing studies to measure hiring discrimination against transgender job applicants.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper discusses the factors to consider when designing studies to measure hiring discrimination against transgender job applicants.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper builds on academic literature related to hiring discrimination and transgender employment to build a detailed discussion of the numerous factors and issues inherent in hiring discrimination against transgender job applicants. By isolating and describing a number of relevant considerations, the paper aims to act as a guide for future studies to build upon.
Findings
Three types of hiring discrimination studies are discussed: correspondence tests, in-person experiments and student cohort experiments. Three main categories of factors relevant to an experiment’s design are then discussed: the legal context, industry/role factors and transgender population-specific factors. A flow-chart detailing the research design decision-making process is provided.
Research limitations/implications
The discussion within this paper will act as a reference and a guide for researchers seeking to address the dearth of empirical studies in the literature. The list is not exhaustive; while a number of factors relevant to transgender-specific studies are identified, there may be more that could affect an experiment's design.
Originality/value
Hiring discrimination against transgender people has been recorded in many surveys, but there is little empirical measurement of this discrimination. To the author's knowledge, this paper is the first to examine the experimental design decisions related to transgender hiring discrimination. In doing so, it provides contributions for two primary audiences: those researching transgender employment issues but who have never conducted a study measuring hiring discrimination; and those who have previously conducted studies on hiring discrimination, but have not done so with reference to transgender job applicants.