Kelly A. Basile and T. Alexandra Beauregard
This paper aims to identify strategies used by successful teleworkers to create and maintain boundaries between work and home, and to determine how these strategies relate to…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to identify strategies used by successful teleworkers to create and maintain boundaries between work and home, and to determine how these strategies relate to employee preferences for segmentation or integration of work and home.
Design/methodology/approach
Forty in-depth, face-to-face interviews were conducted with employees working from home either occasionally (occasional teleworkers), between 20 and 50 per cent of the workweek (partial teleworkers), or the majority of the time (full teleworkers).
Findings
Teleworkers use physical, temporal, behavioral and communicative strategies to recreate boundaries similar to those found in office environments. Although teleworkers can generally develop strategies that align boundaries to their preferences for segmentation or integration, employees with greater job autonomy and control are better able to do so.
Research limitations/implications
A limitation of this research is its potential lack of generalizability to teleworkers in organizations with “always-on” cultures, who may experience greater pressure to allow work to permeate the home boundary.
Practical implications
These findings can encourage organizations to proactively assess employee preferences for boundary permeability before entering a teleworking arrangement. The boundary management tactics identified can be used to provide teleworkers struggling to establish comfortable boundaries with tangible ideas to regulate interactions between home and work.
Originality/value
This research makes a significant contribution to practitioner literature by applying a boundary management framework to the practice of teleworking, which is being adopted by organizations with increasing frequency.
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Jing Yang, Kelly Basile and Xiaowei Zhao
This study examines how top global brands changed their corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication on social media during a victim crisis, and how their CSR communication…
Abstract
Purpose
This study examines how top global brands changed their corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication on social media during a victim crisis, and how their CSR communication on social media influenced consumer sentiment.
Design/methodology/approach
Using 18,502 firms’ Facebook posts and their most relevant consumer comments from pre-pandemic and during-pandemic timeframes, this study integrates machine learning techniques (BERTopic) with human-based qualitative analysis to analyze CSR posts. It also measures the polarity and magnitude of consumer sentiment with Google Natural Language AI. We tested seven hypotheses using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM).
Findings
The machine learning-based topic modeling analysis showed that firms increased CSR communications intensity on social media and they more intentionally chose different CSR communication strategies for different topics on social media during the victim crisis. The hypothesis testing results show proactive, accommodative and interactive strategies have a significant impact on consumer sentiment polarity and magnitude, and these effects are moderated by the level of interactivity and industry type.
Originality/value
(1) This study takes a dynamic view to examine the firms’ CSR communication on social media during a victim crisis. It used machine learning-based text analytics and found many interesting results on how firms changed their CSR communication topics and strategies on social media during the crisis. (2) It measures both consumer sentiment polarity and sentiment magnitude to conduct sentiment analysis. The results indicate that the CSR communication strategies have different impacts on the two sentiment components. (3) It integrates machine learning techniques with human-based qualitative analysis. It shows how researchers can gain the benefits of both approaches.
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Kelly Basile, T. Alexandra Beauregard, Esther Canonico-Martin and Kylee Gause
This study aims to explore how working parents use personal technology to manage parenting responsibilities and to identify how technology use might help to support work–family…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to explore how working parents use personal technology to manage parenting responsibilities and to identify how technology use might help to support work–family balance.
Design/methodology/approach
In-depth telephone interviews with US and UK working parents with children under the age of 18 were conducted.
Findings
Findings suggest that personal technology can facilitate work and family activities and reduce work–family conflict by enabling parents to perform certain parenting duties remotely. However, parental attitudes toward technology and children’s rights to privacy influence both technology use and work and family outcomes.
Practical implications
By better understanding employee personal technology use, and how this use facilitates reduced conflict between work and family roles, organizations might look to creatively expand their benefits offerings to include access/discounts to personal technology platforms that support parenting activities (e.g. Uber One, Amazon Prime and DoorDash).
Originality/value
While substantial research has been conducted on employee use of work-enabled technology to facilitate work–life balance, less attention has been paid to how working parents are using personal forms of technology to achieve this same outcome. This exploratory study establishes certain parenting functions that are facilitated by personal technology use and identifies some parental attitudes that influence technology adoption.
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Despite the significant investment in research on corporate social responsibility (CSR), there still exists a lack of clarity in terms of how different types of CSR activities…
Abstract
Purpose
Despite the significant investment in research on corporate social responsibility (CSR), there still exists a lack of clarity in terms of how different types of CSR activities lead to the outcomes a firm desires with their investment in CSR. The purpose of this paper is to provide greater insight on the relationship between types of CSR activities and brand equity (BE). The authors develop and test a conceptual framework, which examines the unique relationship between each CSR dimension and BE, as well as the interaction of product-related CSR activities and employee-related CSR activities with CSR activities across the other dimensions.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors collected data from multiple secondary sources, including Kinder, Lydenberg and Domini (KLD) Research and Analytics Inc., Interbrand, Compustat and CMR. The authors used random-effect estimations to estimate panel regressions of BE as a function of the different dimensions of a firm’s CSR, interaction terms between CSR dimensions and product quality and interaction terms between employee relations and other CSR dimensions, as well as a set of control variables and Year dummy variables.
Findings
Based upon a large-scale panel data set including 78 firms for the period of 2000–2014, the results show that diversity- and governance-related CSR have a positive effect on BE, employee-related CSR has a negative effect on BE and both product and employee dimensions play important roles in the relationships between other CSR dimensions and BE. These results have important implications for both theory and practice.
Originality/value
This study makes several contributions to extant literature on CSR and brand strength. First, this study examines the impact of CSR on BE vs alternative measures of brand-related outcomes. This study uses the KLD database to determine scores for firm CSR activity. It is the first to use the extensive KLD database to examine the relationship between types of CSR activities and BE. Last, this study seeks to better understand some of the organizational factors which influence the success of CSR outcomes. Specifically, the research will examine the interaction of product-related and employee-related CSR activities with CSR activities across the other dimensions.
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This paper aims to explore the extent to which knowledge management practices, that is the process of developing and sharing organisational knowledge, can enhance intellectual…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the extent to which knowledge management practices, that is the process of developing and sharing organisational knowledge, can enhance intellectual capital (IC) in the context of school education.
Design/methodology/approach
A mixed-method approach was adopted as the research strategy. A cross-sectional quantitative survey was conducted to collect data from 445 teachers at 13 primary schools in Hong Kong. A structural equation model (SEM) was applied to confirm the predictive effective of knowledge strategies on school IC. Interviews were conducted in a case school to explore the process for capitalising the knowledge by Lesson Study.
Findings
The result of the SEM shows that personalisation and codification strategies are predictors of human capital and structural capital at schools. The findings from interviews with the principals and teachers show that personalisation and codification strategies could be put into operation as a Lesson Study to leverage knowledge for school development.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the management practices of school organisation for enhancing their IC by conducting Lesson Study for the development of their schools effectively.
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This paper reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.
Design/methodology/approach
This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.
Findings
Organizations need to have a real sense of the brand outcome they wish to see from the CSR initiatives they commit to. Some approaches are more likely to have a positive influence than others and there is some interplay between elements.
Originality/value
The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.
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Mario Tani, Ciro Troise and Gianpaolo Basile
This study aims to explore the chicken and egg paradox in the taxi e-hailing business contributing to define a condition of system emergence. This paradox is a meaningful one as…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to explore the chicken and egg paradox in the taxi e-hailing business contributing to define a condition of system emergence. This paradox is a meaningful one as these platforms represent a system where the passengers systems have no reason to participate if they have no drivers-systems to answer their call, but, at the same time, the platform is not useful to the drivers-system if there are no passengers-systems using the platform.
Design/methodology/approach
To understand how this paradox has been dealt with in the taxi e-hailing business, this study focused on a case study on a best practice in Italian taxi e-hailing industry (i.e. MyTaxi/FreeNow). This study wants to comprehend which actions have been implemented to solve this paradox and has tried to identify the interconnections between the various strategies to create a closed loop diagram for further testing.
Findings
This study has found that the company did not choose a single “subsystem” (passenger or driver), but it has stimulated the creation of several mutually reinforcing motivation for have both subsystems interact to help the company grow.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paradox has never been studied using the complex adaptive system perspective. This perspective is particularly useful in this case and in the similar ones with several different interacting factors that cannot be really studied without using a higher order perspective.
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Yiyi Wang, Kara M. Kockelman and Paul Damien
This paper analyzes county-level firm births across the United States using a spatial count model that permits spatial dependence, cross-correlation among different industry…
Abstract
This paper analyzes county-level firm births across the United States using a spatial count model that permits spatial dependence, cross-correlation among different industry types, and over-dispersion commonly found in empirical count data. Results confirm the presence of spatial autocorrelation (which can arise from agglomeration effects and missing variables), industry-specific over-dispersion, and positive, significant cross-correlations. After controlling for existing-firm counts in 2008 (as an exposure term), parameter estimates and inference suggest that a younger work force and/or clientele (as quantified using each county’s median-age values) is associated with more firm births (in 2009). Higher population densities is associated with more new basic-sector firms, while reducing retail-firm starts. The modeling framework demonstrated here can be adopted for a variety of settings, harnessing very local, detailed data to evaluate the effectiveness of investments and policies, in terms of generating business establishments and promoting economic gains.