The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of changes in employment regulation in Spain on individual labour market trajectories. It is well known that the Spanish labour…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of changes in employment regulation in Spain on individual labour market trajectories. It is well known that the Spanish labour market has been strongly hit by the 2007 recession. Furthermore, after 2010 and in the benchmark of “austerity”, several reforms were implemented to further flexibilise employment regulation. At the same time, public sector budgets suffered severe cutbacks, that impacted working conditions and prospects of public sector workers. These reforms were implemented by different governments and substantially changed previous existing patterns of employment. This paper explains how these reforms have reinforced previous existing trends towards greater flexibility and weaker employment protection and how they lead to a shift in the position of work in society.
Design/methodology/approach
The emerging patterns that these changes provoked are illustrated thorough data from narrative biographies of workers affected by a job loss or a downgrading of working conditions. The workers of the sample had relatively stable positions and careers and were affected by changes that substantially modified their paths.
Findings
The paper shows how reforms have expanded work and employment insecurities and have broken career paths. It demonstrates how the reforms have weakened the position of work and organised labour in society and how, when institutional supports are jeopardised, the capacity to plan and act is harassed by the traditional social inequalities.
Originality/value
The paper enhances the knowledge about the impact of institutional changes by analysing their effects in individual working lives by means of narrative biographies.
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Martí López‐Andreu and Joan Miquel Verd
The purpose of this paper is to analyse how company policies and strategies affect career development opportunities.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyse how company policies and strategies affect career development opportunities.
Design/methodology/approach
A longitudinal approach is used, combining quantitative and qualitative data. Panel quantitative data have been used to classify different career paths, and biographical interviews conducted to identify the effects of company policies on these career paths. All the employees interviewed were working in two service organisations in Barcelona (Spain): a retail company and a public transport company.
Findings
The results of the analysis show that the combination of new organisational methods, along with the human resource policies developed by the companies, reduces the opportunities for promotion and also actors’ degree of control over transitions. Thus, career development is mainly marked by individual characteristics (educational credentials, age and gender) which are difficult or impossible to transform, and to a much lesser extent by the resources (mostly internal training) companies provide.
Originality/value
The article uses the capability approach as an analytical tool to address three specific company policies: those related to work organisation and working conditions; training; and appraisal and promotion. These policies are placed in a longitudinal perspective as a way of assessing their role in the development of workers’ careers.
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Shaila Rao, Cristina M. Cardona and Esther Chiner
The focus of special education around the globe may be to provide specialized instruction to meet unique needs of children to help them achieve their full potential. However, each…
Abstract
The focus of special education around the globe may be to provide specialized instruction to meet unique needs of children to help them achieve their full potential. However, each country around the globe may also have its own unique issues, barriers, legal frames, policies, and practices, as well as a history of its origin and evolution of policies and practices that govern special education in that country. This chapter describes how special education in Spain originated and evolved to its current state. It includes the following chapter sections: origins of special education in Spain; legislative acts; prevalence and incidence of various recognized disability areas; an overview of Spain’s education system including special needs education; current assessment and intervention practices; teacher education practices; family involvement considerations; and future challenges to special education.
This chapter deals with the development of banking in the Crown of Aragon from the end of the thirteenth century through the establishment of money changers, which followed…
Abstract
This chapter deals with the development of banking in the Crown of Aragon from the end of the thirteenth century through the establishment of money changers, which followed similar patterns as in other Western European territories. It starts with a review of existing literature and follows with an explanation on the different banking services provided by money changers and the specific legal framework that supported such activities. It then examines the geographical distribution of private banks in cities and towns within the domains of the kings of Aragon, as well as their evolution throughout the fourteenth century. After that, it offers an analysis of the most common professional profiles among these bankers and financers. Finally, drawing on a heterogeneous pool of unpublished data, it seeks to shed light on the diversity of investors and clients of these establishments, a crucial proof of their role in integrated financial markets.
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– The purpose of this paper is to analyze investor reactions to ethical screening by pension plan managers.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyze investor reactions to ethical screening by pension plan managers.
Design/methodology/approach
The author presents a sample consisting of data corresponding to 573 pension plans in relation to such aspects as financial performance, inception date, asset size, number of participants, custodial and management fees, and whether their managers adopt ethical screening or give part of their profits to social projects. On this data the author implements the fixed effects panel data model proposed by Vogelsang (2012).
Findings
The results obtained indicate that investors/consumers prefer traditional or solidarity pension plans to ethical pension plans. Furthermore, the findings show that ethical investors/consumers are more (less) sensitive to positive (negative) lagged returns than caring and traditional consumers, causing traditional consumers to contribute to pension plans that they already own.
Research limitations/implications
The author does not know what types of environmental, social and corporate governance criteria have been adopted by ethical pension plan managers and the weight given to each of these criteria for selecting the stock of the firms in their portfolios that could influence in the investors’ behaviour.
Practical implications
The results obtained in the current paper show that investors invest less money in ethical pension plans than in traditional and solidarity pension plans; this could be due to the lack of information for their part. To solve this, management companies could increase the transparency about their corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments to encourage investors to invest in ethical products so these lead to raising CSR standards in companies, and therefore, sustainable development.
Social implications
The Spanish socially responsible investment retail market is still at an early phase of development, and regulators should promote it in order to encourage firms to adopt business activities that take into account societal concerns.
Originality/value
This paper provides new evidence in a field little analysed. This paper contributes to the existing literature by focusing on examining the behaviour of pension funds investors whose investment time horizon is in the long-term while previous literature focus on analysing behaviour of mutual fund investors whose investment time horizon is in the short/medium term what could cause different investors’ behaviour.
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Paula Remoaldo and José Cadima Ribeiro
This chapter pinpoints a chronological and thematic literature review on the concept of Creative Tourism. Even if the concept emerged 21 years ago, its definition keeps being…
Abstract
This chapter pinpoints a chronological and thematic literature review on the concept of Creative Tourism. Even if the concept emerged 21 years ago, its definition keeps being discussed, and different approaches are available. Born in the late 1990s, it developed rapidly due to a very open, flexible and local context design, enabling the development of personal capacity, authentic experiences and involving local culture and communities. This new approach to tourism envisages bringing together local people, their habits and practices in real and everyday contexts to the heart of the tourism experience provided to visitors. Therefore, it looks to be a promising path towards sustainability. Keeping this in mind, one can wonder if Creative Tourism can be a lever for territories' economic, social, cultural and environmental sustainability. In particular, can Creative Tourism's growing importance in Southern Europe be considered a major contribution to the sustainability of those territories? The literature review concludes that most of the studies on Creative Tourism take positive impacts on territories as a kind of ‘belief’. Such an effect is not granted as a beneficial impact on a communities' well-being; it does not result just from the type of resources explored or from the participation of members of the community on the products/services supplied.
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Fiammetta Brandajs and Antonio Paolo Russo
The purpose of this paper is to introduce a critical framework to analyse how “smart” plays out in tourism places. Moving from a recognition of the strategies, expected impacts…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to introduce a critical framework to analyse how “smart” plays out in tourism places. Moving from a recognition of the strategies, expected impacts and imageries of Smart City, the authors engage with the mobilities literature to identify pitfalls in the quest of “smartening up” cities for hypermobile populations.
Design/methodology/approach
The study adopted a set of geoanalytical techniques to establish the potential relationship between the territorial upgrade of mobility and the socio-economic change processes the city of Barcelona is experiencing.
Findings
The paper suggests the effect of “smart” in cities could indeed be one of economic recovery; however, one triggering fundamental transformation of the social fabric of the city, whose most evident facet is the creation of globalised functional enclaves that may be forcefields of exclusion for the most vulnerable populations.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to a new stream of critical research on “smart” with a strong focus on the power of mobilities and mobility systems, whose digital enhancement plays out as a leveraging agent of new place connections and negotiations for short-term populations, but at the same time, may exclude disadvantaged subjects in their capacity to access and afford the system network.
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Niket Thakker, Hitesh Kalro, Mayank Joshipura and Prashant Mishra
This study examines current dynamics, consolidates current knowledge, elicits trends, identifies and analyzes primary research clusters, and offers future research directions for…
Abstract
Purpose
This study examines current dynamics, consolidates current knowledge, elicits trends, identifies and analyzes primary research clusters, and offers future research directions for mutual fund marketing.
Design/methodology/approach
Using bibliographic information from the SCOPUS database, this study used sequential bibliometric (143 documents) and content analyses (37 documents). Bibliometric analysis aids descriptive analysis and science mapping, while content analysis facilitates identifying and analyzing research clusters and provides future research directions.
Findings
The study identifies publication trends, the most relevant authors, and journal articles and unveils the knowledge structures of the field. Analysis of bibliographic coupling reveals the following significant clusters: (1) socially responsible investing and investor preferences, (2) investor factors and traits and investment decisions; (3) external factors, mutual funds' performance and proxy information; (4) the role of disclosures and ratings in shaping investment choices, and (5) cognitive biases, information processing errors and investor behavior. Finally, it offers future research directions.
Research limitations/implications
Using different databases, bibliometric analysis tools, study periods or article screening criteria for the study might yield different results. However, this study's significant findings are robust to such alternatives.
Practical implications
This study summarizes primary clusters and identifies gaps in the current literature, which helps scholars, practitioners, regulators and policymakers understand the nuances of mutual funds marketing. Future studies may focus on the role of online and offline integration, using neuroscience for data m and contemporary investment behavior models.
Originality/value
This is the first study to apply a two-stage sequential hybrid review of articles published over the last decade in high-quality journals, enabling an analysis of the depth and breadth of mutual funds marketing research.
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Evaluating existing literature can lead to a better understanding of a scientific journal's state of the art. In this sense, this study aims to analyze the global research…
Abstract
Purpose
Evaluating existing literature can lead to a better understanding of a scientific journal's state of the art. In this sense, this study aims to analyze the global research evolution of the Revista Europea de Dirección y Economia de la Empresa (REDEE) and the European Journal of Management and Business Economics (EJMBE).
Design/methodology/approach
A bibliometric analysis was conducted to acknowledge the most contributing authors, impactful articles, publication trends, keyword analysis, co-occurrence networks and collaboration networks. A total of 454 articles published between 2006 and 2022 were analyzed.
Findings
The results suggest that the international strategy set in 2014 has resulted in a steadily growing number of publications and a significant increment in citations. Relationship marketing and the connections between innovation, performance and entrepreneurship are topics of interest for the EJMBE.
Originality/value
Mapping existing EJMBE research through identifying the contributing authors, most impactful articles, publication trends, keyword analysis, co-occurrence networks and collaboration networks is missing to encourage new research projects.
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Jesús Martínez-Navarro, Fernando Campayo-Sánchez and Liudmila Ostrovskaya Fedorova
This study aims to appraise the historical evolution of tourism research focused on Spain. Firstly, an analysis was conducted to assess the production and impact of research…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to appraise the historical evolution of tourism research focused on Spain. Firstly, an analysis was conducted to assess the production and impact of research within this domain. Secondly, scientific mapping, specifically through co-word analysis, was used to identify and explore the principal research themes and their evolution in the field.
Design/methodology/approach
A historical approach was adopted in this study, using 1,100 bibliographic records obtained from the Scopus database. Science mapping was then conducted through co-word analysis of bibliographic data.
Findings
The results of the performance analysis provide insights into the volume, evolution and impact of the scientific documents published within the research area under investigation. Moreover, by adopting a longitudinal approach, science mapping through co-word analysis enables the definition of the intellectual structure within this research domain. In this regard, the main research themes are identified, conceptually assessed, and their evolution is examined across three distinct window periods: an initial research period (1972–2002), a growing research period (2003–2012) and a consolidation period (2013–2022).
Originality/value
The study provides a state-of-the-art position on tourism research related to Spain thus guiding future studies in the area. Furthermore, this study provides a comprehensive “snapshot” of the historical progression of tourism research in Spain, capturing the emblematic aspects that have emerged within the area over the investigated time period.