If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this study is to gain new insight into the true nature of the relationship between product diversification and performance, as well as to explore the roles the home country environment and time can play on this relationship. Design/methodology/approach -The study reviews a large part of the research that has addressed the relationship between product diversification and performance over the last four decades.Findings -This study identifies the main views (models) that can help scholars to adequately understand, both theoretically and empirically, the potential effect of product diversification on performance: the premium diversification model; the discount diversification model; and the U-inverted model. The study confirms a wide diversity of results. Drawing from the institutional-based view, it is argued that a significant part of this heterogeneity stems from the effect of two factors that have often been ignored: the home country environment and time period. The review of recent empirical research seems to provide some support for the central argument that the value firms achieve through product diversification may be contingent both on the specific home country environment (environmental dependency) and time period (time dependency) under study. Originality/value -This study yields an alternative explanation to the inconsistency in findings that goes beyond strictly theoretical and methodological reasons. It shows that the arguments related to different views (or models) need to be considered "environment-dependent" and "time-dependent". It concludes by proposing a framework to guide future research.

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Achieving a balance between the development of information and communication technologies (ICT) development and teaching competences has become essential. The rapid evolution of the Web has presented universities with the challenge of preparing today's academic staff for the ICT of the future. The European Higher Education Area has adapted to ICT, proposing a conceptual and methodological change in teaching-learning processes in Spanish universities. In this new scenario, the education of students via the Web has become a key factor that requires higher education teachers to have new emotional competences. Although affections, feelings and emotions have been gaining relevance in society and scientific thought for more than a decade now, in the future, we will be dealing with a sensory emotive Web (Web 5.0) and, more than ever before, there will be a deep need for teachers to use and promote intra-and interpersonal emotional competences. In this respect, this paper suggests that the use of rationalistic methodology alone, in this era of sensory and emotional knowledge (present and future), is a mistake. Teaching staff need to develop emotional competences and transmit them to their students, in order to produce graduates who will be more adaptable to new socio-professional contexts.

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Work-life balance has become a topic of great relevance in today's business world. In this work we present both a theoretical review on the state of art in this issue and an analysis testing the validity of the positive impact of worklife balance policies in firm performance. For the empirical analyses of these policies on performance we evaluated a sample composed of firms listed in IBEX-35. Findings provide support for the idea that introducing work-life balance practices benefits the company with respect to talent retention and higher employee engagement, as well as achieving a positive impact on productivity, costs and business results.

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to gain new insight on the determinants of economic growth. More precisely, it disentangles the contribution of an increase in the stock of ideas that exceeds the rate of growth in the steady state and the growth inherent to the steady state. Design/methodology/approach – Following Romer (1990) and Jones (2000, 2002) this paper uses an aggregate production function. The paper also models the evolution of the stock of ideas following the generalisation of Jones (1995). The analysis decomposes growth utilising the estimated parameters inherent to the ideas function. Findings – This article presents a growth accounting exercise that estimates total factor productivity for three Southern European economies. Systematic comparison of the countries illustrates the importance of innovation for economic growth. This exercise shows the main growth patterns over the last 50 years, and highlights the principal determinants by specifying an ideas function. Originality/value – This study yields recent timeframe for explaining per capita income variations within economies and observed differences across economies.

A firm's set of knowledge processes may be affected by the entrepreneurial culture of the country in which it is located. Total factor productivity, mainly associated with technical progress, accounts for most differences over time and across countries. In the present work we examine the determinants of total factor productivity growth in 26 OECD countries between 1965 and 2010, breaking them down into changes in technical efficiency and shifts in technology over time. Using the U.S. as the technology frontier, different patterns of productivity growth emerge between world technology leaders and countries with low initial levels of productivity. Whereas changes in efficiency seem to be the main result of the evolution in the stock of knowledge in technologically dependent economies, suggesting that less advanced economies can benefit from their relative backwardness, domestic research effort appears to be a relevant factor for technology leaders.