The paper explores how SMEs located in industrial districts explore e-business as a means to face the challenges posed by globalisation. By resorting to case studies conducted in the textile district of Prato, the research evidences the positive attitude of the interviewed entrepreneurs towards e-business. However, the characteristics of the considered products (textiles) and the district structure strongly affect the path followed to explore the scenarios opened by e-business. The collected evidence suggests that only few firms in the district are actively pursuing the full range of opportunities provided by e-business, and that isolated actions are not enough to foster collective learning and growth processes involving the whole district
Researchers have long expressed their discontent with the existing measures of skill mismatch. This paper argues that traditional measures cannot fully capture the essence of an inherently multidimensional and job‐specific concept such as skill mismatch. An empirical job‐based methodology is proposed that classifies the types of skill (mis)matches based on performance of core skills and supplementary skills. The proposed methodology is tested on a sample of 600 Portuguese retail bankers. The results support the job‐specific nature of skills. The differentiated distribution of skill (mis)match by job is a significant determinant of earnings among the sampled retail bankers.
This paper provides new evidence on the relationship between family business (FB) and human resource management (HRM) abroad. Our analysis provides two main results. First, not all organizational attributes of FBs exert the same effect on the approach to HRM abroad. Whereas participation of family members in the board of directors displays no significant impact, ownership and family managerial models favor the exploitation of the human resources supplied by the parent company. In contrast, the involvement of young successors favors an explorative attitude. Second, a multidimensional approach has better explanatory power compared with a dichotomous classification of FBs
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