Outsourcing der Personalfunktion als Sonderfall des „Make or Buy“ wird in dieser Arbeit primaer in Abhaengigkeit von den Merkmalen des Beschaeftigungssystems erklaert. Der Ausgangspunkt der Untersuchung liegt in dem Versuch, die unterschiedliche Neigung zum Outsourcing der Personalfunktion...

This article provides a new mechanism in understanding how partner heterogeneity moderates an alliance’s ability to advance corporate social responsibility goals. I identified the antecedents for firms to select a more diverse set of partners and explored whether more diverse alliances...

Management practices are at the heart of most organizations’ sustainability efforts. Despite the importance of values for the design and implementation of such practices, few researchers have analyzed how human values, particularly ethical values, relate to human resource management practices...

Why have services grown into the dominant sector of developed economies? Our analysis of macroeconomic data shows that business services make the strongest contribution to the rise of the service sector. We integrate three related economic theories of the firm to explain business services in...

The question of whether firms gain competitiveness through local networks and clusters becomes more relevant than ever as globalization proceeds. This is particularly true for traditional and craft-based clusters, districts and business networks. A central question emerging for these types of...

Academics and practitioners working in the field of knowledge management (KM) have reached a consensus that knowledge is valuable and can benefit to organizations’ long-term development and competiveness. However, to believe knowledge is valuable that is no longer to satisfy the expectations...

Market orientation (MO) – which is the propensity of a firm to collect and utilise information from the market – is an important leverage of competitive advantage. This paper helps to better understand why some owner-managers engage with market intelligence why others simply do not. The...

The characteristics of the EU and Italian food market, dominated by evolving regulations, rise of new emerging countries, globalisation, advances in ICT and technology sector, increase of retailers’ bargaining power, and changes in consumer patterns, affect especially SMEs, which are forced to...

This paper tests a primary postulate of the Resource-Based View (RBV) of Information Technology (IT) business value. From this perspective, IT is not rare but pervasive, and it is only the combination of investments with other resources that makes the investment inimitable. Therefore, the effect...