Extraordinary body-self narratives: sport and physical activity in the lives of transgender people

Physical activity and sports can be regarded as particularly challenging social practices for transgender people, regarding the centrality of the body, gendered structures like changing rooms and competitions, and normative gender ideologies. In the emerging body of literature on transgender people and sport, the main focus has been on mainstream, competitive sports as non-inclusive. In this article, I present body-self narratives in physical activity and sports (PA/S) during different stages of their gender transition, based on interviews with 12 transgender people in the Netherlands. The results confirm that mainstream sports and physical activity spaces like swimming pools are often experienced as relatively unsafe by transgender people, both pre- and post-transition and especially during the ‘liminal’ transition phase. However, apart from places of shame for or control of the ‘wrong’ body-object and places of felt/enacted stigma, the body-self narratives also indicated that PA/S had been important enabling and empowering activities at different times in the lives of transgender people. For example, regarding gender (dis)identification or as coping strategy in de pre-transition phase and for ultimately gaining body-subject awareness, gender recognition and pride of the ‘right’ body-self.     

Green Practices and Organizational Design as Sources of Strategic Flexibility and Performance

Green competences are dynamic capabilities based on practices (green practices), routines and structures that can be used to detect opportunities, make the most of them and use them to transform organizations. With this in mind, we explore the relationships between environmental management, organizational performance, and organizational processes and practices. We identify three key constructs related to green competences: (1) hybrid structures, (2) environmental best practices and (3) strategic flexibility, a key variable connecting structural design and green practices to organizational performance. We propose that the implementation of specific organizational structures characterized by the inclusion of market‐driven control practices within hierarchies (internal hybrids) could enhance firms' environmental responsiveness and deployment of green best practices. In addition, we suggest that green practices and structures are positively related to the development of strategic flexibility, driving above‐average returns in dynamic environments. To test these hypotheses, we use data from the European aviation industry. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Beyond the Information Technology Agreement: Harmonisation of Standards and Trade in Electronics

Product standards can have a dual impact on costs and, thus, on trade. They can impose costs on exporters as it may be necessary to adapt products for specific markets (cost effect). In contrast, standards can reduce exporters’ information costs as they convey information on product characteristics (informational effect). Using a new World Bank database of European standards for electronic products, we examine the net impact of internationally harmonised European standards on European Union imports. We find that European Union standards for electronic products that are harmonised to international standards have a significant and a positive net effect on trade. The results suggest that efforts to promote trade in electronic products could be complemented by steps to promote standards harmonisation. This might include, for example, restarting talks to extend the WTO’s Information Technology Agreement to commitments to harmonise national standards in electronic products.     

Husbands,Wives, and Housework: Graduates of Stanford and Tokyo Universities

Barbara Bergmann argues that economic gender equity requires equity not only in paid employment, but also in household work. We examine the household task arrangements of a sample of married 1981 graduates of Stanford and Tokyo (Todai) Universities, about a decade after their graduation. No less than 43 percent of Stanford graduates shared household tasks about equally with their spouse, a much higher sharing rate than for the whole U.S. population. However, only 12 percent of Todai women and 8 percent of Todai men had egalitarian household task arrangements, a sharing rate about equal to that of the whole Japanese population. Holding other variables constant, Stanford men who did at least half of household tasks paid an earnings penalty of about 10 percent. Women who did more than half of household tasks did not pay an earnings penalty. Our examination of task arrangements among dual-career couples provides support for bargaining power theories of the division of household tasks, but suggests that societal ideology plays a critical role in defining the scope for bargaining.     

The Role of Commodified Celebrities in Children’s Moral Development: The Case of David Beckham

This paper presents an existentialist interpretation of the identity constituting meanings that middle‐class men and women ascribe to their bodies and their related motivations to engage in consumption activities that seek to transform their embodied selves. We begin by describing the relevance of the existential conceptualization of the embodied self to the postmodern condition of consumer culture. We apply this existential perspective to discern three dialectically structured themes drawn from phenomenological interviews with men and women across a broad age range. One emergent and unexpected finding is the extent to which these men and women expressed a constellation of common body image anxieties, thematic meanings, and self‐critical, objectifying interpretations of their bodies. Based on these findings and historical considerations, we propose that men's embodied selves are, like women's, fully inscribed in the patriarchal discourses that circulate throughout postmodern consumer culture. However, men occupy a distinct social space and, accordingly, we argue that their embodied selves are uniquely situated in a cultural model of hegemonic masculinity. We conclude that the postmodern ideal of the plastic, transformable body has become a resonant cultural metaphor through which middle‐class consumers enact their identity projects of creating a desired embodied self.     

Factors Influencing Human Resource Management Solutions at Subsidiaries of Multinational Companies in Central and Eastern Europe

There is a shortage of empirical human resource management (HRM) literature in respect to identifying new patterns of multinational company (MNC) involvement in the Central and Eastern Europe region and the impact of ongoing MNC operations on the patterns of the HRM behavior of these companies. To counter this lack of understanding within the field, our broadly based, international survey asked 279 subsidiaries located in Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia and was conducted in 2010. It aimed to describe the relationships within the companies involved—between the influencing factors and the HR solutions applied—in a statistically valid way.     

Banking sector development and interest rate volatility in emerging economies

Over the last decades, macroeconomic stability is said to be one of the major concerns of emerging economies. Financial sector as a core of macroeconomic stability has been under close consideration of policy makers. The relationship between interest rate uncertainty and banking sector development as one of the most important indicators of financial sector development, especially for emerging economies, has not received enough attention in the literature. Perhaps this article is the most comprehensive study that investigates the relationship between interest rate uncertainty and banking sector development for a large group of emerging economies. To do this, the short-run and long-run models using a bounds testing approach to cointegration for 12 emerging economies over the period 1980–2011 have been developed. Estimated results from all models indicate that interest rate uncertainty has significant effect on banking sector development in both short-run and long-run phenomena in the majority of countries. The findings indicate that the link between interest rate uncertainty and banking sector development in each country depends on each country’s specific structure.     

On the Usefulness of Operating Income,Net Income and Comprehensive Income in Explaining Security Returns

This study evaluates the usefulness of three earnings definitions (operating income, net income and comprehensive income) in explaining residual security returns. Usefulness is measured in terms of relative information content and incremental information content. In the former, the goodness-of-fit of the return-earnings relationship is compared under each earnings definition. In the latter, the increase in goodness-of-fit due to additional earnings components is measured. Based on a sample that averages 922 firms a year for 18 years, the analysis shows that operating income weakly dominates net income, and that both operating income and net income dominate comprehensive income, in information content. The results also show that those items that account for the difference between net income and operating income have incremental information content, but not those between net income and comprehensive income. The practical and academic contributions of these findings are discussed.     

Dynamic effects of idiosyncratic volatility and liquidity on corporate bond spreads

We study the dynamic impact of idiosyncratic volatility and bond liquidity on corporate bond spreads over time and empirically disentangle both effects. Using an extensive data set, we find that both idiosyncratic volatility and liquidity are critical mainly for the distress portfolios, i.e., low-rated and short-term bonds; for others only volatility matters. The effects of volatility and liquidity shocks on bond spreads were both exacerbated during the recent financial crisis. Liquidity shocks are quickly absorbed into bonds prices; however, volatility shocks are more persistent and have a long-term effect. Our results overall suggest significant differences between how volatility and liquidity dynamically impact bond spreads.