Immigrant Entrepreneurship: The Effect of Early Career Immigration Constraints on New Venture Formation

We examine how institutional factors may affect microlevel career decisions by individuals to create new firms by impacting their ability to exercise entrepreneurial preferences, their accumulation of human capital, and the opportunity costs associated with new venture formation. We focus on an important institutional factor—immigration-related work constraints—given that technologically intensive firms in the United States not only draw upon immigrants as knowledge workers but also because such firms are disproportionately founded by immigrants. We examine the implications of these constraints using the National Science Foundation’s Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System, which tracks the careers of science and engineering graduates from U.S. universities. Relative to natives, we theorize and show that immigration-related work constraints in the United States suppress entrepreneurship as an early career choice of immigrants by restricting labor market options to paid employment jobs in organizational contexts tightly matched with the immigrant’s educational training (job-education match). Work experience in paid employment job-education match is associated with the accumulation of specialized human capital and increased opportunity costs associated with new venture formation. Consistent with immigration-related work constraints inhibiting individuals with entrepreneurial preferences from engaging in entrepreneurship, we show that when the immigration-related work constraints are released, immigrants in job-education match are more likely than comparable natives to found incorporated employer firms. Incorporated employer firms can both leverage specialized human capital and provide the expected returns needed to justify the increased opportunity costs associated with entrepreneurial entry. We discuss our study’s contributions to theory and practice.

A Social Platform for Fostering Ethical Education through Role-Playing

Nowadays the complexity of knowledge, the specialization of labor and the pervasiveness of ICT in human activity, lead individuals to frequently make complex decisions with ethical implications. The educational system has a fundamental role in preparing specialized human capital in every discipline, however, it also faces the challenge of educating individuals with ethical discernment capabilities and behavior. In this book chapter, we describe the design, implementation and validation of EthicApp-RP, a social platform aimed at higher education settings, for fostering reflection and moral reasoning around ethical cases through a role-playing activity. We present an application of EthicApp-RP involving a cohort of undergraduate business students (N = 85), based on a case in which students play political and public leadership roles in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. The results indicate that students and teachers acknowledge the learning environment’s capacity to stimulate reflection and argumentation around ethical issues, while providing all students with equal opportunities for participation. In addition, the tool offers high technical and pedagogical usability, based on the Systems Usability Scale and the Pedagogically Meaningful Learning Questionnaire. EthicApp-RP can contribute to the improvement of ethics education, especially in scientific and technological disciplines, wherein students are quantitatively inclined by nature, in spite that ethics, a humanistic subject often foreign to them, must live at the core of their preparation.

Expert Insights on the Impacts of, and Potential for, Agricultural Big Data

Advanced digital technologies are rapidly permeating agriculture from laboratory to field. Machine-based breeding, robotics and big data technologies have deeply transformed not only production systems but also the way scientific research is conducted. How are digital applications revolutionizing people’s jobs and skills? What are the challenges and opportunities for managing and sharing agricultural big data? This article addresses these and other questions by surveying international experts in plant biotechnology. Results show that digital innovations in the form of decision-support tools are perceived as promising. Most surveyed experts anticipate the deployment of big data analytics and artificial intelligence to boost agricultural productivity. Another key finding is that substantial physical investment, specialized human capital and effective data governance are critical to successful implementation of technological innovations associated with big data.

Elites and Useful Knowledge in Britain

A longstanding claim attributes economic growth and technological change to social and scientific elites, who possess special knowledge that is unavailable to the general population. This chapter considers the significance of scientific training, costly human capital, and different types of knowledge during British industrialization by assessing the backgrounds, education, and inventive activity of major contributors to technological advances. The results show that scientists, engineers, or technicians were not well represented among the cadre of important British inventors, and many innovators remained unspecialized until very late in the nineteenth century. Informal institutions like apprenticeship and learning on the job efficiently helped creative individuals to increase their skills and productivity. Costly investments in specialized human capital and esoteric knowledge were less important than incentives for creativity, flexibility, and the ability to make incremental adjustments to produce innovations that are appropriate for prevailing conditions.

The Analysis of Push Factors in Case of Physicians Migration from Romania

Romania is facing the phenomenon of migration, including brain drain, registering losses regarding the specialized human capital. A very significant loss of specialists is present in the health sector, this loss being reflected in the population health, but also in the efficiency of the health system. Therefore, the push factors in case of physicians migration must be known and analyzed, in order to take measures to reduce this phenomenon. In this sense, indicators refering to the economic situation of the destination countries in case of physicians from Romania and the number of Current Professional Certificates were analyzed, assuming that it reflects the number of physicians who intend to migrate from Romania. The data source is represented by Eurostat and the Romanian College of Physicians, and the analysis was performed using SAS software.

Proposal of Postgraduate in Management to Collaborate with the Sustainable Regional Development in the State of Mexico

Regional Development of the countries depends of the relation and interaction between enterprises, government, education sector and society, and the strategies to take advantage of the available resources. In that sense, the education sector plays a very important role as a supplier of competitive human capital. This study is the result of a special research made for Technologic of Higher Studies of Ecatepec which is interested in launching a new postgraduate program that can respond to the new regional challenges. Nowadays it doesn’t exist an educational program in the State of Mexico that collaborates in generation of specialized human capital to manage the productive and administrative process of the enterprises. This research is supported with the induction deduction, analysis-synthesis methodologies, moreover, the information gathering of different database scholars was reviewed, and it was also compare institutions within similar context and programs to get and analyzing previous research about tendencies of modern management.

Redefining the boundaries of the firm: the role of 4PLs

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the specific valuable partnership between human capital-intensive firms (HCIFs) and fourth-party logistics (4PLs), and in particular, to explore the way boundaries of HCIFs are changing as a consequence of the growing importance of 4PLs. Design/methodology/approach – The paper represents the viewpoints of the authors as far as the role of 4PLs in the changing boundaries of HCIFs is concerned. It is based on a literature review, especially on the analysis of the recent works on organizational boundaries developed by Garicano, Santos and their co-authors. It establishes the prerequisites on the actors of the phenomenon and provides a knowledge-based conceptual framework to understand their dynamic relationship. Findings – The authors show that the relationship between a HCIF and a 4PL represents a balance of power between two partners based on the co-specialized human capital provided by each of them. From four main propositions, the authors explain that the HCIF extends its boundaries and create more value through the in-house and outside critical human capital it uses. Originality/value – The specific partnership between HCIFs and 4PLs has been rarely mentioned in the economics and management literature. This interdisciplinary viewpoint essentially provides both academics and practitioners with a conceptual map of 4PLs and HCIFs research and also points out opportunities for future research.