BI Norwegian Business School

Following the recent rise of digital nomadism, this study explores changing patterns of travel and work among highly mobile individuals. We draw on liquid modernity theory to analyze data from Reddit’s r/digitalnomad subreddit over 3.5 years. Fifteen topics and seven clusters capture the rich discussions. The most discussed topic was Destination review and recommendation, followed by Emotional needs and lifestyle choice. Regulatory issues also emerged as a significant concern. The pandemic influenced sentiment fluctuations over time, but the tone of topics remained mostly neutral. Our research provides nuanced insights into digital nomads’ habits, concerns, and lifestyle choices, showing how travel-related aspects feature front and center. For the tourism industry, our findings offer actionable suggestions to cater to this dynamic and economically powerful traveler group. Finally, and as a theoretical contribution, the study enhances our understanding of the role of global disruptive events, such as pandemics, in liquid modernity.

The increase in natural and manmade disasters around the world in which organizations need to operate has brought the concept of organizational resilience to the forefront. To understand the role that HRM can play in fostering resilience in extreme contexts, we adopt a resource‐based lens through the conservation of resources theory, to explore how organizations protected, gained, and retained employees as their most valuable resources in the face of the extreme context of war. Specifically, we investigated the underlying mechanisms that allowed organizations operating in the extreme context of the Syrian civil war, to increase their and their employees' resilience through their HR departments. Using a qualitative interpretive approach based on the narratives of HR managers and employees working in Syria during the civil war, we explore the role of HRM in building individual and organizational resilience. Our findings point to two mechanisms that HR departments relied on to protect resources and acquire new ones. First, HR departments adopted relationality practices, enacted by their managers, focused on investing in employees' psychological capital and wellbeing. Second, HR departments leveraged technology for recruitment and training purposes to attract and develop employees. Additionally, the extreme context characterized by scarce resources may have triggered the “strategification” of HR departments and transformed them, into strategic partners playing a critical role in their respective organizations' survival. We contribute to the literature on organizational resilience by highlighting the important relational role HRM can play to foster individual and subsequently organizational resilience.

In this editorial, we discuss and define the “future of work” as a phenomenon and research area, and outline avenues for further research at the conceptual and empirical level. We first offer a brief review of the different streams of research that study the future of work, both in management and organization studies and in adjacent fields. We then elaborate on what we see as the most promising avenues for research on the future of work, organized around five questions of what, when, who, how, and why. That is, research on the future of work needs to clarify its assumptions about (1) the phenomena it considers within scope; (2) the temporality associated with these phenomena; (3) which future of work actors it is about and whom it is for; (4) the methods and data types used to be able to study the future empirically; and (5) desired impact and envisioned outcomes. We discuss how moving beyond techno-determinism, depoliticization, and a present-day focus could open up new and important avenues for further research on the near and distant future of work. We conclude with some specific examples of research questions and methods.

Purpose This review and synthesis aims to answer the following question: what do existing empirical studies tell us about the relationship between organizational practices and their outcomes in terms of the performance, well-being and sustainable employment of employees with disabilities? Methods This review builds on a scoping review of empirical studies of organizational practices aimed at the hiring and retention of people with disabilities. It focuses on a specific group of studies identified in the scoping review: studies examining outcomes of organizational practices for employees with disabilities (EWD). Additional selection criteria were: (1) studies focused on the performance, well-being and sustainable employment of EWD; (2) studies used quantitative methods; and (3) studies were published in high-quality journals. This resulted in 27 articles. Results Three clusters of organizational practices received most attention in the articles: workplace relations and organizational culture; accommodations; and leadership. The studies found significant positive and negative relationships between practices in these clusters and the three outcomes mentioned above. These empirical findings were supported by the theoretical perspectives used in the studies. Although diverse, most of these theoretical perspectives share their focus on interactions between individuals and their (work) environment. Discussion We recommend that future research into the outcomes of organizational practices for EWD should be both broader (examining more clusters of practices and their outcomes for people with and without disabilities) and deeper (examining similar practices-outcome combinations in different contexts). This will increase our understanding of what practices work for whom under what circumstances.

How should a multinational enterprise (MNE) shape its own agility in response to the environments in which it operates? In this paper we argue that proactive investments in switching-flexibility, e.g., to facilitate future relocations of production assets, can be a powerful tool for handling international business (IB) volatility. If options to invest in future flexibility are exercised strategically, international relocation may become a more frequent phenomenon in high than in low volatility industries. This prediction contrasts the value-of-waiting recommendation of the classical real options literature, which suggests that relocation becomes less frequent if volatility is high. The differences in predictions stem from a change in perspective—from exogenous flexibility in the classical literature to endogenous flexibility in this study. Optimal proactive investments in future agility increase the value of a firm and enhance the firm’s ability to handle risk. This suggests that MNEs operating in volatile and competitive international markets typically become more agile than firms operating in stable environments. The paper’s proposition is supported by illustrative cases from ocean industries and by a real options model with endogenous reversibility. The model shows that optimal proactive investments in flexibility may tighten the entry and exit threshold spread for higher volatility.

Despite initial research about the biases and perceptions of large language models (LLMs), we lack evidence on how LLMs evaluate occupations, especially in comparison to human evaluators. In this paper, we present a systematic comparison of occupational evaluations by GPT-4 with those from an in-depth, high-quality and recent human respondents survey in the UK. Covering the full ISCO-08 occupational landscape, with 580 occupations and two distinct metrics (prestige and social value), our findings indicate that GPT-4 and human scores are highly correlated across all ISCO-08 major groups. At the same time, GPT-4 substantially under-or overestimates the occupational prestige and social value of many occupations, particularly for emerging digital and stigmatized or illicit occupations. Our analyses show both the potential and risk of using LLM-generated data for sociological and occupational research. We also discuss the policy implications of our findings for the integration of LLM tools into the world of work.

Background Scholars have increasingly focused on the role of employers in addressing labour market challenges faced by persons with disability (PWD). While we have gained more knowledge about the motivations, practices and characteristics for hiring PWD, we still lack information on whether these are general organizational features or specific to inclusive companies. Objective This study aims to examine the factors that distinguish inclusive from non-inclusive ones, using the COM-B framework (capability, opportunity, motivation) and Human Resource Management (HRM) practices. Methods We utilized survey data from a sample of small and medium sized companies (SME) in Norway (N = 1000). We conducted Logistic Regression Estimates (odds ratios) to determine predictive factors of an “inclusive company”. Results Inclusive companies scored higher than non-inclusive companies in all dimensions of COM-B and HRM practices. However, only knowledge about work inclusion (capability), availability of resources and positions (opportunity) and the desire to contribute to an inclusive labour market (social motivation) were significant explanatory factors for inclusivity. Among HRM practices, only recruitment showed a significant relationship with inclusivity after considering the COM factors. Conclusions This study underscores the importance of utilizing the COM-B framework to understand how companies approach the inclusion of PWD.

Despite the increased emphasis on ‘employer engagement’ to take advantage of demand-side active labour market policies, little attention has been paid to managers. In this paper, we examine the micro-practices of engaged managers in including jobseekers from disadvantaged groups. Through a qualitative study of managers, jobseekers and other stakeholders in twenty-one companies with a history of employing disadvantaged jobseekers, we identify three broad types of engagement by managers: vacancy-oriented, ability-oriented, and growth-oriented. The types of engagement involve crucial differences in motivation, caring and accommodation on the part of the employing managers. Our findings highlight the multi-facetedness of employer engagement when examined from the perspective of managers and propose ‘inclusive leadership’ as a useful lens to understand engaged employers.

There has been much interest recently in implicit artificial intelligence (AI)-based approaches for geostatistical facies modeling. New generative machine learning constructions such as latent diffusion models (LDMs) appear to be competitive with traditional geostatistical approaches for facies characterization. Going beyond visual inspection of predictions, this study examines properties of the statistical distribution of samples generated by an LDM trained to generate facies models. The study uses a traditional truncated Gaussian random field (TGRF) model as a reference data-generating process and as the ground truth for benchmarking the LDM results. The distributions of realizations drawn from the LDM and TGRF models are compared using metrics including bias, variance, higher-order statistics, transiograms and Jensen–Shannon divergence for both marginal and joint (volume) distributions. Comparisons are made with and without conditioning on facies observations in wells for both stationary and nonstationary TGRF models with different covariance functions. The observed distributional differences are modest, and LDMs are regarded as a very promising approach here. Even so, some systematic artifacts are observed, such as underrepresentation of variability by the LDM. Moreover, the performance of the LDM is found to be sensitive to the training data.

We identify directors who experience a corporate bankruptcy and examine how this professional experience affects monitoring at the other firms where they concurrently sit on the board. Using a sample of US directors interlocked with firms that file for bankruptcy, we find that directors have a greater tolerance for real earnings management after a low‐cost bankruptcy experience. This effect is stronger for independent directors and those who sit on the audit committee, consistent with a ratification and monitoring explanation. We do not find evidence consistent with the competing hypotheses that bankruptcy leads to directors' distraction or incentivizes efficient cost‐cutting strategies. We contribute to the research on the influence of directors' corporate experience over corporate outcomes, by providing evidence suggesting that surviving a bankruptcy relatively unscathed lowers directors' perception of the severity of distress costs, with negative consequences for decision control.

This article investigates – based on semi-structured interviews and conversations on cryptoart forums – how digital artists experience the blockchain-enabled assetization of their work through non-fungible tokens, including the transformation of digital artworks (which previously had negligible if any economic value) into assets capable of increasing in price value over time and generating future income from resale provisions. We show how this assetization of digital artworks has kindled artists’ financialized imagination and incentivized them to perform speculative labour – that is, to speculate on the potential capture of future financial proceeds from present-day underpaid or uncompensated activities, while mobilizing fictional expectations of imagined rentiership futures. We suggest that the commodification thesis, which has traditionally explained the future orientation of creative work as tied to commodity exchange, may be insufficient to account for artists’ speculative, asset-based imaginations of the future under financialized capitalism. Therefore, it may be beneficial to complement it with an assetization lens.

Self-discrepancy refers to the extent to which individuals believe there is a discrepancy between who they are, who they wish they were, or who they should be. The negative consequences (e.g., depression, anxiety, and eating disorders) of self-discrepancy motivate individuals to adopt different consumption strategies. However, previous research on factors that may cause individuals to act differently in response to ability self-discrepancy is limited. Based on the self-discrepancy theory and self-efficacy theory, this study identifies self-efficacy as a moderating factor for individuals’ compensatory consumption and adaptive consumption due to the ability self-discrepancy. Two between-group experiments examined the effects of ability self-discrepancy (with vs. without) and self-efficacy (high vs. low) on the purchase intention of compensatory products and adaptive products respectively. The results show that consumers with low self-efficacy are more likely to engage in compensatory consumption than consumers with high self-efficacy. However, the moderating effect of self-efficacy is not significant in adaptive consumption.

Affluent citizens commonly record higher election turnout than less affluent citizens. Yet, the causal effect of affluence on voter turnout remains poorly understood. In this article, we rely on Norwegian administrative data to estimate the impact of random, exogenous shocks in (unearned) income on individual-level voter turnout. Exploiting the random timing and size of lottery wins for identification, our main findings suggest that a lottery windfall in the years just before an election boosts individuals’ turnout probability by 1.6 to 1.9 percentage points. Crucially, these point estimates reflect only a small share of turnout differences observed across the income distribution. Hence, our findings strongly suggest that most of the commonly observed positive income-turnout associations do not reflect a causal relationship.

I set up a dynamic experience goods model where a long‐lived seller interacts with a sequence of short‐lived buyers and where the seller has reputational concerns. The key innovation of the article is to endogenize prices in this framework, specifically by endowing either the seller or the buyers with the ability to post price. I show that influence over prices has a strong impact on equilibrium characteristics. If the seller posts price, equilibria will display work‐shirk dynamics. If the buyers post price, however, there is always an equilibrium where the seller builds and perpetually maintains her reputation.

Self‐determination theory (SDT) postulates that all humans have basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. SDT scholars employ a necessity logic to define and interpret the roles of psychological need satisfaction for optimal human development. However, traditional regression techniques, often applied to test hypotheses derived from SDT, are unsuitable for testing necessity statements. To achieve a theory‐method alignment, we employed necessary condition analysis (NCA) to examine whether basic psychological needs at work are necessary for employees' intrinsic motivation, identified regulation, life satisfaction, and vigour at work. Study 1's cross‐sectional data ( N = 550; Germany) and Study 2's time‐lagged data ( N = 417; UK and US) generally support the necessary roles of need satisfaction. Notably, intrinsic motivation and vigour are especially constrained by basic psychological need satisfaction. This research advances SDT by providing more precise accounts of the theory from a necessity‐oriented lens. We also highlight the importance of management practices that can satisfy employees' basic psychological needs at work.

A growing body of evidence suggests that exposure to natural environments is associated with more positive body image, but such work has invariably centred the experiences of neurotypical adults and bodies. To rectify this oversight, we examined whether direct and indirect (i.e., mediational) pathways between nature exposure and an index of positive body image (i.e., body appreciation) are significant in autistic adults. A total of 303 autistic adults (age M = 36.69, range 18-75 years) from the United Kingdom completed an online survey that included measures of nature exposure, body appreciation, self-compassion, and nature connectedness, as well as sociodemographic variables. Structural equation modeling was used to test a hypothesised parallel mediation model in which self-compassion and connectedness to nature, respectively, mediated the association between nature exposure and body appreciation. Results showed that connectedness to nature, but not self-compassion, mediated the relationship between nature exposure and body appreciation. This finding was robust to sensitivity analyses and consistent across participants who identified as women and men. These results suggest that nature exposure is associated with more positive body image in autistic adults, which practitioners may find useful in designing population-specific nature-based interventions.

New advances in computerized adaptive testing (CAT) have increased the feasibility of high‐stakes unproctored testing of general mental ability (GMA) in personnel selection contexts. This study presents the results from a within‐subject investigation of the convergent validity of unproctored tests. Three batteries of cognitive ability tests were administered during personnel selection in the Norwegian Armed Forces. A total of 537 candidates completed two sets of proctored fixed‐length GMA tests before and during the selection process. In addition, an at‐home unproctored CAT battery of tests was administered before the selection process began. Differences and similarities between the convergent validity of the tests were evaluated. The convergent validity coefficients did not significantly differ between proctored and unproctored batteries, both on observed GMA scores and the latent factor level. The distribution and standardized residuals of test scores comparing proctored‐proctored and proctored‐unproctored were overall quite similar and showed no evidence of score inflation or deflation in the unproctored tests. The similarities between proctored and unproctored results also extended to the moderately searchable words similarity test. Although some unlikely individual cases were observed, the overall results suggest that the unproctored tests maintained their convergent validity.

A pivotal characteristic of leaders is their ability to assist employees in recognizing, harnessing, and cultivating their strengths. This study explores the hypothesis that strengths-based leadership fosters employees’ personal initiative (PI). Grounded in self-determination theory (SDT), it is posited that strengths-based leadership indirectly bolsters employees’ PI by enhancing their competence perceptions. The study further argues that with the increase in remote work opportunities in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is imperative to consider whether teleworking influences the relationships among strengths-based leadership, employees’ perceived competence, and employees’ PI. A two-wave, web-based questionnaire was utilized to collect data from 626 employees in the public sector in Norway. Multiple regressions and the PROCESS macro were used to test the hypotheses. The results corroborate a mediation model in which strengths-based leadership amplifies employees’ PI by increasing their perceived competence. The results supported the hypothesis that remote working moderates the positive association between strengths-based leadership and employees’ perceptions of competence, whereas a moderated mediation model, with the number of hours working remotely as the moderator, did not. This study contributes to research on strengths-based leadership by offering a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that drive proactive employee behavior within the framework of self-determination theory. As such, this study also contributes to self-determination theory and the literature on PI by examining how context and leadership influence the satisfaction of employees’ needs and foster proactivity. The study further provides insight into the implications of the increase in home office use in the post pandemic workforce.

Assigning patients to rooms and nurses to patients are critical tasks within hospitals that directly affect patient and staff satisfaction, quality of care, and hospital efficiency. Both patient-to-room assignments and nurse-to-patient assignments are typically agreed upon at the ward level, and they interact in several ways, such as jointly determining the walking distances nurses cover between different patient rooms. This provides the motivation to consider both problems jointly in an integrated fashion. This paper presents the first optimization models and algorithms for the integrated patient-to-room and nurse-to-patient assignment problem. We provide a mixed integer programming formulation of the integrated problem that considers the typical objectives from the single problems and additional objectives that can only be properly evaluated when integrating both problems. Moreover, motivated by the inherent complexity that results from integrating these two NP-hard and already computationally challenging problems, we devise an efficient heuristic for the integrated patient-to-room and nurse-to-patient assignment problem. We conduct extensive computational experiments on both artificial and real-world instances to evaluate the runtime and quality of the solution obtained with the heuristic. The artificial instances are generated by a parameterized instance generator for the integrated problem that is made freely available.