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The considerable institutional distance between home and host countries of most international branch campuses (IBCs) necessitates that they address the managerial challenge of balancing global integration and local responsiveness. Previous studies have investigated IBCs' strategies for addressing this challenge as well as the macro- or micro-level factors impacting their strategies. This study extends previous research by constructing a multilevel framework for understanding both macro- and micro-level factors and adopting it to guide the empirical investigation of two Canadian cases. The results demonstrate that the two Canadian IBCs have maintained a high level of localisation in staffing but different levels of globalisation in curriculum. Like many other IBCs, these two IBCs, as institutions, are inactive in research, although they do provide occasional support for research activities. Such strategies are increasingly influenced by the institutional forces in their host countries than those in their home country at the macro level. At the micro level, the strategies are primarily impacted by their students' educational demands. These findings exemplify strategies for other IBCs and for Canadian postsecondary institutions that consider opening overseas campuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary, we engage with the study by Carney, El Ghoul, Guedhami, Lu and Wang, titled "Political corporate social responsibility: The role of deliberative capacity." Their study provides empirical support for earlier claims that deliberative capacity – the capacity of political institutions to enable diverse stakeholders to collectively assemble and voice their opinions – is an important building block to understanding the prominence or lack thereof of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in a country. In so doing, Carney and co-authors contribute to the so-called "Political CSR" or PCSR literature. Yet, their study carries two important shortcomings that can be addressed to bring PCSR research forward in an IB context. First, they ignore a fundamental tenet of the PCSR literature, namely the existence of global governance gaps requiring private businesses to actively engage in political activity. Second, and related to the first, their model and associated variables are misspecified, with independent and dependent variables that are at least partially overlapping. Departing from these shortcomings, we attempt to engage constructively with their work in the interest of advancing the conversation in IB about private sector involvement in democratic will formation to achieve social and environmental responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study performs a multilevel analysis of personality traits and cultural values. With data from 7489 participants across 40 nations, we explore the relationship between Big Five personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) and Hofstede's cultural values (power distance, collectivism, achievement and assertiveness, gender egalitarianism, long-term orientation, uncertainty avoidance, and teamwork preference), considering multilevel data structures. We extend prior research by performing (1) variance decomposition tests to assess how differences in Big Five personality traits are explained by variations between nations versus individuals, (2) variance decomposition tests to determine how differences in Hofstedian cultural values are explained by variations between nations versus individuals, and (3) multilevel correlations to examine "true" personality-culture associations. Findings suggest some disparities between observed versus theoretically expected decomposition patterns. They also indicate minimal between-country variation, which underscores the challenges of categorizing individuals into distinct cultural groups and suggests globalization's shared cultural influence across borders. Multilevel analyses show weaker personality-culture associations than aggregate national-level analyses, emphasizing the need to consider nested data structures in research to prevent skewed correlation estimates and the risk of Simpson's paradox. Overall, findings highlight the importance of adopting multilevel approaches to human behavior theorizing and analysis. • Examined the sources of variance in cultural values and personality in 40 nations • Cultural values vary more across individuals with little between-nation variation. • Cultural values and personality links show statistical independence across levels. • Associations drawn from nation-mean levels may lead to misleading conclusions. • Multilevel research is needed to precisely study cultural values and personality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A variety of collective phenomena are understood to exist to the extent that workers agree on their perceptions of the phenomena, such as perceptions of their organization's climate or perceptions of their team's mental model. Researchers conducting group-level studies of such phenomena measure individuals' perceptions via surveys and then aggregate data to the group level if the mean within-group agreement for a sample of groups is sufficiently high. Despite this widespread practice, we know little about the factors potentially affecting mean within-group agreement. Here, focusing on work climate, we report an investigation of a number of expected contextual (social interaction) and methodological predictors of mean rWG, a common statistic for judging within-group agreement in applied psychology and management research. We used the novel approach of meta-CART, which allowed us to assess the relative importance and possible interactions of the predictor variables. Notably, mean rWG values are driven by both contextual (average number of individuals per group and cultural individualism-collectivism) and methodological factors (the number of items in a scale and scale reliability). Our findings are largely consistent with expectations concerning how social interaction affects within-group agreement and psychometric arguments regarding why adding more items to a scale will not necessarily increase the magnitude of an index based on a Spearman-Brown "stepped-up correction." We discuss the key insights from our results, which are relevant to the study of multilevel phenomena relying on the aggregation of individual-level data and informative for how meta-analytic researchers can simultaneously examine multiple moderator variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Care for U.S. children living with serious illness and their families at home is a complex and patchwork system. Improving home-based care for children and families requires a comprehensive, multilevel approach that accounts for and examines relationships across home environments, communities, and social contexts in which children and families live and receive care. We propose a multilevel conceptual framework, guided by Bronfenbrenner's ecological model, that conceptualizes the complex system of home-based care into five levels. Levels 1 and 2 contain patient and family characteristics. Level 3 contains factors that influence family health, well-being, and experience with care in the home. Level 4 includes the community, including community groups, schools, and providers. Level 5 includes the broader regional system of care that impacts the care of children and families across communities. Finally, care coordination and care disparities transcend levels, impacting care at each level. A multilevel ecological framework of home-based care for children with serious illness and families can be used in future multilevel research to describe and test hypotheses about aspects of this system of care, as well as to inform interventions across levels to improve patient and family outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The life course in general, and the educational trajectories of young people in particular, comprise a high degree of complexity as they take place in iterative, recursive and interactive negotiation processes in which numerous actors, institutions and discourses are involved. In this paper, an attempt is made to combine two conceptual discussions—Life Course and Governance—bringing them to bear on the examination of how Lifelong Learning (LLL) policies have been used to govern young people's life courses. The paper synthesizes different discussions of the complex relations among governance, discourses and structures of opportunity that impact the governing of the life course and particularly educational trajectories. It suggests that the combination of life course research and a governance perspective enables analyzing the governance of educational trajectories along discursive, institutional and relational dimensions of opportunity structures. Considering these various dimensions, the paper argues, allows us to attend to the social interactions, decision-making processes and processing mechanisms that precede and/or underlie educational processes and thus favor or complicate them. The contribution also critically discusses the implications of a governance perspective on life courses and closes with a discussion of the multidimensional and multilevel challenge of governing life course by means of LLL policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We theorize that organizations with higher brokerage positions (which we call brokers) benefit from access to capital and distribution that, paradoxically, causes them to implement poorer projects but to survive longer. Whereas prior research proposes that such organizations implement alliance projects because of their superior quality, we argue that they can do so despite project quality, because they have better access to capital and distribution. This access subjects their ventures to fewer implementation hurdles. As a result, there emerge three paradoxes and associated hypotheses: (a) brokers are able to implement more alliance projects, but their projects will perform on average more poorly; (b) brokers will tend to ally with other brokers but will do better when they ally with those having lower brokerage positions; and (c) despite the poorer performance of alliance projects, brokers will experience fewer risks and be less likely to exit the business. Paradoxically, brokerage makes organizations perform worse in each alliance but benefit from longer-term sustainability. In a study of 2,694 movie production companies in the Hollywood film industry from 1994 to 2009, we find considerable support for our hypotheses and develop a novel perspective on brokerage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As individuals are the actual agents of knowledge management (KM) activities, they are influenced by the technical and social aspects of an organization. The effects of social and technical aspects on KM, however, have either been studied separately, or one aspect has been emphasized over the other. This study used the multilevel approach to investigate the interaction between technical and social systems within the work system of KM by examining how the social system moderates the effects of the technical system on KM activities. The social system is operationalized as a team climate, which is the socially shared perception among members within a team, whereas the technical system is operationalized as the perceived value of the KM systems (KMS), which is the technical information system that deals with organizational knowledge and is realized in the work setting in the form of the perception of individuals. We conducted a field study that involved 80 teams of 419 individuals from three knowledge-intensive companies. A hierarchical linear model was employed to analyze the multilevel structure: individual-level KMS perceptions for operational support and strategic decision support, and KM activities with the team-level affective and innovative climates. Our findings show that the innovative team climate magnifies the effect of the perceived KMS value of individuals for strategic decision support on their knowledge adoption; whereas, the affective climate strengthens the effect of the perceived KMS value of individuals for operational support on their knowledge transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Care for U.S. children living with serious illness and their families at home is a complex and patchwork system. Improving home-based care for children and families requires a comprehensive, multilevel approach that accounts for and examines relationships across home environments, communities, and social contexts in which children and families live and receive care. We propose a multilevel conceptual framework, guided by Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model, that conceptualizes the complex system of home-based care into five levels. Levels 1 and 2 contain patient and family characteristics. Level 3 contains factors that influence family health, well-being, and experience with care in the home. Level 4 includes the community, including community groups, schools, and providers. Level 5 includes the broader regional system of care that impacts the care of children and families across communities. Finally, care coordination and care disparities transcend levels, impacting care at each level. A multilevel ecological framework of home-based care for children with serious illness and families can be used in future multilevel research to describe and test hypotheses about aspects of this system of care, as well as to inform interventions across levels to improve patient and family outcomes.

The life course in general, and the educational trajectories of young people in particular, comprise a high degree of complexity as they take place in iterative, recursive and interactive negotiation processes in which numerous actors, institutions and discourses are involved. In this paper, an attempt is made to combine two conceptual discussions—Life Course and Governance—bringing them to bear on the examination of how Lifelong Learning (LLL) policies have been used to govern young people’s life courses. The paper synthesizes different discussions of the complex relations among governance, discourses and structures of opportunity that impact the governing of the life course and particularly educational trajectories. It suggests that the combination of life course research and a governance perspective enables analyzing the governance of educational trajectories along discursive, institutional and relational dimensions of opportunity structures. Considering these various dimensions, the paper argues, allows us to attend to the social interactions, decision-making processes and processing mechanisms that precede and/or underlie educational processes and thus favor or complicate them. The contribution also critically discusses the implications of a governance perspective on life courses and closes with a discussion of the multidimensional and multilevel challenge of governing life course by means of LLL policies.