London School of Economics and Political Science

About: London School of Economics and Political Science is a education organization based out in London, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Population. The organization has 8759 authors who have published 35017 publications receiving 1436302 citations.

Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political transformation

Abstract: This article seeks to intervene in what I perceive to be a problematic opposition in feminist theory between ontological and epistemological accounts of existence and politics, by proposing an approach that weaves together Elspeth Probyn’s conceptualisation of ‘feminist reflexivity’ with a re-reading of feminist standpoint through affect. In so doing, I develop the concept of affective solidarity as necessary for sustainable feminist politics of transformation. This approach is proposed as a way of moving away from rooting feminist transformation in the politics of identity and towards modes of engagement that start from the affective dissonance experience can produce. Moving beyond empathy as a privileged way of connecting with others, I argue that the difference between ‘womanhood’ and ‘feminism’ is critical for a universal yet non-essential understanding of what motivates gendered change.

Social Connections and Incentives in the Workplace: Evidence from Personnel Data

Abstract: We present evidence on the effect of social connections between workers and managers on productivity in the workplace. To evaluate whether the existence of social connections is beneficial to the firm's overall performance, we explore how the effects of social connections vary with the strength of managerial incentives and worker's ability. To do so, we combine panel data on individual worker's productivity from personnel records with a natural field experiment in which we engineered an exogenous change in managerial incentives, from fixed wages, to bonuses based on the average productivity of the workers managed. We find that when managers are paid fixed wages, they favor workers to whom they are socially connected irrespective of the worker's ability, but when they are paid performance bonuses, they target their effort towards high ability workers irrespective of whether they are socially connected to them or not. Although social connections increase the performance of connected workers, we find that favoring connected workers is detrimental for the firm's overall performance.

How Special is the Special Relationship? Using the impact of US R&D spillovers on UK firms as a test of technology sourcing

Abstract: How much does US-based R&D benefit other countries and through what mechanisms? We test the "technology sourcing" hypothesis that foreign research labs located on US soil tap into US R&D spillovers and improve home country productivity. Using panels of UK and US firms matched to patent data we show that UK firms who had established a high proportion of US-based inventors by 1990 benefited disproportionately from the growth of the US R&D stock over the next 10 years. We estimate that UK firms’ Total Factor Productivity would have been at least 5% lower in 2000 (about $14bn) in the absence of the US R&D growth in the 1990s. We also find that technology sourcing is more important for countries and industries who have "most to learn". Within the UK, the benefits of technology sourcing were larger in industries whose TFP gap with the US was greater. Between countries, the growth of the UK R&D stock did not appear to have a major benefit for US firms who located R&D labs in the UK. The "special relationship" between the UK and the US appears distinctly asymmetric.

Distributed tuning of boundary resources: the case of Apple's iOS service system

Abstract: The digital age has seen the rise of service systems involving highly distributed, heterogeneous, and resource-integrating actors whose relationships are governed by shared institutional logics, standards, and digital technology The cocreation of service within these service systems takes place in the context of a paradoxical tension between the logic of generative and democratic innovations and the logic of infrastructural control Boundary resources play a critical role in managing the tension as a firm that owns the infrastructure can secure its control over the service system while independent firms can participate in the service system In this study, we explore the evolution of boundary resources Drawing on Pickering's (1993) and Barrett et al's (2012) conceptualizations of tuning, the paper seeks to forward our understanding of how heterogeneous actors engage in the tuning of boundary resources within Apple's iOS service system We conduct an embedded case study of Apple's iOS service system with an in-depth analysis of 4,664 blog articles concerned with 30 boundary resources covering 6 distinct themes Our analysis reveals that boundary resources of service systems enabled by digital technology are shaped and reshaped through distributed tuning, which involves cascading actions of accommodations and rejections of a network of heterogeneous actors and artifacts Our study also shows the dualistic role of power in the distributed tuning process