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.

A Review of the it Outsourcing Empirical Literature and Future Research Directions

Abstract: An enormous amount of information has been produced about the IT outsourcing phenomenon over the last 20 years, but one has to look to the academic literature for consistent, objective, and reliable research approaches and analyses. Our review finds that, in practice, the academic literature on IT outsourcing has very much honored both rigor and relevance in the ways in which research has been conducted. Our central purpose in the review was to answer two research questions: What has the empirical academic literature found about information technology outsourcing (ITO) decisions and outcomes? What are the gaps in knowledge to consider in future ITO research? To answer these questions, we examined 164 empirical ITO articles published between 1992 and 2010 in 50 journals. Adapting a method used by Jeyaraj et al. (2006), we encapsulated this vast empirical literature on ITO in a way that was concise, meaningful, and helpful to researchers. We coded 36 dependent variables, 138 independent variables, and 741 relationships between independent and dependent variables. By extracting the best evidence, we developed two models of outsourcing: one model addressed ITO decisions and one model addressed ITO outcomes. The model of ITO decisions includes independent variables associated with motives to outsource, transaction attributes, client firm characteristics, and influence sources. The model of ITO outcomes includes independent variables associated with client and supplier capabilities, relationship characteristics, contractual governance, decision characteristics, and transaction attributes. We also examined the interactions among broad categories of variables and the learning curve effects resulting from feedback loops. Overall, ITO researchers have a broad and deep understanding of ITO. However, the field continues to evolve as clients and suppliers on every inhabited continent participate actively in the global sourcing community. There is still much research yet to be done. We reviewed recent studies that have identified gaps in current knowledge and proposed future paths of research pertaining to strategic motivations, environmental influences, dynamic interactions, configurational and portfolio approaches, global destinations, emerging models, reference theory extension, and grounded theory development.

The Structure of Economic Modeling of the Potential Impacts of Climate Change: Grafting Gross Underestimation of Risk onto Already Narrow Science Models

Abstract: Scientists describe the scale of the risks from unmanaged climate change as potentially immense. However, the scientific models, because they omit key factors that are hard to capture precisely, appear to substantially underestimate these risks. Many economic models add further gross underassessment of risk because the assumptions built into the economic modeling on growth, damages and risks, come close to assuming directly that the impacts and costs will be modest and close to excluding the possibility of catastrophic outcomes. A new generation of models is needed in all three of climate science, impact and economics with a still stronger focus on lives and livelihoods, including the risks of large-scale migration and conflicts.

Cool, Creative and Egalitarian? Exploring Gender in Project-Based New Media Work in Euro

Abstract: The new media industries are popularly regarded as cool, creative and egalitarian. This view is held by academics, policy-makers and also by new media workers themselves, who cite the youth, dynamism and informality of new media as some of its main attractions. This paper is concerned with what this mythologized version of new media work leaves out, glosses over and, indeed, makes difficult to articulate at all. Themes include pervasive insecurity, low pay, and long hours but the particular focus of the paper is on gender inequalities in new media work. Despite its image as 'cool', non-hierarchical and egalitarian, the new media sector, this paper will argue, is characterized by a number of entrenched and all too old-fashioned patterns of gender inequality relating to education, access to work and pay. Moreover, a number of new forms of gender inequality are emerging, connected - paradoxically - to many of the features of the work that are valued - informality,autonomy,flexibility and so on. Drawing on a study of 125 freelance new media workers in six European countries, this paper explores these issues and argues that the new forms of sexism in new media represent a serious challenge to its image of itself as cool, diverse and egalitarian.

Scaling policy preferences from coded political texts

Abstract: Scholars estimating policy positions from political texts typically code words or sentences and then build left-right policy scales based on the relative frequencies of text units coded into different categories. Here we reexamine such scales and propose a theoretically and linguistically superior alternative based on the logarithm of odds-ratios. We contrast this scale with the current approach of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), showing that our proposed logit scale avoids widely acknowledged flaws in previous approaches. We validate the new scale using independent expert surveys. Using existing CMP data, we show how to estimate more distinct policy dimensions, for more years, than has been possible before, and make this dataset publicly available. Finally, we draw some conclusions about the future design of coding schemes for political texts.

Is Time-Discounting Hyperbolic or Subadditive?

Abstract: Subadditive time discounting means that discounting over a delay is greater when the delay is divided into subintervals than when it is left undivided. This may produce the most important result usually attributed to hyperbolic discounting: declining impatience, or the inverse relationship between the discount rate and the magnitude of the delay. Three choice experiments were conducted to test for subadditive discounting, and to determine whether it is sufficient to explain declining impatience. All three experiments showed strong evidence of subadditive discounting, but there was no evidence of declining impatience. I conclude by questioning whether hyperbolic discounting is a plausible account of time preference.