This thesis focuses on the international hotel industry as part of the global economy and examines the implications that the strategic management of human capital has within the five-star sector of the hotel industry in Dubai, an emirate of the United Arab Emirates, and an economy based on the service sector. It examines the macro environmental factors influencing the potential strategic directions of two recognized international five-star hotel brands and considers the challenges this creates for the alignment of strategy, and the implications this has for management of human capital(people) as a key determinant of success that enhances organisational outcomes. In selecting this area of research, the author has adopted a grounded theory approach to the generation of new knowledge, allowing the literature to be guided by concerns raised by hotel managers and industry consultants working in the context of Dubai. This approach led to the employment of a case study method, through which the key influences of organisational culture and ownership are considered. Two international hotel chains were identified to represent the two strategic modes of entry into the destination. The first case being a locally owned and managed chain with 7 hotels in Dubai. The second case is a European chain operating 6 hotel properties under management contract in Dubai, with 6 different owners from the Middle East. Both companies operate within the luxury five-star market that is so prevalent in Dubai. The hospitality industry, by definition, relies heavily on human capital, both as a resource and a capability that may allow for the development of competitive advantage. However, the dynamics of the Dubai hotel environment, the strength of the Arab cultural values and the organisational conditions that exist in Dubai present HR managers with a number of unique challenges, including high levels of pastoral care, and approaches to managing the workforce that may be at odds with traditional ‘Western’ ideals. This thesis adds to the existing debate on the value and utilisation of existing theoretical frameworks attached to the alignment of strategy and the implications for managing human capital in the face of globalisation and presents a model of their application in a city that is characterised by power and control, predictability and change aversion.

This study examines the role of board social and human capital in assessing the market value of firms in the UK context. As the world economy has shifted from manufacturing to service and knowledge-based economies, attributes such as knowledge, expertise, skills, ability and reputation are increasingly fundamental to the success of business enterprises. There is a growing consensus that these attributes are an increasingly valuable form of capital, asset or resource, despite their intangibility. In accounting, there are a number of problems arising from the accountability of non-physical, non-financial capital. Firstly, some forms of capital and certain assets are neither recognised nor presented in the statement of financial position. Secondly, some accounting practices relating to intangible assets are very conservative, resulting in undervalued assets and overstated liabilities. Consequently, there is an increasing gap between the book value and market value of firms. This gap restricts the relevance of information presented in financial statements and suggests that there is something missing in financial statements. This is the research problem being addressed in this study. While prior literature demonstrates that it has proven difficult to operationalise intangible forms of capital, there has been significant empirical attention and theoretical development in social and human forms. This thesis aims to contribute to accounting theory and practice by exploring the impact that board social and human capital have on firm market value. In light of extant research, it is hypothesised that social and human capital possessed at board level are positively related to the market value of firms. This study employs the Ohlson’s (1995) residual income valuation model to test the impact of social and human capital using a sample of UK firms listed on the FTSE All Share index for a period of 10 years (2001-2010). Social and human capital measures are derived from interlocking directorate ties and detailed biographic information of board directors. This study benefits from Pajek and Ucinet network packages to generate network maps and calculate positional metrics such as centrality and structural hole measures.

O fluxo escolar brasileiro representa um problema crônico para o caso do Ensino Médio do país. A literatura mostra que o retorno do investimento escolar é atrativo no país, tanto por apresentar uma taxa média alta, como pelo fato de que o adicional de salário devido aos níveis educacionais mais altos são maiores do que nos estágios iniciais da educação, i.e., o retorno educacional brasileiro aparenta ser crescente e convexo, diferente do que se apresenta na literatura internacional. A explicação usual para a evasão se dá através das restrições orçamentárias e de crédito enfrentadas pelas famílias que, sendo restritas no acesso ao crédito, poderia fazer com que o jovem saísse da escola precocemente, mesmo que o aluno esperasse um salário futuro maior. Somado a este retorno atrativo da educação, o país expandiu abruptamente os gastos educacionais. Porém, apesar da expansão, a escolaridade e as medidas de fluxo no país não reagiram proporcionalmente, despertando, assim, a atenção da literatura para explicação desse puzzle. A despeito destes fatos, a literatura internacional avançou no sentido de mostrar dois fatos que auxiliam na investigação dessa questão: em primeiro lugar, o retorno da educação pode variar entre indivíduos, ainda que a média seja alta. Por exemplo, indivíduos com maior aptidão podem ser os que se beneficiam mais de uma escolaridade maior, explicando o motivo de alguns abandonarem a escola. Em segundo lugar, a literatura avançou em mostrar que um fator importante na previsão de resultados escolares são habilidades não-cognitivas, como as habilidades socioemocionais. Portanto, este presente trabalho buscou explorar uma coleta de dados realizada em Sertãozinho - SP, em 2008, 2012 e 2017, em que estão disponíveis dados socioemocionais dos estudantes, além de dados demográficos e cognitivos, de estudantes que estavam no segundo ano do Ensino Fundamental em 2008, e em 2017 idealmente estariam no Ensino Médio, possibilitando investigar se existe uma associação entre características socioemocionais e o fluxo escolar. Os resultados indicam que tais fatores têm poder preditivo relevante na explicação do fluxo escolar brasileiro, medidos pela probabilidade de os indivíduos permanecerem estudando e pela probabilidade de se atingir o Ensino Médio em 2017, sendo que a Conscienciosidade e a Amabilidade do estudante aumentam a chance do aluno persistir estudando, enquanto que a Extroversão reduz essa probabilidade, em linha com algumas evidências da literatura. Os resultados trazem como contribuição uma evidência empírica inicial acerca da associação entre habilidades não-cognitivas e o fluxo escolar brasileiro. / The Brazilian school flow represents a chronic problem for the country\'s high school case. The literature shows that the return on school investment is attractive in the country, both for having a high average rate, and for the fact that the additional salary due to higher education levels is higher than in the early stages of education, ie, The Brazilian educational return appears to be growing and convex, different from what is presented in the international literature. The usual explanation for avoidance is through budget and credit constraints faced by families who, being restricted in access to credit, could cause the young person to leave school early, even if the student expects a larger future salary. Added to this attractive return of education, the country abruptly expanded educational spending. However, despite the expansion, the schooling and flow measures in the country did not react proportionally, thus awakening the attention of the literature to explain this textit puzzle. In spite of these facts, the international literature has advanced to show two facts that help in the investigation of this question: firstly, the return of education can vary among individuals, even if the average is high. For example, individuals with higher aptitude may be those who benefit most from higher schooling, explaining why some drop out of school. Second, the literature has advanced in showing that an important factor in predicting school outcomes are non-cognitive skills, such as social-emotional skills. Therefore, this study aimed to explore a data collection held in Sertãozinho - SP, in 2008, 2012 and 2017, in which are available socioemotional data of the students, as well as demographic and cognitive data, of students who were in the second year of Elementary Education in 2008, and by 2017 would ideally be in High School, making it possible to investigate if there is an association between socioemotional characteristics and the school flow. The results indicate that such factors have a relevant predictive power in the explanation of the Brazilian school flow, measured by the probability of individuals remaining studying and by the probability of reaching high school in 2017, and the student\'s Conscientiousness and Kindness increase the chance of while the Extroversion reduces this probability, in line with some evidence in the literature. The results contribute as an initial empirical evidence about the association between non-cognitive abilities and the Brazilian school flow.

A relação entre capital humano e desigualdade depende do quão desigual é a distribuição de atributos produtivos entre os trabalhadores e da forma como o mercado remunera estas diferenças. No Brasil, os retornos à escolaridade e a desigualdade educacional são elevados, de modo que a educação desempenha um importante papel na explicação de sua elevada iniqüidade de renda. Desde 1980, os trabalhadores brasileiros estão cada vez mais educados. Este artigo procura entender quais os impactos destas transformações sobre a dispersão salarial no Brasil entre 1981 e 2006. Conclui-se que os retornos à educação apresentam um impacto positivo sobre a desigualdade de salários. Já o aumento da escolaridade, que atuou no sentido de elevar a desigualdade de rendimentos nos anos 1980, não vem apresentando impactos significativos sobre a dispersão salarial a partir de então. Simulações mostram que as melhorias educacionais devem colaborar para a redução da desigualdade de salários a partir de 2012. / The relationship between human capital and inequality depends on how unequal is the workers\' productive features distribution and how the market rewards these features. In Brazil, returns on education and educational inequity are both high, in order that education plays an important role in explaining the high levels of income inequality. Since 1980, Brazilian workers have become more educated. This paper proposes to comprehend the impacts of these transformations on Brazil\'s wage inequality from 1981 to 2006. It is possible to conclude that returns on education have a positive impact on wage inequity. As for the raise of educational level, which acted to raise inequality in the 80\'s, has not been having significant impacts on this disparity since then. Simulations show that rising in the schooling level may help wage inequality to lower by 2012.

As the number of older adults experiencing homelessness continues to increase, understanding the experiences of older homeless adults is necessary. Although housing first initiatives are vital to removing individuals from homelessness, the psychosocial aspects of homelessness are often neglected. The efforts to end and prevent homelessness among older adults require interagency collaboration to include counseling professionals who can assist with the psychosocial aspects of the phenomenon. In an effort to provide a platform for older adults experiencing homelessness to inform researchers and practitioner alike, a phenomenological qualitative study was conducted to explore their lived experiences and their human and social capital. The findings of the study suggest that the experiences older adults participants of this study ranged from maladaptive behaviors (e.g., poor decision making) to positive outlooks for their future. Overall, both their human and their social capital are impaired, and they require interventions that address psychosocial aspects of homelessness, such as loss of social ties and financial insecurity.

Applying data analytics for talent acquisition and retention has been identified as one of the most urgent challenges facing HR leaders around the world; however, it is also one of the challenges that firms are least prepared to tackle. Our research strives to narrow such a capability gap between the urgency and readiness of data-driven human resource management. First, we predict interfirm competitors for human capital in the labor market utilizing the rich information contained in over 89,000 LinkedIn users' profiles. Using employee migrations across firms, we derive and analyze a human capital flow network. We leverage this network to extract global cues about interfirm human capital overlap through structural equivalence and community classification. The online employee profiles also provide rich data on the explicit knowledge base of firms and allow us to measure the interfirm human capital overlap in terms of similarity in their employees' skills. We validate our proposed human capital overlap metrics in a predictive analytics framework using future employee migrations as an indicator of labor market competition. The results show that our proposed metrics have superior predictive power over conventional firm-level economic and human resource measures. Second, we estimate the effect of skilled immigrants on the native U.S. workers' turnover probability. We apply unsupervised machine learning to categorize employees' self-reported skills and find that skilled immigrants disproportionately specialize in IT. In contrast, the native workers predominantly focus on management and analyst skills. Utilizing the randomness in the H-1B visa lottery system and a 2SLS design, we find that a 1 percentage point increase in a firm's proportion of skilled immigrant employees leads to a decrease of 0.69 percentage points in a native employee's turnover risk. However, this beneficial crowding-in effect varies for native workers with different skills. Our methodology highlights the need to account for a multifaceted view of the skilled immigration's effect on native workers. Finally, we also propose a set of features and models that are able to effectively predict future employee turnover outcomes. Our predictive models can provide significant utility to managers by identifying individuals with the highest turnover risks.

This paper assesses the relevance of social investment in relation to the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), targets, and indicators. The research question is: How could social investment support the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals? The thesis conceptualises social investment, sustainable development, and sustainability, before turning to the issue of how social investment could enhance its impact by focusing on areas of policy that it has not considered typically. This thesis goes beyond addressing the SDGs themselves to consider other issues that shall arguably be significant in relation to achievement of the 2030 Agenda, such as the contentious matter of limits to growth. The thesis includes a content analysis of the global indicator framework for the 2030 Agenda, based upon social investment-related search terms and focused reading of particular examples from the social investment literature. The first part of the analysis suggests that social investment in its current form can contribute towards Goal 4 on quality education and Goal 8 on decent work and economic growth; and to a somewhat lesser extent towards Goal 1 on no poverty, Goal 5 on gender equality, and Goal 10 on reduced inequalities. The analysis considers subsequently further SDGs that social investment could ultimately support. While recognising the value of social investment as understood usually for policymaking to achieve the SDGs, the concluding section suggests that a broadened version of social investment could strengthen policy relevance.

The inability of business owners to hire skilled employees affects the profitability of a small business. Small business owners may attain profitability by understanding the value of military veterans and cultivating strategies for the hiring and recruitment process. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies that business owners in Fayetteville, North Carolina used to recruit military veterans as a means to acquire skilled employees to maximize productivity, profitability, and sustainability. The conceptual framework of this study included human capital theory and recruitment theory. The purposive sample consisted of 6 participants who were small business owners. Data from interviews and supporting documents were processed and analyzed using data source triangulation to identify 3 emergent themes. Findings indicated that, for these 6 Fayetteville small business owners, job description and transition workshops, resume review and communication, and accommodations and benefits were key attributes related to the successful recruitment of military veterans as skilled employees. Specifically, streamlined hiring processes, relationship building, and access to resources were predictive of a successful hire. Knowledge barriers regarding hiring processes prevented efficient communication between small business owners and military veterans, but business owners cultivated strategies to help with hiring military veterans. The implications for positive social change include the potential for business owners to capitalize on the skills that military veterans bring to the civilian workforce, which in turn may improve the economy.

Organizational leaders know that employee turnover negatively impacts an organization's finances and can be a result of a lack of employee commitment. Guided by Yukl's flexible leadership theory, this single case study was used to explore strategies that senior leaders have used to increase employee commitment and reduce employee turnover. Vice presidents and directors from a U.S. Fortune 500 financial firm in New Jersey participated in semistructured interviews. The 5 participants have implemented effective strategies to increase employee commitment and reduce employee turnover. Data collection comprised face-to-face interviews, review of company documentation, external website content, and member checking to explore effective strategies to increase employee commitment and reduce employee turnover. Data analysis involved organizing information and data and coding it appropriately corresponding to a 5-step data analysis process. Using thematic coding, data were organized into topics based on the conceptual framework of flexible leadership theory. Three primary themes emerged from data analysis: effective and truthful communication, effective leadership and feedback, and improving organizational atmosphere and work environment. Leaders can implement effective employee commitment strategies for increased trust and motivation to enhance productivity and performance in an organization and stimulate the economy. The implications of this study for positive social change include the potential to increase job satisfaction and reduce the unemployment rate.

Thesis (MPA) --University of Limpopo, 2011