Fida Afiouni

Conjuguant GRH, stratégie et finance, ce travail a pour vocation de mettre en lumière l'importance de l'homme au sein du processus de création de valeur. Nos résultats montrent qu'une vision partenariale de la banque permet une meilleure création de valeur que la seule vision actionnariale, que les banques appliquant une gestion stratégique et efficace des ressources humaines enregistrent de meilleures performances que celles où la fonction RH reste marginalisée. GRH et finance sont ainsi complémentaires, et leur combinaison conduit à une meilleure création de valeur.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how women academics from the Arab Middle East enact their careers with reference to double-bounded contexts: academia as an institution encoding organizational career scripts and gender as another institution encoding specific gender roles. It is hoped that this cross-cultural perspective would broaden the understanding of careers beyond the economically advanced industrialized countries and better inform the current debate on the boundaryless career model. Design/methodology/approach – The study is qualitative and exploratory in nature. It draws on one-to-one interviews with 23 female academics in early, mid and late careers, working in research universities in the Arab Middle East region. Findings – The choice of academia as a profession is mainly driven by the subjective perception of an academic career as a calling, the lack of attractiveness of other career options in the region, and the appeal of the flexibility of academic work. Furthermore, the fin...

ABSTRACT The aim of this chapter is to provide a critical assessment of SHRM, shedding light on its differentiating attributes and theoretical foundations, as well as the persistent gaps and challenges in this rapidly growing field. SHRM undoubtedly presents significant advances and new insights in relation to people management, but it is not a panacea and there is still no consensus on an exact definition of SHRM among scholars. These challenges, coupled with the difficulty of translating theory into practice, are possible stumbling blocks in the way of the fully fledged maturation of SHRM and will be fleshed out and discussed further in the sections below.

In this chapter, and stemming from our position as academic researchers and as women living and working in the Arab Region, we engage in a critical reflexive exercise that echoes our feminist standpoint. We aim to tackle and debunk some of the assumptions that often underpin research on women’s careers in our region. Such assumptions may find strong support in a Western context, but they do not necessarily hold in a different socio-cultural and political context.

The connections linking HRM and CSR are many and far reaching. Recent research highlighting micro-foundations of CSR and earlier writings on the strategic turn in HRM, are two examples of directions that researchers have taken to explicitly link the management of human resources to responsible business practices. Although tracing such connections is useful in contexts across the globe, in the proposed symposium we focus specifically on the HRM- CSR nexus within the context of developing nations and as it relates specifically to women. We explore the ways in which organizations and its employees/managers in developing economies can leverage HRM practices and internal/external CSR strategies to provide meaningful tools or mechanisms for gender development, for better understanding of gender dynamics within the organization, and/or for the advancement of women's careers. This symposium therefore brings together five papers to explore the HRM-CSR nexus as a space for gendered-based ...

The field of talent management (TM) has grown over the last two decades, and much theoretical and methodological progress has been made in an effort to better conceptualize the field. Despite these efforts, the construction of knowledge within TM research has ignored power and gender dynamics. In this paper, we adopt a feminist poststructuralist perspective and unveil how talent management theory is underpinned by predominant masculinist discourses that create and sustain business elites in a neoliberal world order. Based on a textual and discourse analysis of foundational texts on TM, we identify the power effects of language in shaping current TM theory. This study raises questions concerning the epistemological foundations of talent management as objective, neutral, and observable. We suggest that future researchers adopt critical methods of inquiry to ensure that gender and equity issues are interrogated within dominant talent management writings.

Abstract: Knowledge Management (KM) is typically defined as the holistic combination of measures for managing people, processes and technology. However, most of the KM literature focuses on the technology part, and the explicit integration of Human Resource Management ...

Ancre dans un paradigme constructiviste et utilisant des methodes qualitatives de recueil et d'analyse de donnees, ce travail a pour vocation de mettre en lumiere l'importance du capital humain au sein du processus de creation de valeur dans le secteur bancaire libanais. La premiere partie de ce travail retrace la theorie de creation de valeur a partir de son origine, et souligne l'importance des mecanismes de gouvernement, du capital immateriel et d'une gestion socialement responsable dans le processus de creation de valeur. La deuxieme partie est consacree a la presentation du terrain et a nos choix epistemologiques et methodologiques. La troisieme partie est consacree a la presentation de nos resultats, prouvant qu'une gestion strategique des ressources humaines ainsi qu'une vision partenariale de la banque permet une meilleure creation de valeur. GRH et finance sont ainsi complementaires. Leur combinaison conduit a une meilleure creation de valeur sur le ...

In this study we consider context more centrally in research on career calling. Conceptualized as situational opportunities and constraints, we attempt to expand how we understand the influence of context on shaping a person’s career calling. Interviews were conducted with 40 successful women working in non-traditional gender careers in a context where female labor force participation ranks one of the lowest globally. Our results evidence that these women experience context in a manner that is laden with patriarchal, sectarian, politically unstable and challenging constraints. Our results also suggest; however that these same contextual factors serve as a “pushing force” leading these women to develop a calling that is other-oriented. Based on these findings, we contribute to existing conceptualizations of calling by providing an extended, contextualized and process-oriented analytic model of career calling.

In recent years, there have been visible increases in gender balanced corporate governance structures globally following the introduction in many countries of mandatory quotas for women’s participation on corporate boards (MSCI survey, 2014). The implementation of gender quotas begins to address longstanding issues related to gender-biases and underrepresentation, both issues that are of increasing interest to practitioners and researchers alike. In this proposed symposium, we adopt a multi- country perspective and discuss the parameters of implementation for mandatory quotas in different context. We explore the perceptions of various stakeholders about how and why women are appointed to boards, who are the women being appointed, what are some of the perceived multi-level challenges to serving on boards, and what are the measures of successful performance. This symposium brings together five papers authored by 15 scholars from 5 different countries and 11 different institutions glob...

Informal networking can be seen as a positive activity with beneficial outcomes for individuals, firms, and society as a whole, but informal networking can also lead to collusion, cliques, nepotism, and other forms of unethical or corrupt conduct – largely related to research on emerging markets. To date, the construction of informal networks and their cultural intertwinement and development have not been a focus of international management and organization studies, a gap that this special issue seeks to address. This special issue contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics of informal networks and their ambivalence, in which the same networks have different modes of operation and have positive and negative sides intermittently or simultaneously. We demonstrate the context in which informal networks operate, highlight their complexity, and encourage dialogue among scholars studying informal networks in a variety of countries. Using a context-based and comparative perspect...

A notable phenomenon in the Arab Middle East is the growing number of educated and skilled women who are unemployed at disproportionate rates when compared to their male compatriots In contrast to the Leaking Pipeline described in many national contexts in Europe and North America, it appears that in the Arab world the pipeline is experiencing ever-increasing pressure -- what has been referred to as the Bursting Pipeline. This pressure adds to the frustrations felt throughout the region exacerbating the multitude of challenges faced by professionals, entrepreneurs, employers, and governments aiming to revive economic growth after the onset of the uprising and far-reaching institutional changes. In this paper symposium, we showcase five papers that move research towards concrete actions that various stakeholders can undertake in support of dissipating the pressure within the pipeline and therefore supporting female contributions to regional economic development overall. If accepted, this symposium would be...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce this special issue about the “Impact of the Global Refugee Crisis on the Career Ecosystem” and summarise the key contributions of the included practitioner and scholarly papers which examine refugee business and labour market experiences. The paper also examines the impact of media reports to provide a broader understanding of the context within which the current refugee crisis is evolving. Design/methodology/approach The authors begin with a delineation of the concept of a career ecosystem in the context of refugee crises. The authors then employ this framing as a backdrop to engage in a basic analysis of business media coverage of the most recent Syrian refugee crisis, and a summary of the practitioner and scholarly papers. Findings The findings of the media analysis suggest major coverage differences between different groups of countries in the number of documents identified, the proposed aim of business engagement with refugees, ...

Due to the realities of the labor market, the career prospects of individuals in the Arab MENA are weak, with unemployment rates remaining the highest in the world (ILO, 2014). Although certain regions in the Arab MENA are focal points of resource-rich economic activity (Forstenlechner and Baruch, 2013), many other regions have resource-poor economies with individuals facing difficulty in securing employment due to labor market rigidities and labor skills that do not match the needs of the market (O’Sullivan, Rey, and Mendez, 2011). The increasing political instability and conflict in the region since 2011 has created a particularly harsh environment for women in many of these resource-poor countries, one example being Lebanon (Afiouni, 2014, Karam and Afiouni, 2014). As evidenced by the low percentage (24.5%) of women making up the total Lebanese labor force (World Bank, 2014), Lebanese women experience difficulties accessing formal employment. In the 2014 Global Gender Gap Report, Lebanon fared particularly badly, ranking 135th out of 142 countries (World Economic Forum, 2014: 9). Broad explanations of these low employment rates and the commensurate lack of career prospects have often referenced salient sociocultural dynamics and patterns of gendered governance characteristic of neo-patriarchal Arab states (Moghadam, 2004). More focused explanations within the context of Lebanon note a context of deterrence, with multilevel factors leading to restrictions on women’s retention and career growth (Nasser and Abouchedid, 2003; Tlaiss and Kauser, 2010), female representation in political parties and electoral systems (Kassem, 2012), and women’s access to managerial and leadership positions (Sidani, Konrad, and Karam, 2015; Tlaiss and Kauser, 2011). The current paper seeks to better understand the perceived career opportunities and limitations of women living and working within this complex context. Adopting a multilevel perspective, we explore the narratives of a sample of 35 Lebanese women. Our efforts capture these women’s personal judgments of the legitimacy of (not) engaging in paid work, with the aim of exploring specifically how the public (i.e., culture, state, paid work) and private (i.e., household) patriarchal structures (Walby, 1990) work to shape these judgments. In doing this, our paper contributes to the career literature in two specific ways. First, we build a multilevel analytic framework that combines the institutional structures of private and public patriarchy (Walby, 1990) with the micro-processes of institutional logics (Dornbusch, Scott, and Busching, 1975; Tost, 2011). This type of framework is a good example of an attempt to contextualize career research as has been increasingly called for in the career literature (Duberley, Carmichael and Szmigin, 2014; Mayrhofer et al., 2007). Second, through our analytic framework we are better able to explore the contextualized logics of how women legitimize (not) engaging in paid work. We trace the intersection and interaction of the logics of legitimacy at both the collective (i.e., validity cues) and individual (i.e., propriety judgments) levels within women’s narratives and therefore gain a better contextual understanding of each woman’s perception of career decisions, opportunities and limitations. This paper therefore adds to the growing body of research examining women’s careers in various contexts (e.g. Afiouni, 2014; Buse, Bilimoria, and Perelli, 2013; Walsh et al., 2016), and adds to a burgeoning stream of literature aiming to examine both structure and agency in career research (e.g. Afiouni and Karam, 2014; Duberley, Cohen and Mallon, 2006; Tomlinson, Muzio, Sommerlad et al., 2013).