''Human Resources'': Economics and Organization
The paper considers the current challenges that organizations have to cope with in managing people and knowledge at the present time, moved by turbulent contexts and crisis at a social and at an organizational level. It begins with a question around the possibility of a dialogue between the two disciplines that could jointly contribute to the development of organizational responses, economics and psychology, and it discusses their relationship on the basis of field experiences. In discussing what is nowadays sustainable in the relations between society and organizations, the paper argues the role of intersubjectivity in organizational processes as the resource that allows to cope with unpredictable events and changes both for individuals and groups challenged to live and contribute to their work contexts. Four approaches in organizing the management of technical, economical and social/human resources are presented and analysed in their capacity to offer an interdisciplinary dialogue
Lectio magistralis. Investing in our Young People: Lessons from Economics and Psychology
A full understanding of child development draws on knowledge from economics and psychology. Both cognitive and noncognitive capabilities produce a variety of behaviors and outcomes. An emerging literature relates psychological measurements of personality and cognition to economic preference parameters and extends conventional preference specifications in economics. Comparative advantage is an empirically important feature of economic and social life. The same bundle of personal traits has different productivity in different tasks, and people with different bundles sort into tasks according to their comparative advantage. Recent empirical work on the technology of capability formation provides an operational empirical framework that captures these ideas (see Cunha and Heckman, 2009). Capabilities are not invariant traits and are causally affected by parental investment and early social environments. Moreover, capabilities are not solely situational specific. They are stable, but they evolve over the life cycle. Measures of capabilities should standardize for the environments in which they are taken – a basic tenet of science. Otherwise traits may appear to be unstable across situations (Borghans - Duckworth - Heckman - ter Weel, 2008). The technology of capability formation rationalizes a large body of evidence in economics, psychology, and neuroscience. Capabilities are self-productive and crossproductive. Synergies in the technology (2) explain why it is so productive to invest in the cognitive skills of disadvantaged young children but why the payoffs are so low for cognitive investments in disadvantaged older children and are even lower for disadvantaged adults. There is no equity-efficiency trade-off for investment in the capabilities of young disadvantaged children. There is a substantial equity-efficiency trade-off for investment in the capabilities of older disadvantaged children. Later remediation should focus on fostering noncognitive traits related to personality.
Ceramic microwave antennas for mobile applications
Due to their medium to high permittivity values, ceramic microwave materials are attractive as building blocks for miniaturised antenna solutions. Further advantages are low dielectric losses and an excellent temperature stability of standard ceramic materials. Yet, the permittivity of the ceramic material also has a strong influence on the radiation efficiency and bandwidth of the antenna. This implies that in the design process a suitable compromise has to be found between the degree of miniaturisation on the one hand and the antenna efficiency and bandwidth on the other. We describe two approaches towards efficient miniaturised ceramic microwave antennas: the dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) with partial metallisation and the shorting post patch antenna. We focus on design steps taken to ensure both a high degree of miniaturisation and high values of the radiation efficiency, the choice of the ceramic material and the experimental performance of the antennas.