THE LATEST NEWS FROM ACROSS BGA’S NETWORK Business
BRIEFING Challenging companies on how they measure the merits of employment, the factors that fuel political polarisation and assessing the success of agricultural policies using satellite data all feature in this round-up of news and research from BGA schools. Tim Banerjee Dhoul , Ellen Buchan and Colette Doyle report
RESEARCH CHALLENGES TRADITIONAL EFFICIENCY PERSPECTIVE ON EMPLOYMENT
his co-authors. They found that ventures with closer ties to the community tended to hire more people and survive longer. “Employment, in this context, functions as both strategy and signal. It signals alignment with community values. It builds legitimacy and it invites the kinds of reciprocal relationships that stabilise young firms,” Eberhart wrote in an article for the USD website. The idea is that when new ventures are more engaged with their communities and enjoy overlapping local relationships, they are able to draw on the kind of support that helps sustain them over time, such as trust, partnerships and local resources. The paper also found that founder origin, venture location and local multiplex relationships determine which new ventures recognise the contribution,
or valorise, employment in this way and make it central to their purpose and strategic orientation. This is as opposed to viewing employment from a traditional efficiency perspective, where firms hire to meet demand and reduce headcount to protect margins. In big cities, for example, firms face fewer social consequences for reducing employment and it becomes easier for new ventures to treat labour as being interchangeable. Conversely, social ties run deeper in more community- oriented settings. The Valorisation of Employment , published in the Journal of Business Venturing , aims to widen awareness of employment’s dual nature, wherein employees not only serve as essential inputs but also as core outcomes. TBD
SCHOOL Knauss School of Business University of San Diego (USD), US
T he conventional notion that employees are simply costs to be managed is challenged in new research led by Knauss School of Business associate professor Robert Eberhart. Instead, greater consideration should be given to the benefits of a firm’s commitment to community stakeholders, the research argues, particularly in the context of entrepreneurship. A total of almost 26,000 ventures founded in Japan between 1998 and 2007 were analysed by Eberhart and
6 Business Impact • ISSUE 4 • 2026
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