This paper examines the career concerns of security analysts using long histories of their earnings forecasts, job separations and stock coverage assignments. Our findings include the following. Relatively good (accurate) past forecast performance increases the probability that an analyst moves from a low status to a high status (large, prestigious) brokerage house, while relatively poor past f...

Political sociologists have distinguished between Weberian states in which elite promotions are based on meritocratic criteria and states in which personalistic networks dominate government careers, linking these different career types to state structures and capacity. While researchers also recognize that elite networks are important even in highly bureaucratized states, there is little system...

Studies of Irish politics have generally used a clientelist framework: voters in rural areas seem to obtain state benefits through a politician's interventions and, in return, become the politician's "clients". This article reports anthropological research on urban brokerage and clientelism carried out in Dublin from 1978 to 1981 which suggests that a more complex analytic model is required. Cl...

Open network structures and brokerage positions have long been seen as playing a crucial role in sustaining social capital and competitive advantage. The degree to which individuals intermediate between otherwise disconnected others can differ across online and offline social networks. For example, users may broker online between two others who then exchange offline the information received thr...

Despite widespread recognition of a research-practice gap in multiple service sectors, less is known about how pre-existing communication channels facilitate the flow of information between researchers and practitioners. In the current study, we applied an existing typology of brokerage developed by Gould and Fernandez (Sociol Methodol 19:89-126, 1989) to examine what types of brokerage facilit...

A key premise in innovation literature suggests that individuals enabling contact between pairs of otherwise disconnected others (i.e., holding open triads) are more innovative, as they benefit from opportunities for knowledge recombination. Such benefits also come with a cost, conducting innovative action triads requires finding common ground to coordinate and integrate disparate efforts uncon...

As firms focus on their particular competencies, they are increasingly using contingent but highly skilled workers. This increased use of externalized labor permits firms in dynamic environments to modify and upgrade their specific technical skills, while retaining and developing skills at organizing outsourced competencies. This increased externalization of highly skilled work in competitive m...

This paper examines various factors affecting Chinese financial analysts’ information comprehension, analyzing ability and job quality. We hypothesized that financial analysts with better educational background, more experience, superior resources provided by large brokerage firms and more information sources have better information comprehension, stronger analyzing ability, and higher job qual...

In this study, we employ an innovative new methodology suggested by Bernhardt et al. (2006) to examine the herding (or anti-herding) behavior of German analysts in case of earnings forecasts. Our methodology avoids well-known shortcomings often encountered in related studies, such as, e.g., correlated information signals, unexpected common shocks to earnings, systematic optimism or pessimism or...

Firms are increasingly using collaborative systems to enhance supply-chain visibility. A key emphasis of these interorganizational systems (IOS) is to improve the coordination between buyers and suppliers through electronic integration. While 186 GROVER AND SAEED such IOS integration is purportedly good, because it tightens linkages in the supply chain, it is not clear whether it is the best co...