Documents Middle East 9 results

"Dubai offers an example of the contradictions and tensions surrounding a development model based on migrant labour, foreign investment and a segmented labour market which has led to the exclusion of large segments of the labour force from basic forms of labour standards and protection. Unlike many other developing economies, Dubai does not possess large labour surpluses and a large informal labour market, but instead has constructed its labour market around distinct divisions within the workforce. Consequently, it is argued that, in line with building and developing civil institutions in the Middle East, there are several urgent labour reforms that are required to address the migrant workforce vulnerability and exclusion. This paper outlines the implications of these proposed reforms for human resource management (HRM) in Dubai, offering a framework that encompasses the responses required of strategic international HRM in combination with recommended human resource practices that can assist in reducing worker vulnerability."

"Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy.
Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called "the economy" and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East.
In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order.
In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world."

"This is a study surrounding the interplay between Human Resource Management (HRM) and knowledge transfer within an emerging institutional petro-state. It seeks to link HRM and knowledge transfer through individual-level mechanisms in response to the recent calls for more research on micro-foundations. Our findings provide empirical evidence for HRM-related factors influencing knowledge exchange in a sample of 815 employees in the national context of the UAE. We found that individual-level perceptions and extrinsic motivation have a positive impact on knowledge exchange; however, we found evidence to suggest only an indirect effect of individual perceptions of organisational commitment to knowledge exchange, via individual intrinsic motivation and social interaction. Unlike some existing accounts from the Western world, individual perceptions of organisational commitment to knowledge sharing had no direct positive impact on knowledge exchange – an issue that may be ascribed to the distinct institutional setting of the UAE. This paper adds to the existing literature on HRM and knowledge exchange by bringing to bear new evidence from a Middle Eastern emerging market setting – an area thus far relatively neglected in the literature. "

"This article discusses earnings differentials among skilled Western, Arab and Asian migrants, who constitute most of the private sector labour force in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, during the period 2012–14. Using two standard decomposition methodologies, it investigates the view that Westerners are paid premium rates due to the unobserved perceptions of private employers. The results indicate that while one‐third to three‐quarters of real hourly earnings differentials are attributable to differing observed levels of productivity‐related characteristics, the remainder are due to the incorporation of higher opportunity costs for Westerners into the bargaining process. The potential effect of unobserved perceptions is found to be irrelevant to observed earnings differentials."

"This study analyses the selection of a sample of 203 young male asylum seekers from Middle Eastern and African countries that recently arrived in Germany. The findings suggest that, on average, asylum seekers in our sample have 22% more years of schooling—the indicator used for human capital—when compared to same-aged males from their country of origin. In addition, the analysis suggests that asylum seekers in the sample often accumulated rather low or relatively high levels of schooling compared to same-aged males in their countries of origin. This phenomenon is even more pronounced for parental education. It is demonstrated that individual human capital influences short-run integration outcomes in Germany. The paper discusses potential economic explanations for the findings on immigrant selection and integration outcomes."

"We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employee's digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe and the Middle East. Using de- identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270 users, we find, compared to pre- pandemic levels, increases in the number of meetings per person (+12.9 percent) and the number of attendees per meeting (+13.5 percent), but decreases in the average length of meetings (-20.1 percent). Collectively, the net effect is that people spent less time in meetings per day (-11.5 percent) in the post- lockdown period. We also find significant and durable increases in length of the average workday (+8.2 percent, or +48.5 minutes), along with short-term increases in email activity. These findings provide insight from a novel dataset into how the nature of work has changed for a large sample of knowledge workers. We discuss these changes in light of the ongoing challenges faced by organizations and workers struggling to adapt and perform in the face of a global pandemic."