Word from the editor

This latest edition of Management international (our journal’s regular spring issue) is comprised of nine articles, two research notes and one essay – all contributions whose originality and diversity should make them very enjoyable to read. Authored by Dinh Thi Ngoan, the first paper - entitled “Perceived employability, job crafting and career success: the case of young professionals in Vietnam” – seeks to determine whether vocational skills might enhance young professionals’ employability by enabling new job creations and thereby facilitating career success. Findings from the 1,008 questionnaires which the study administered and subjected to structural equation modelling demonstrate that vocational skills directly affect both internal and (especially) external employability. In addition, professional success mediates, to some extent at least, the relationship between professional skills and perceived internal employability. Lastly, job crafting partially mediates the relationship between professional skills and employability. The study builds upon previous employability literature by adding a more personal perspective rooted in personal resource effects that are apprehended here in personal adaptation and success terms and which therefore lend themselves to being formulated as human resource management recommendations. Foued Cheriet and Pasquale Lubello’s article “Acquisitions and international deployment of emerging countries multinational firms: A case study of the Brazilian firm JBS” questions the theoretical filters currently being used to apprehend the internationalisation processes that characterise multinational firms originating from the Global South. Towards this end, it undertakes a case study of the Brazilian company JBS, which is a world leader in the meat industry. Combining internal corporate data with a compilation of secondary information and analysing all JBS acquisitions both in Brazil and abroad, the authors discover an internationalisation trajectory akin to ones that have already been laid out in a number of recent models (including Born Global, Springboard and Casino). Particularities include advanced financialisation; how the acquisition of other international groups’ subsidiaries is being used to acquire further targets; geographical expansion intended to secure both supplies and distribution; and strong support from political and financial institutions in the multinational firm’s country of origin. Jie Xiong, Lu Xu, Jie Yan, Shubho Chakraborty and Yeming Gong’s article - “Coexistence paradigm of the technological catching up process” - starts with the observation that current research in this field has yet to nurture comprehensive understanding of the processes involved. Hence the research team’s mobilisation of technological catch-up theory and its application to Chinese carmaker subcontractors. The findings intimate three possible coexistence scenarios: convergent; asymptotic; and intersectional. Benoît Jamet, Julien Bousquet and Antoine Masse’s contribution - “National institutional context and voluntary carbon disclosure: An international study of the banking industry” - starts by noting the dearth of previous research in this area before drawing on assumptions derived from institutional theory to analyse the various ways in which a national context (including the broader legal system and national environmental policy) affects banks’ disclosure of their carbon emissions. Three international examples are used to produce findings revealing a positive relationship between the strength of a legal system (degree of enforcement); the stringency of environmental regulations; environmental performance; and the quality of banks’ carbon disclosures. Khaled Sabouné, Nathalie Montargot and Mathilde Dougados’s case study - “Role strain in French nursing homes: causes and consequences” - seeks to explain the prevalence of this phenomenon among French care system staff members. Towards this end, it identifies both the linkages between the three different forms of role strain that tend to be broadly described in literature and the three causes thereof, to wit, a dominant economic logic within a social structure; work intensification; and communication failings. As for findings relating to the consequences of role strain centre, …