"Public on the outside, private on the inside": the organizational hybridization, sense of belonging and identity strategies of the employees of a public unemployment insurance fund in Switzerland

A number of studies show that New Public Management reforms have altered the current identity benchmarks of public officials, particularly by hybridizing values or management practices. However, existing studies have largely glossed over the sense of belonging of officials when their organization straddles the concerns of public service and private enterprise, so that the boundary between public and private sector is blurred. The purpose of this article is precisely to explore this sense of belonging in the context of organizational hybridization. It does so by drawing on the results of research conducted among the employees of a public unemployment insurance fund in Switzerland. On the one hand, the analysis shows how much their markers of belonging are hybrid, multiple and constructed in negative terms (with regard to the State), while indicating that the working practices of the employees point to an identity that is nevertheless closely bound with the public sector. On the other hand, the analysis shows that the organization plays strategically with its State status, by exploiting either its private or public identity in line with the needs related to its external image. The article concludes with a discussion of the results highlighting the strategic functionality of the hybrid identity of the actors.

What Transaction Costs are Acceptable in Life Insurance Products from the Policyholders' Viewpoint?

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to analyze what transaction costs are acceptable for customers in different investments. In this study, two life insurance contracts, a mutual fund and a risk-free investment, as alternative investment forms are considered. The first two products under scrutiny are a life insurance investment with a point-to-point capital guarantee and a participating contract with an annual interest rate guarantee and participation in the insurer's surplus. The policyholder assesses the various investment opportunities using different utility measures. For selected types of risk profiles, the utility position and the investor's preference for the various investments are assessed. Based on this analysis, the authors study which cost levels can make all of the products equally rewarding for the investor. Design/methodology/approach - The paper notes the risk-neutral valuation calibration using empirical data utility and performance measurement dynamics underlying: geometric Brownian motion numerical examples via Monte Carlo simulation. Findings - In the first step, the financial performance of the various saving opportunities under different assumptions of the investor's utility measurement is studied. In the second step, the authors calculate the level of transaction costs that are allowed in the various products to make all of the investment opportunities equally rewarding from the investor's point of view. A comparison of these results with transaction costs that are common in the market shows that insurance companies must be careful with respect to the level of transaction costs that they pass on to their customers to provide attractive payoff distributions. Originality/value - To the best of the authors' knowledge, their research question - i.e. which transaction costs for life insurance products would be acceptable from the customer's point of view - has not been studied in the above described context so far.