Shifting risk to the frontline: case studies in different contract working environments

An extensive body of safety literature and research discusses the integral role of rules and procedures in managing workplace hazards, ensuring worker safety, and safeguarding the environment. Nevertheless, organizational accidents and workplace injuries continue to occur, and individual employees often bear the brunt of responsibility. This paper examines how risk becomes shifted to individuals at the bottom of supply chains, focusing on two different groups of contract workers. Specifically, it draws on case studies conducted in Australia – one on civil contractors working around hazardous infrastructure and one on athletes who are subject to anti-doping requirements. A comparison of the two cases and their distinctive elements illuminates the ways in which structural pressures, organizational dynamics, and context-specific conditions influence the risks shouldered by individuals. Our analysis shows that, in both cases, adverse outcomes are widely seen as the responsibility of contract workers, prompting other actors to judge them as blameworthy. In doing so, risk in various forms (e.g. safety, financial, reputational) becomes shifted onto workers who are constrained by contracts and away from away from higher level actors and organizations that are generally in more powerful positions than frontline workers. This finding suggests that the burden of accountability and potentially liability is borne primarily by frontline workers. Because of this focus, it is easy to lose sight of organizational and structural conditions that contribute to the risks revealed at the individual level. Through an analysis of 57 interviews across both sectors, complemented by participant observations and a media review, this paper underscores the importance of critically considering not only individual worker actions, but also how regulation can support the diversion of risk, responsibility, and liability onto frontline workers.     

International food advertising,pester power and its effects

The increasing importance of children as consumers has focused attention on ‘pester power’: children’s influence over adult purchasing through requests and demands for certain products. Many concerns are expressed about pester power, including that it increases parent-child conflict. In the contested area of food marketing, an additional and particularly potent criticism of pester power is that it can undermine parents’ attempts to feed their children a healthy diet. Results from a systematic review of international evidence find that food advertising does cause ‘pestering’ by children and results in parents buying less healthy products that are associated with obesity. This undermines industry arguments that pester power is just a legitimate way for children to express their growing autonomy as consumers. Policy implications for marketers and government are discussed.     

Configurations of New Public Management reforms and the efficiency,effectiveness and equity of public healthcare systems: a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis

ABSTRACT

Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis identifies configurations of New Public Management (NPM) reforms (privatization, consumerism, performance management, and corporatization) associated with perceptions of improvements in healthcare efficiency, effectiveness and equity in 14 European countries. Although these outcomes are pursued concurrently, no combination of the considered reforms appears to support success or failure across the board and the inter-relations between reforms shape their effects. Three NPM reform profiles are evident in Europe; (1) strong reformers, adopting a comprehensive package of reforms that are perceived to perform better than (2) partial reformers, with (3) limited reformers also doing better than partial reformers.     

Promoting Effective Psychological Contracts Through Leadership: The Missing Link Between HR Strategy and Performance

This article offers line managers and HR professionals an actionable, research‐based framework for developing psychological contracts with employees that suit their organizational and human resource (HR) strategy. Leadership styles supporting the firm's HR strategy are key to making psychological contracts that benefit both the firm and its members. When managers' styles are out of sync with HR strategy, this mismatch can lead to poorer performance through ineffective and unfulfilled psychological contracts with workers.     

Interstate competition in the US South for South Korean auto investments: a US perspective

Multinational corporations (MNCs) recognize the importance of optimizing their international site-selection decision(s). Similarly, host regions recognize the potential economic benefits of securing ‘greenfield’ investment projects. Thus, there is intense intra-regional competition to secure ‘trophy investments’. The extant research offers little insight to the very final stages of the site-selection negotiation process. No previous study has examined in detail the final stages of international site-selection negotiations involving South Korean MNCs. This paper focuses on the role of US government officials and Southern state stakeholders seeking to secure investments by Hyundai Motors and Kia Motors. It offers an exploratory eclectic theory to explain site-selection decisions.     

Institutions, education, and development: The role of entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are instrumental for structural transformation. They create and organize new firms and hire workers with a minimum level of human capital. Entrepreneurs encourage workers to invest in their own education in order to move into the modern production sector. Better institutions lead to less income diversion, which creates a greater supply of entrepreneurs, a larger demand for human capital, and faster structural transformation. Education policy alone is not as effective, although it, too, raises the number of entrepreneurs. Simulations and evidence from Brazilian states support the theory.     

International Comparisons of Biotechnology Policies

Biotechnology policies are in many respects similar across the countries studied and are of three types: industrial policies, regulatory frameworks, and protection of intellectual property. Government-funded research, seed money, and tax credits are used within all of these countries, with the majority of support concentrated in R&D and capital investment, reflecting the knowledge and capital intensity of the industry. Tariffs, quotas, and other non-tariff barriers to trade are not widely used.While the European Union enacted process-driven legislation to regulate genetically modified organisms, biotechnology-derived products in the US and Japan are regulated under existing product-driven legislation. Regulatory stringency in each country appears to reflect public attitudes towards biotechnology. Labelling of genetically modified products and patentability of transgenic animals remain controversial issues that divide the US and the EU.As a country with a small domestic market for biotechnology, Canada has an interest in reducing trade obstacles caused by differential national policies.     

Hedging multiple price and quantity exposures

We examined the general hedging problem faced by a global portfolio manager or a pure exporting multinational firm. Most hedging models assume that these economic agents hold only a single asset in the spot market and are exposed only to a single source of price–quantity uncertainty. Such models are less relevant to many financial and exporting firms that face multiple sources of risk. In this study, we developed a general hedging model that explicitly recognizes that these hedgers are faced with multiple price and quantity uncertainties. Our model takes advantage of the full correlation structure of changes in spot prices, quantities, and forward prices. We performed simulations of the hedging model for a firm with two pairs of price and quantity exposures to demonstrate potential gains in hedging efficiency and effectiveness. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 21:145–172, 2001