Managing absence in an NHS hospital

Absence studies often pay little attention to institutional settings. This study of a large hospital looks at factors affecting absence, and worker attitudes to time off. It reveals a highly committed workforce, but one with low morale, deeply distrustful of a management initiating rapid changes.     

INDUCED INNOVATION IN UNITED STATES FIELD CROPS, 1939-78

During the past four decades, United States field crop production has been transformed by the mechanical and fertiliser revolutions. In this study crop-specific estimates of the technical progress parameters that represent these changes are used to test the microeconomic theory of induced innovation. Tests based on the land/labour ratio, derived from a reformulation of the Hayami and Ruttan model, entirely support the inducement hypothesis and suggest that the partial failure of previous empirical investigations resulted from specification problems.     

Empirical Effects of Performance Contracts: Evidence From China

Performance contracts (PCs)—contracts signed between thegovernment and state enterprise managers—have been usedwidely in developing countries. China's experience with suchcontracts was one of the largest experiments with contractingin the public sector, affecting hundreds of thousands of statefirms, and offered a rare opportunity to explore how PCs work.On average, PCs did not improve performance and may have madeit worse. But China's PCs were not uniformly bad; in fact, PCsimproved productivity in slightly more than half of the participants.PC effects were on average negative because of the large lossesassociated with poorly designed PCs. Successful PCs were thosethat featured sensible targets, stronger incentives, longerterms, managerial bonds, and were in more competitive industries.Selecting managers through bidding was not associated with performanceimprovement. Good PC features were more often observed in state-ownedenterprises (SOEs) under the oversight of local governments,that faced more competition, that were smaller in size, andthat had better previous performance.     

Managers' perceptions of ethical codes: dialectics and dynamics

Codes of ethics and conduct have become common in UK organisations. This paper explores how such codes are understood and responded to by those whom the codes seek to influence. The study is an interpretative one, based on interview material, in which a dialectical pattern is seen in employees' reactions to codes. Initial contradictions are found in codes of ethics (which claim to give employees space in which to exercise their integrity, but simultaneously are seen as impugning employees' moral status) and in codes of conduct (which require a loyal adherence to rules that interferes with wider loyalties). These tensions create perceptions of a two-tier system in organisations in which core employees are subject to codes of ethics that are loosely applied, but non-core staff are subject to codes of conduct that are strictly applied. However, even core staff are aware of a dialectical contradiction in their position. They believe that loyalty to the organisation is the price they pay for being allowed freedom of integrity by their organisations, but that the price they have to pay for showing integrity may be breaking faith with their organisations. This chiasmus of integrity and loyalty represents a difficulty for the project of improving standards of corporate citizenship. The use of this trope and other rhetorical figures to exemplify processes of understanding and interpretation in organisations is discussed.     

Beyond necessity versus opportunity entrepreneurship: some lessons from English deprived urban neighbourhoods

When discussing the motivations of entrepreneurs, it has become commonplace to represent them dichotomously as either necessity or opportunity driven. This paper evaluates critically this dualistic depiction of entrepreneurs’ motives through an examination of the rationales of entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs living in a deprived urban neighbourhood of an English city, a group of entrepreneurs who have been conventionally depicted as largely driven by necessity into entrepreneurship in the absence of alternative means of livelihood. Reporting the results of a face-to-face questionnaire conducted in 2008 with 459 respondents and a further 18 follow-up in-depth interviews, the finding is that forcing individual entrepreneurs’ motives into one or other of these categories grossly over-simplifies their rationales which in lived practice are not only a mixture of both opportunity and necessity but also temporally fluid shifting most often from more necessity- to more opportunity-oriented rationales. The outcome is to reveal that the opportunity versus necessity dichotomy, which uses the perceptions of an entrepreneur’s originating condition as the defining feature of their motivations, is a misleading way of categorising types of entrepreneurship not only because motivations change over time but also because entrepreneurs are frequently driven by both necessity as well as opportunity factors. The result is a call to move beyond the conventional either/or depiction of opportunity versus necessity entrepreneurship and towards a richer, more nuanced and dynamic appreciation of entrepreneurs’ motivations.     

When it comes to the crunch: What are the drivers of the US banking crisis?

This article considers how permissive regulatory conditions helped change the size and scope of the US mortgage market. Asset backed securitization facilitated an expansion of the US mortgage market and modified the structure of the value chain within which financial assets, risk and liquidity were managed. New sophisticated mortgage products, indulgent lending practices, loose credit assessment and flimsy documentation increased the probability of mortgage default in an economic downturn. US banks were not in a position to absorb mark-to-market losses on mortgage assets and goodwill impairment resulting from a credit crunch because they operate with narrow profit margins and a limited equity cushion in the balance sheet. This article questions the viability and sustainability of this banking business model.     

Job guarantees, employability training and partnerships in the retail sector

This paper discusses the potential value of local, partnership-based employability training and job guarantee programmes, focusing on one example—the 'Alloa Initiative'. The Initiative involved an employability training and job guarantee scheme developed in partnership with Tesco, a major retailer, in preparation for the opening of one of the company's new stores. This paper reports on the outputs from this project, which placed 109 disadvantaged job seekers into positions at the store, and proved particularly effective at targeting the long-term unemployed and those with limited experience of the retail sector. The analysis is based on the findings of survey research undertaken with 86 of the 109 training course completers (a 79 per cent response rate) and all the main partners involved in the Initiative. Innovative elements of the training programme that contributed to its positive outcomes are discussed, and a model for 'managing successful partnerships' is applied, in order to identify critical factors explaining the apparent success of the Initiative. In particular, the importance of employers providing job guarantees is noted.     

Regional Grants: Are They Worth It?*

Regional grants have recently come under scrutiny and are controversial. Some estimates put the employment effect of these grants at no more than 6,000 jobs in the first half of the 1990s, against expenditure of £500 million. Other aspects of the grants are questioned, such as their ability to attract foreign direct investment and their effect on productivity. This paper reviews these issues, focusing on the recent evidence for the Regional Selective Assistance scheme. It describes the nature and difficulties involved in policy evaluation, and finds that differences over the employment effect of the grants result from possible biases induced by the evaluation methodology and from differences in the job measure used. Overall, the paper argues that the regional grants are cost‐effective in employment terms, but that expenditure is small relative to the scale of the problem, so that an expansion of the grants may be desirable.