Beyond survival: the implementation of new forms of work organization in the UK and German steel industries

This paper outlines and analyses the major changes in work-force organization that have been introduced by British and German steel producers in the past decade, against a backcloth of retrenchment in the industry, new product development and technological change. Including multiskilling, a reduction in demarcation and team–working, these changes have had a major effect upon the composition of the work–force and the nature of work undertaken at the shopfloor level.

While these changes have had a common broad trajectory, they have been introduced at a different pace and in different forms. The contrasts are provided not only at the international level, but between plants in the same countries. The paper further outlines the response of trade unions to these changes and the implications for industrial relations at the shopfloor level.     

Street Children and Street Life in Urban Tanzania: The Culture of Surviving and its Implications for Children’s Health

This paper presents data from an in-depth study conducted among street children in an urban setting in Tanzania. It examines the reasons ‘children of the street’ leave their homes, how they survive and meet their daily needs, what problems they encounter whilst on the streets and how they surmount them. The paper also examines the implications of street life for children’s health. The findings show that general poverty lies at the center of the increasing number of street children in Tanzania. Street life makes the children vulnerable to a variety of problems including ill health. Policies in Tanzania have so far failed to solve this problem, particularly because social policies have been dealing with symptoms rather than essential causes. The paper ends by outlining short- and long-term policy solutions and also suggests directions for future research and early intervention. — Cet article présente les données d’une étude en profondeur conduite parmi les enfants des rues dans un cadre urbain en Tanzanie. Il explore les raisons pour lesquelles ‘les enfants des rues’ partent de chez eux, comment ils survivent et surviennent à leurs besoins quotidiens, les problèmes qu’ils rencontrent dans les rues et comment ils les surmontent. Cet article examine aussi les implications de la vie dans la rue pour la santé des enfants. Les résultats montrent que la pauvreté générale est la raison centrale du nombre croissant d’enfants dans les rues en Tanzanie. La vie dans les rues rend les enfants susceptibles à de nombreux problèmes, y compris la mauvaise santé. La politique de la Tanzanie n’a pas encore réussi à résoudre ce problème, en particulier parce que la politique sociale a adressé les symptômes plutôt que les causes essentielles. Cet article propose des solutions politiques à court et à long terme et suggère également des options pour les recherches futures et pour des interventions précoces.     

Risk management with interdependent choice

Risks faced by traders from price movements are sometimes magnifiedby the actions of other traders. Risk-management systems whichneglect this feature may give a seriously misleading pictureof the true risks. The hazards arising from this potential blindspotare at their most dangerous when the prevailing conventionalwisdom lulls traders into a false sense of security on the attractivenessof a trading position. The efforts of one trader to reversehis trade makes more acute the need to follow suit on the partof others. For markets dominated by traders with short timehorizons, such interdependence leads to exaggerated price movements.Estimates of 'value at risk' which recognize such interdependenceof actions can diverge substantially from those given by conventionaltechniques.     

Remembering Mancur Olson

Mancur Olson, professor of Economics at the University of Maryland-College Park, died February 19, 1998. He served the Southern Economic Association as a member of the Executive Committee in 1978-80, as President-Elect in 1980-81, and as President in 1981-82. Three of his colleagues, Wallace Oates, Joe Oppenheimer, and Thomas Schelling, contributed personal essays to a memorial symposium in Public Choice Studies (No. 31, 1998), a journal published in Japanese. The Editor thanks the Japan Public Choice Society for permission to publish these contributions in English for the benefit of our readers.     

Corporate Environmental Responsibility

This paper offers directions for the continuing dialogue between business ethicists and environmental philosophers. I argue that a theory of corporate social responsibility must be consistent with, if not derived from, a model of sustainable economics rather than the prevailing neoclassical model of market economics. I use environmental examples to critique both classical and neoclassical models of corporate social responsibility and sketch the alternative model of sustainable development. After describing some implications of this model at the level of individual firms and industries, I offer an ethical justification of the sustainability alternative that is derived from the same values that underlie traditional market economics.     

Human resources in the German maritime industries: ‘back-sourcing’ and ship management

In today's global shipping industry have management functions often been outsourced to separate companies and to overseas locations. With the appearance of socalled ‘flags of convenience’ the world shipping industry has increasingly registered commercial vessels overseas. Following this trend, human resource management functions have also been relocated, with the opening of recruitment offices and the use of HR agencies outside OECD countries. Recently, new German regulation has sought to attract previously outsourced HRM functions back to Germany. A case study of such a newly established firm, called ‘Reimarus’, will exemplify the impact of the new regulation on HR firms in shipping. The following paper analyses this process based on an empirical study of Germany's commercial shipping industry.     

Public Service Leaders as ‘Change Agents’ – for Whom?

Abstract

This article examines how far senior staff in English educational and health service organizations view themselves as leaders who are ‘change agents’ for government-driven reform and independent change agendas. The contribution of external leadership development provision to shaping these self-perceptions is explored. Special attention is paid to national leadership development bodies with different degrees of formal association with government. Whatever this relationship, such provision and other development support apparently reinforced a strong sense of personal agency (choice of action) associated with being a leader, empowering senior staff to adopt a modestly mediatory stance towards both reform and leadership development provision.     

International harmony measures of accounting policy: comparative statistical properties

Van der Tas's (1988) I index and the between-country C index introduced by Archer et al. (1995) are competing measures of international harmony. We present comparative statistical properties of these indices, via a simulation study covering three accounting methods in 10 countries, with uniform, bimodal and unimodal distributions of companies across accounting methods. The indices are also adjusted for non-disclosures using techniques developed by Archer and McLeay (1995) and Archer et al. (1995). The I index and the between-country C index are mathematically equivalent in the two-country case even in the presence of non-disclosures. As more countries are compared, the two indices diverge. The means and standard deviations of the I index, with a correction proposed by Archer and McLeay (1995), decrease and there is little skewness or kurtosis. In contrast, as more countries are compared, the between-country C index exhibits more stability in means, lower standard deviations, higher skewness and kurtosis. The between-country C index may be superior to the corrected I index because (i) between-country C index means approximate their ‘expected values’ (where all observations equal expected values) more closely than do corrected I index means: and (ii) between-country C index means are more stable than corrected I index means where the data come from stable distributions.     

Developing a typology of affective responses to advertising

This article identifies—and then validates—a set of categories for use in the measurement of affective responses to advertising. Unlike previous categories developed for this purpose, these are first extracted by cluster analysis and then also subjected to formal tests for reliability and for convergent, discriminant, concurrent, and predictive validity.