Work Relationships in Telephone Call Centres: Understanding Emotional Exhaustion and Employee Withdrawal

This paper examines the nature of employment and the conditions of work in five telephone call centres in the telecommunications industry in Australia. Call centre work typically requires high levels of sustained interpersonal interaction with customers which can lead to burnout and employee withdrawal. Customer service staff can also become targets of customer hostility and abuse. In addition, this form of work tends to involve extensive employee monitoring and surveillance with little job discretion or variety of tasks. The paper draws upon survey data from 480 telephone service operators to identify the factors that are associated with emotional exhaustion and the frequency of absence amongst the employees. A modelling of the data using LISREL VIII revealed that a number of job and work-setting variables affected the level of emotional exhaustion of employees. These included interactions with the customer, a high workload and a lack of variety of work tasks. Moreover, higher rates of absence were associated with emotional exhaustion.     

Transforming Local Government: Innovation and Modernization

This article is based on research investigating why local authorities innovate and what happens when they do. The authors show how local authorities have responded to the current normative climate for innovation, and explore the interaction between central policy and local action. The article demonstrates the importance of the policy climate set by central government in fostering—or constraining—innovation at a local level.     

Implementing reverse e-auctions: A learning process

Reverse e-auctions, which enable suppliers to compete on-line in real-time, are changing the way organizations select their suppliers. We explore how five large firms in different industries learned to use e-auctions, and how e-auctions were integrated into their purchasing processes. To successfully implement e-auctions, organizations should: (1) build e-auction competencies; (2) organize for knowledge management; (3) create a holistic sourcing process; (4) focus on the total cost of ownership; and (5) experiment with e-auction designs. Key observations are drawn from the case studies, and implications for supply managers are presented.     

Japanese/U.S. technological competitiveness and strategic alliances in the biotechnology industry

This paper analyzes the reasons for Japanese/U.S. collaborations in the biotechnology industry, and considers the question of whether such alliances pose a threat to the North American industry. Japan's technological competitiveness in biotechnology is examined in terms of its strengths and perceived weaknesses. Ways in which Japan is attempting to overcome these weaknesses are identified. As well, the strengths and weaknesses of the North American biotechnology industry are assessed. The paper concludes with recommendations for government and R&D managers on how to preserve U.S. competitiveness. R&D managers must keep abreast of their techno-global competitive environments. While organizations can enter into alliances to improve their competitiveness they must be aware of the dangers of collaboration, and to benefit from their alliances they must enhance their organizational learning. Organizations must be aware of the pitfalls of alliance formation, and any alliance must be viewed in its national context. Last, but not least, managers must be more effective in their management of the processes of technological innovation.     

The long-run relationship between private and public savings: An empirical note

This empirical note extends the recent work by Holmes (2006) in examining the long-run relationship between private and public savings in the U.S. over the post-World War II period. Standard Engle-Granger cointegration tests fail to reject the null hypothesis of no cointegration; however, once allowance is made for an endogenous break in the cointegrating relationship, the weak form of the Ricardian equivalence proposition is supported.     

The Economics and Bioeconomics of Folk and Scientific Classification

Synopsis This paper is the product of a collaboration between a biologist (Ghiselin 1997) who works on the philosophy of classification and an economist (Landa 1981, 1994) who works on the ‘Economics of Identity’: how and why people classify people based on identity in the context of a theory of ethnic trading networks. In developing the ‘bioeconomics’ (the synthesis of economics with biology) of classification, we crossed a number of disciplinary boundaries—anthropology, economics, sociology, biology, and cognitive psychology including evolutionary psychology’s ‘fast and frugal’ heuristics. Using a bioeconomics approach, we argue that folk classifications—the classifications used by ordinary persons—have much in common with scientific classifications: underlying both is the need for economy of information processing in the brain, for the efficient organization of knowledge, and for efficiency of information acquisition and transmission of information to others. Both evolve as a result of trial and error, but in science there is relatively more foresight, understanding, and planning.     

Using replication research for just-in-time purchasing construct development

Using replication research, the validity of the just-in-time purchasing (JITP) construct is established. Although empirical researchers have examined JITP over the last two decades, a consistent set of valid, reliable factors has not been used. The lack of valid construct is a barrier to hypotheses testing and meta-analyses on JITP. This study confirmed the validity of six JITP factors: top management commitment, employee relations, training, supplier quality management, transportation, and quantities delivered using two different data sets and testing the first- and second-order structure of the JITP construct. Content validity, reliability, unidimensionality, convergent validity, discriminant validity, criterion-related validity, and an invariant factorial structure of the JITP construct were empirically established.     

All politics is local: The effect of fiscal and monetary constitutions on economic policy

The rules of behavior for the monetary authorities changed in 1933 and 1947 and the Fed temporarily changed its operating procedures in 1979, but these changes did not alter the fact that the monetary authorities serve as the agent of the fiscal authorities. On the fiscal side, a shift from a centralized process to one where Congress was composed of a set of individual entrepreneurs altered the fiscal focus from the national economy to one of localized interests. This change led to a more autoregressive and deficit-prone federal budget and changed the interaction between monetary and fiscal policy. It also elevated the status of monetary policy to the extent where financial markets react to every utterance from the monetary authorities.     

Calibrating an algorithm for estimating transactions from FXFX exchange rate quotes

In this paper we investigate the efficiency of a class of transaction-generating algorithms, originally suggested in Bollerslev and Domowitz (1993). Our comparison utilizes real transaction data recorded over Reuters D2000-2 electronic broking system for 7 h in June 1993 and transaction data generated from FXFX quotations over an identical period. Results suggest that, at this high-frequency data sampling, the performance of these transaction-generating algorithms is poor, with the most likely explanation of this outcome due to the high-frequency characteristics of FXFX spreads and quotation intensity.     

Global sourcing strategy and sustainable competitive advantage

Global sourcing strategy has been one of the most hotly debated management trends in the last 20 years. In its early years, global sourcing was examined mostly from “in-house” development and procurement perspectives; and in the last several years, research focus has shifted to “outsourcing” activities. Along with this shift from internal to external focus on global sourcing, many researchers and business practitioners have applied a core competency argument to justify increased levels of outsourcing activities on a global basis. Although the beneficial aspects of outsourcing are assumed in most cases, no consensus exists in reality as to the effect of outsourcing. Furthermore, the increased instability of the exchange rate environment in the last several years has also led to increased difficulties in managing globally scattered operations that were once fashionable in the 1980s-90s under the rubric of global strategy. In this article, the authors explore potential limitations and negative consequences of outsourcing strategy on a global scale.