Shop stewards in the 1990s: a research note

Evidence suggests that the unions suffered badly during the 1980s, but how has this affected the lynch-pin of workplace industrial relations, the shop steward? The evidence of this research is that the shop stewards of the 1990s display remarkable stability in their influence and role when compared to earlier surveys.     

An exploratory study of organizational flexibility in Malaysia: a research note

This note reports on an exploratory study examining the relationships between rules on employee behaviour and on management discretion and other aspects of organizations in Malaysia. Using the data from thirty-five Malaysian organizations, the authors highlight the differences between the implications of the rules for the two groups and their relationships with company performance.     

Effects of domestic multiculturalism on job attitudes in Nigeria: a research note

This study investigates possible cultural differences in job attitudes among the three main sub-cultural groups dominating the entire population of the Nigerian work-force: Hausa (n=80), Ibo (n=119) and Yoruba (n= 151). Several hypotheses were derived from previous knowledge of the three cultures and differences were explored in the relationships between perceptions and attitudes concerning specific aspects of the job. Consistent cross-cultural differences that can be related to characteristics of the cultures studied were revealed with regard to only three motivational factors, namely, interpersonal relations, nature of work and supervision. The overall results seem to indicate that employees' cultural background has little impact on their perceptions of job motivation. However, a number of different personal variables were found to affect responses. Practical and research implications of the findings are discussed as well as directions for future research.     

British trade union membership,density and decline in the 1980s: a research note

This article is concerned with British trade union membership statistics. It provides three different estimates of trade union density and considers their meaning and significance. It also assesses the reliability of union membership figures, and finally it provides fresh data on the unemployed membership of trade unions.     

A note on measuring political participation in comparative research

This article presents an application of Prezeworski and Teune's so-called “identity-equivalence method” to a large set of indicators of political participation. By relaxing commonly held assumptions about necessary distinctions among types of participation, it is found that the distinction between “conventional” and “unconventional” modes of participation is unnecessary, while the distinction between “government” and “nongovernment” has some merit. The findings also lend further support to the claims of Prezeworski and Teune that the identity-equivalence method is preferable to the identical indicator method.     

福特：打造部件园区 推动制造业革命

制造商与供应商"比邻而居",是汽车制造业"安静的革命"的一部分,福特汽车公司走在了前面。◆ 福特经营的新起点在芝加哥南面的一个现代化的工厂里,近400名高塔汽车公司(TowerAutomotive Inc.)的工人,正在为福特汽车公司最新投放家庭轿车市场的“福特500”小汽车生产部件。这本是很平常的事,但使人惊奇的是,完工的部件不再送到几百英里远的地方,而是直接送到旁边的一家新建的福特装配厂,装配成小汽车。这种“邻居”似的安排,是汽车制造业一个“安静的革命”的一部分。有十多家供应商在福特汽车工厂附近建厂生产零部件,高塔汽车公司仅是其中…     

The behavioural impact on trade unionists of the trade union legislation of the 1980s: a research note

This note is concerned with research conducted through a survey of trade union lay representatives to identify their perceptions of the current law and attitudes to compliance/non-compliance with it. Emphasis is placed on how any misconceptions could affect the conduct of an industrial dispute.     

R&D in a strategic delegation game revisited: a note

In this note we reconsider the paper of Zhang and Zhang (1997), published in Managerial and Decision Economics, who analyze a strategic delegation model with R&D spillovers in an imperfectly competitive market. We were motivated to study their setup by a puzzling result given in their paper: delegating the production and R&D decisions to managers is never beneficial for the owners of the firm. When we tried to understand the driving forces of this result, we found however that the findings of Zhang and Zhang (1997) are incorrect. We explain why their derivations are wrong and demonstrate via counterexamples that the main propositions in their paper do not hold. In addition, we show how the correct solution of this R&D model with spillovers can be obtained. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shop stewards' organisation in Ford Halewood: from Beynon to today

This article revisits the Ford Halewood car plant on Merseyside to assess the extent of shop steward bureaucratisation since Huw Beynon's Working for Ford appeared twenty years ago. It suggests that, notwithstanding very substantial changes, there are important elements of continuity with the shop-floor union vitality of the past.     

What happened to single union deals?-a research note

Single union deals were heralded by many as the way for the unions to survive in the 1990s. The importance of such deals has been reduced since then. Here the author examines the decline in the rate of signing and then looking at the factors which have led to this.     

Spatial Cournot competition and economic welfare: a note

We investigated welfare implications in location-quantity models in a symmetric linear city. We found that when firms are not agglomerated in equilibrium, increasing the distance between firms raises (reduces) producer surplus and social welfare (consumer surplus). Moreover, central agglomeration is always optimal for consumers among symmetric locations, but not necessarily for producers. Central agglomeration can be inefficient even if it is the unique equilibrium outcome. In short, the firms are more likely to agglomerate or locate closer than what welfare maximizers would dictate, whereas they locate farther apart than what consumer surplus maximizers would recommend.     

Is the enterprise software sector still in transition? A research note

Advances in information technology have not only promoted competition since the 1980s, but they also advanced globalization in the 1990s. The information technology group has lost its momentum since 2000. One of its vital segments was the enterprise software software sector. The sector’s products—such as ERP, CRM—have spurred the speed and efficiency of scores of U.S. companies and service firms in the past fifty months. In 2000, the majority of enterprise software firms incurred losses. Were one to assume that these innovative firms have a real contribution to augment client firms’ efficiency, the question of how to analyze their performance in the absence of positive net income becomes a Gordian knot. To unravel, we have employed selected non-income based measures as proxy criteria. We classify twenty-two firms into three subsets: Pre-1990 and post-1990 firms, full-line and partial-line firms, and large-capitalized and small-capitalized firms, and perform a comparative analysis on the basis of the proxy measures. While pointing to significant differences in productivity and perceived risks among these subsets, our findings allow us to speculate that, one, cottage-industry status of the sector has ended, and, two, new beginnings, in the post-September era of anxiety, will crystallize in the form of a consolidated industry comprising a few firms that possess the intrinsic value of leveraging their innovative capabilities.     

Perceptual differences between recruiters and students on the importance of applicant and job characteristics: a research note based on evidence from Singapore

This study compared the perceptions of various important job applicant characteristics, job characteristics and job benefits between 107 corporate recruiters and 191 business undergraduates in Singapore. Results indicated significant incongruence between recruiter and student perceptions of a large number of job characteristics and benefits. However, perceptual differences were less extensive in the case of applicant attributes. The implications of these findings, and suggestions for greater perceptual congruence between recruiters and applicants, are discussed.     

Causality reconsidered: A note

This note extends the recent work of Steinnes by formulating and testing a similar but more complete dynamic reduced form model of intraurban location decisions. The formulation of the model corrects a specification error by Steinnes, and a dummy variable technique is applied to yield consistent estimates. The results include relations between the employment sectors as well as between population and employment and, when they differ from those previously published, they are more plausible. The basic conclusion of the note is that “jobs follow people.”     

Using ad hoc measures for response styles: a cautionary note

This research note addresses the challenge of how to optimally measure acquiescence response style (ARS) and extreme response style (ERS). This is of crucial importance in assessing results from studies that have tried to identify antecedents of response styles (such as age, education level, national culture). Using survey data from the Netherlands, a comparison is made between the traditional method and a more recently proposed method of measuring ARS and ERS (i.e., the convergent validity across both methods is assessed). The traditional method is based on an ad hoc set of related items. The alternative method uses a set of randomly sampled items to optimize heterogeneity and representativeness of the items. It is found that the traditional method may lead to response style measures that are suboptimal for estimating levels of ARS and ERS as well as relations of ARS and ERS with other variables (like hypothesized antecedents). Recommendations on how to measure response styles are provided.     

A note on a noise process

Summary In this article we considered the system of stochastic differential equations …, wherex is a column vector of orderr, A is a square matrix of constant coefficients andε is a vector of random functions. The system is transformed to the corresponding system of the white noise process. A method of estimation of the elements of the matrixA has been introduced under certain conditions, the assurance of which has been also investigated.

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Zusammenfassung In diesem Artikel wird das System der stochastischen Differentialgleichungen … betrachtet, worinx ein Spaltenvektor der Ordnungr, A eine quadratische Matrize der konstanten Elemente undε ein Vektor der zuf?lligen Funktionen ist. Dieses System wird umgeformt zum korrespondierenden System des wei?en Rauschens. Eine Methode der Sch?tzung der Elemente der MatrizeA ist unter bestimmten Bedingungen eingeführt, deren Sicherheit auch untersucht wird.