The two faces of Nordic management? Nordic firms and their employee relations in the Baltic States

This study examines Nordic management styles in union and non-union industrial enterprises in the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) through case studies of nine Nordic subsidiary companies, based on on-site interviews with management and employees.1 1. Here, I refer to ‘Nordic’ countries denoting Denmark, Finland and Sweden, for the companies chosen for research are from these three countries and for the sake of common social and economic characteristics among these three countries, basing on the varieties of capitalism (VoC) literature. That is why Norway, a country seen usually in the composition of the Nordic countries, is left out of this investigation. The entity ‘Baltic States’ or ‘Baltic countries’ refers here to the three countries on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea: Estonia (population 1.4 million), Latvia (2.3 million) and Lithuania (3.4 million). This analysis construes the ‘Nordic model’ of management style as ‘bargained constitutional’ or ‘sophisticated consultative’, following Purcell and Ahlstrand's (1994) matrix of management styles in the highly unionized countries of origin, characterized as coordinated market economies. The case studies reveal that in the Baltic liberal-market environment, Nordic employers exhibit a variety of management styles, ranging from sophisticated human relations or paternalistic relations styles in non-union contexts, to an adversarial bargained style or modern paternalistic style in unionized subsidiary firms. The Nordic model's ‘bargained constitutionalism’ only occurs in those cases in the sample in which Soviet-era trade union structures survive, or where an in-firm union has fought for recognition and collective bargaining.     

Demolishing the Present to Sell off the Future? The Emergence of ‘Financialized Municipal Entrepreneurialism’ in London

This article introduces a new mode of urban entrepreneurialism in London through a study of the state‐executed, speculative development and financialization of public land. In response to an intensifying housing crisis and austerity‐imposed fiscal constraints, municipalities in London are devising entrepreneurial solutions to deliver more housing. Among these ‘solutions’ can be found the early signs of the state‐executed financialization of public housing in the UK with the use of speculative council‐owned special purpose vehicles (SPVs) that replace existing public housing stock with mixed‐tenure developments, creating ambiguous public/private tenancies that function as homes and the basis for liquid financial assets. Drawing together parallel literatures on the financialization of urban governance and housing, and combining these with original empirical research, we situate these developments in contrast to earlier modes of governance, identifying a distinct mode of entrepreneurial governance in London: financialized municipal entrepreneurialism. The local state is no longer merely the enabler—limited to providing strategic oversight of the private sector—but financializes its practice in a reimagined commercialized interventionism, as property speculator. This article concludes that while the architects of this new mode of entrepreneurialism extol the increased capacity and control it provides, any such gains must be set against longer‐term financial, democratic and political risks.     

Deregulation and institutional conversion in the Greek hotel industry: an employment relations model in transition

Before the debt crisis of 2010 forced Greece into almost permanent austerity, its hotel workers enjoyed wages and conditions (through a sector collective agreement) similar to those in other economic sectors. This was against the international trend where low wages and poor conditions were standard. Sweeping deregulation by Greek governments has brought much of the hotel industry into line with other countries. The sector agreement, now covering a much smaller proportion of the workforce, survived but has experienced ‘institutional conversion’, delivering a much poorer outcome. Despite buoyant tourism, institutional deregulation and derogation have delivered the employers' major objective of matching the workforce to the fluctuating demand for labour.     

Planning Gentrification and the ‘Absent’ State in Athens

In times of austerity, gentrification is promoted as a prime investment opportunity capable of reviving stagnating local economies. In Athens, pro‐gentrification policies (using English slogans like ‘Re‐launch Athens’ and ‘Re‐activate Athens’) have become increasingly defined in their targeting of specific areas. Moreover, planning in Greece is characterized by spontaneity, fragmentation and tolerance of speculation, specifically favouring the gentrification process. In many cases, the state's ‘absence’ after promulgation of regeneration projects acts as a clear strategy for inner‐city gentrification. After discussing the emergent relations between state policies on urban intervention and gentrification in the post‐crash era, this article will focus on the peculiarities of the Greek planning system and how these have led to the gentrification of an inner‐city area called Metaxourgio.     

The ‘Singapore scenario’: the uncertain prospects for labour standards in post‐Brexit Britain

The Conservative government of Theresa May asserted that labour standards would be preserved post‐Brexit. The Labour Party also privileged labour standards in its anti‐austerity programme. The threat remains however that Brexit will provide an incentive to erode labour standards in a global ‘race to the bottom’ in a ‘Singapore scenario’.     

Spaces of the Expelled as Spaces of the Urban Commons? Analysing the Re‐emergence of Squatting Initiatives in Rome

Asserting the need to acknowledge the role of the current crisis and austerity politics in fostering the re‐emergence of squatting initiatives in Rome, this article brings together the literature on squatting as an urban social movement, notably Martínez López's holistic approach, with a political economy perspective analysing the current stage of ‘late neoliberalism’. In so doing, I use the conceptualization of ‘expulsions’ developed by Sassen to show how emerging squatting initiatives in Rome represent the ‘spaces of the expelled’. Focusing on the case of Communia in San Lorenzo neighbourhood, the article shows how Martínez López's approach is able to account for the rapid success and support enjoyed by Communia, going as it does beyond the ‘single‐issue’ perspective that has dominated much of the squatting literature. Indeed, the main claims addressed by Communia activists concern a plurality of issues grouped around the concept of urban commons, as both a practice and a goal. Methodologically, the article is the result of 18 months of fieldwork based on an activist/participatory action research (PAR) approach, comprising participant observation/observant participation, in‐depth interviews and questionnaires.     

A survey study on weights of decision criteria for job rotation in Thailand: comparison between public and private sectors

Five hundred Thai organizations (from both public and private sectors) were surveyed to learn how decision criteria were weighed when conducting job rotation. The organizations were categorized into three groups, namely, government agency (GA), private service company (PSC), and private manufacturing company (PMC). Three purposes of job rotation were considered: (1) restructuring of the organization, (2) periodic reshuffling of employee-job assignments, and (3) efficiency/productivity improvement. The findings from responded questionnaires (with a response rate of 41.40 per cent) show that the criterion weights are significantly dependent on both the organization type and the purpose of job rotation. It is found that organizations from both sectors considered ‘knowledge, skills, and abilities’ as a predominant decision criterion, irrespective of the purpose of job rotation. For the organizations that periodically reshuffled their current employee-job assignments, ‘job seniority’ was also considered as an important criterion. Regarding the other two job rotation purposes, organizations from the public sector consistently gave more attention to ‘job seniority,’ ‘years of service,’ and ‘age’ than did those from the private sector.     

Being Good Parents or Being Good Citizens: Dilemmas and Contradictions of Urban Families in Middle‐Class Enclaves and Mixed Neighbourhoods in Germany

In recent years, cities have become ever more attractive to middle‐class families. On the one hand, middle‐class families tend to withdraw into (often newly built) socially homogeneous middle‐class neighbourhoods. On the other hand, they are also known to move into inner‐city and socially mixed areas, thus triggering processes of gentrification. Academic literature has often denounced these housing choices as being either ‘separatist’ or ‘revanchist’, more broadly categorized as strategies of ‘middle‐class disaffiliation’. Although there is a grain of truth in these interpretations, the reality is certainly more complicated. In our research on middle‐class parents’ housing and neighbourhood choices as well as their patterns of neighbourhood use, carried out in each of the two types of residential area mentioned above, we have only very rarely found an explicit desire to draw boundaries that exclude those ‘beneath’ them. We rather argue that the housing choices and neighbourhood‐related activities of middle‐class family households are heavily influenced by the specific dilemmas the interviewees face as (working) urban parents. While a significant number of respondents worry about the social sustainability, justice and cohesion of urban society, they are also concerned about the future prospects of their children. Many find it difficult to reconcile these conflicting normative demands under the prevailing circumstances.     

Widening the ‘representation gap'? The implications of the ‘lobbying act’ for worker representation in the UK

The Transparency of Lobbying, Non‐Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014 (the ‘Lobbying Act’) imposes tight restrictions on the campaigning and lobbying activities of civil society organisations in the UK, diminishing their capacity to represent the interests of working people and thus likely compounding the ‘representation gap’ within British workplaces. Along with austerity measures and employment law reforms, the legislation exemplifies the UK government's attempts to shift the balance of power further towards employers.     

The UK and the Eurozone: Sovereign Debt Management and Monetary Policy

Events in the wake of the ‘credit crunch’ can be understood only against institutional structures within which interdependent monetary and fiscal policy are administered. In the Eurozone, the attempt to keep a central monetary authority (together with its associated national central banks) independent from 17 diverse fiscal authorities was flawed. When sovereign debt approaches unmanageable levels, the Maastricht Treaty presents austerity as the single option. In the UK, the electorate has an opportunity to choose between monetary financing (inflation) and fiscal consolidation (austerity). Policy choices within the Eurozone and the UK are set against Keynes's focus on unemployment and more recent concerns to retain (or restore) price and/or financial stability.     

MODELS OF REGIONAL GROWTH: PAST,PRESENT AND FUTURE

Abstract This paper presents an overview of various models of regional growth that have appeared in the literature in the last 40 years. It considers the past, and therefore supply‐side models, such as the standard neoclassical, juxtaposed against essentially demand‐side approaches such as the export‐base and cumulative causation models (as integrated into the Kaldorian approach); before moving on to the ‘present’ and more recent versions of the neoclassical model involving spatial weights and ‘convergence clubs’, as well as new economic geography core–periphery models, and the ‘innovation systems’ approach. A key feature of the more recent literature is an attempt to explicitly include spatial factors into the model, and thus there is a renewed emphasis on agglomeration economies and spillovers. Discussing ‘present’ and ‘future’ approaches to regional growth overlaps with the current emphasis in the literature on the importance of more intangible factors such as the role of ‘knowledge’ and its influence on growth. Finally, there is a discussion of the greater emphasis that needs to be placed at the ‘micro‐level’ when considering what drives growth, and thus factors such as inter alia firm heterogeneity, entrepreneurship and absorptive capacity.     

Cooperative Islands in Capitalist Waters: Limited‐equity Housing Cooperatives,Urban Renewal and Gentrification

Improving the habitat of residents in central‐city neighbourhoods without simultaneously gentrifying these is becoming a pressing dilemma in right‐to‐housing and right‐to‐the‐city agendas, both in the global North and the global South. This article explores what possibilities limited‐equity housing cooperativism can bring to the table. Insights are drawn from two urban ‘renewal’ processes in which limited‐equity housing cooperatives have played an important role: in Vesterbro (Copenhagen) and Ciudad Vieja (Montevideo). The article analyses the everyday politics within and around these cooperatives through a broader institutional and political‐economy lens. This approach sheds light on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that operate within these cooperatives, as well as on the processes through which they have been directly and indirectly implicated in the displacement of low‐income neighbours. Despite providing a grassroots housing alternative for local ‘non‐owners’, individual cooperatives participate in, and are vulnerable to, urban transformations that traverse multiple scales. They are inserted, moreover, within wide‐ranging unequal social structures that the cooperative's formal equality has limited tools to offset. The ways in which cooperatives interlink as a sector and how this sector relates to the state are two key dimensions to be considered in challenging capitalist‐space economies.     

Corporate Carbon Strategies in Responding to Climate Change

With climate change emerging as one of the most important issues affecting the business circle, companies have begun considering the carbon issue in their overall strategic positioning. However, few studies have examined the corporate carbon strategies in developing and advanced developing countries, where climate change regulation is extensive and market uncertainty is relatively high. In addition, there has been growing interest among researchers and practitioners concerning the relationship between the carbon strategy and firm performance. This paper presents a framework for identifying the corporate carbon strategy. The cluster analysis of 241 Korean companies indicates six types of corporate carbon strategy: ‘wait‐and‐see observer’, ‘cautious reducer’, ‘product enhancer’, ‘all‐round enhancer’, ‘emergent explorer’ and ‘all‐round explorer’. This study empirically examines whether there are differences between these carbon strategy types in terms of the sector, firm size and firm performance. The results indicate a significant relationship between a firm's carbon strategy and its sector and size but a significant relationship between the carbon strategy and firm performance is not confirmed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

UNIVERSITY RESEARCH, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND EUROPEAN INNOVATION SYSTEMS

Abstract This paper surveys the literature on university patenting. From the point of view of the economic theory of patents, it is argued that patenting knowledge developed by university researchers is paradoxical: patents are normally intended to stimulate knowledge development by providing property rights, but universities operate also under a different incentive scheme, i.e. they receive public funds to perform socially useful knowledge. In the debate surrounding the so‐called Bayh‐Dole Act in the USA, it has, however, been argued that patents on university inventions may be necessary to stimulate technology transfer from universities to private firms. The first part of the paper addresses two major questions. First, what is the economic logic of Bayh‐Dole, and, second, what were the effects on universities and the knowledge they develop? In the second part, the paper addresses the issue of whether ‘Bayh‐Dole‐like’ legislation would be beneficial for European countries. In a number of European countries, a suggestion has been made that this could enhance knowledge transfer from the public to the private sector. Using a new database resulting from a survey among patent inventors in six European countries, an assessment is given of the degree of university patenting in Europe. Because university researchers are often involved in patented inventions without the university being listed as a patent applicant, statistics based on the patent office databases alone often underestimate university patenting in Europe. The paper ends with a discussion of how this ‘European practice’ of university patenting affects public–private knowledge transfer in Europe, and how this compares to the effects of the Bayh‐Dole Act in the USA.     

Beyond the Global City Concept and the Myth of ‘Command and Control’

The article argues that the lack of convincing empirical evidence for the global economy as being subject to ‘command and control’ results from that contention being a neo‐Marxist myth. First, imagining the global economy as being subject to ‘highly concentrated command’ through the function of some major cities as ‘strategic sites’ for the production of ‘command and control’ is traced back through several neo‐Marxist authors to narrate its genesis, and to argue that the lack of evidence for that proposition is a consequence of those antecedents envisioning capitalism as a totalizing structure, thus making the assumption that it is subject to control and coordination from a distance. Second, Taylor's interlocking world city network model is forensically examined to explain that it is fallacious because it is a structuralism that, bedevilled by a sorites paradox, contains the further problem of containing no credible evidence for the existence of ‘command centres’. Finally, the article moves beyond neo‐Marxism's key concepts by juxtaposing their assumptions with ethnographic results from social studies of finance, a manoeuvre which forges an understanding of cities as socio‐technical assemblages and eventful multiplicities, beyond, inter alia, the baseless assumption that the global economy is subject to ‘command and control’.     

Diaries from the front line—Formal supervision and job quality among social care workers during austerity

Focusing on social care workers in public, private and voluntary sectors, this article contributes to research on the impact of austerity on public service human resource management (HRM). The article uses an innovative diary method to highlight the importance of intrinsic elements of job quality such as supervision practice in mitigating degradation in extrinsic elements as austerity dismantles public service HRM. The article also reports that supervision has itself come under pressure due to resource shortages. The results regarding sub‐sector differences have implications for policy‐makers and practitioners in terms of rebuilding the standard employment relationship in social care so that they are more sensitive to differences across private, public and voluntary sectors.     

Rebalancing and Regional Economic Performance: Northern Ireland in A Nordic Mirror

Northern Ireland has been characterised as having an excessively large public sector. This characterisation has led some to explain poor regional economic performance in terms of ‘crowding out’. This diagnosis has been used to justify a policy of ‘rebalancing’ and the region copying its southern neighbour's lower rate of corporation tax. The experience of large public sectors in the Nordic economies seems however to suggest that higher public spending is not necessarily damaging. This argument is examined critically. Rodrik's comparative institutional analysis indicates that in the Nordics a large public sector was the result of building a successful tradable private sector rather than its cause. In terms of the possible ‘economic dividend’ from devolution we suggest that a Hayekian insight is better: no ‘silver bullets’ exist.     

The business case for sustainability? An examination of small firms in the UK's construction and restaurant sectors

Studies show that despite a concerted attempt by UK policy‐makers to portray ‘eco‐efficiency’ measures as cost reducing, most owner‐managers of small firms view environmental measures as expensive to undertake. As a result, owner‐managers tend to be highly resistant to voluntarily improving their environmental performance. Given that SMEs are such a vast sector of the economy, this perceived discord between profits and environmental protection is clearly a major barrier to the ‘greening’ of industry. This ESRC‐funded study has sought to unearth the underlying motivations for why SME owner‐managers in the UK resist or accept the idea that there are business benefits for improving their environmental performance. The findings from 40 in‐depth interviews with SME owners in the UK's construction and restaurant sectors and 12 ‘key informants’ from industry and government are presented, followed by a discussion of SME perspectives on the ‘business case’ for sustainability and its implications for policy‐makers. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

A typology of stakeholder participation for company environmental decision‐making

Companies now recognise the need to identify and address the concerns of their stakeholders to ensure their decisions and business activities are more socially acceptable. However, despite stakeholder participation being widely accepted in the public sector and used to a limited extent within some business management processes, there is no accepted understanding of what stakeholder participation actually constitutes and certainly no systematic method for its application within companies and company decision‐making. In order to support the development of such a method, stakeholder participation must first be defined in the ‘company’ context. Drawing from previous typologies of participation outlined in the literature, particularly relating to the public sector, this paper proposes a typology of stakeholder participation for companies, with particular relevance to environmental issues. It also outlines the needs and problems associated with developing a method of stakeholder participation for use in company decision‐making. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.