Is There a Wage Payoff to Innovative Work Practices?

During the 1980s, wage inequality increased dramatically, and the economy lost many high-wage jobs that had provided middle-class incomes to less skilled workers, increasingly restricting these workers to low-wage jobs lacking union or other institutional protections. A number of scholars have suggested that a new paradigm of work, often called high performance , is emerging that offers such workers more skilled jobs and higher wages. Using a unique national dataset, we find little evidence that practices associated with high-performance work systems are associated with higher wages.     

Working for Position: Women, Men, and Managerial Work Hours

Job hours may be determined in part by positional striving to keep up with or outwork others in one's organization. A prisoner's dilemma in which employees have an incentive to work more than a socially optimal level of hours may arise from positional competition. This article uses survey data to estimate how much positional striving increases job hours, and considers how it may contribute to workplaces more in accord with men's than women's hours preferences.     

False Self‐Employment,Autonomy and Regulating for Decent Work: Improving Working Conditions in the UK Stripping Industry

A large‐scale study of working conditions in UK‐based strip dancing clubs reveals that dancers are against de facto self‐employment as it is defined and practised by management, but in favour of de jure self‐employment that ensures sufficient levels of autonomy and control in the workplace. While dancers could potentially seek ‘worker’ or ‘employee’ status within the existing legal framework, their strong identification with the label ‘self‐employed’ and their desire for autonomy will likely inhibit these labour rights claims. We propose an alternative avenue for improving dancers’ working conditions, whereby self‐employed dancers articulate their grievances as a demand for decent work, pursued through licensing agreements between clubs and local authorities and facilitated by collective organization.     

Supervision, Working Conditions, and the Employer Size-Wage Effect

Two hypotheses for the employer size-wage effect are explored using data from the 1980 Survey of Job Characteristics. We found that there is a strong establishment size effect in both medium-size and large companies and that employee-reported frequency of supervision has a negative relationship to pay but makes no difference in the effect. While 26 working conditions reduce the establishment size effect by one-third, it remains strong and significant.     

'High-performance' Management Practices, Working Hours and Work–Life Balance

The effects of selected high‐performance practices and working hours on work–life balance are analysed with data from national surveys of British employees in 1992 and 2000. Alongside long hours, which are a constant source of negative job‐to‐home spillover, certain ‘high‐performance’ practices have become more strongly related to negative spillover during this period. Surprisingly, dual‐earner couples are not especially liable to spillover — if anything, less so than single‐earner couples. Additionally, the presence of young children has become less important over time. Overall, the results suggest a conflict between high‐performance practices and work‐life balance policies.     

Retail Mergers and Food Prices: Evidence from France

This paper analyzes the impact of a merger in the French supermarket industry on food prices. Using consumer panel data, we compare the changes in prices for merging and rival firms in affected and comparison markets. We use a novel definition of affected markets when some firms have a local pricing strategy and others a more centralized pricing strategy. We find that prices increase significantly following the merger, and that the merging firms lose market shares. For the rivals, the price increases are larger in local markets, in which concentration increased and differentiation changed after the merger.     

A Comparison of American and Japanese Work Practices: Skill Formation, Communications, and Conflict Resolution

This article examines whether American work practices are becoming more similar to Japanese work practices with regard to skill formation, communications, and conflict resolution. I find that separated skills, self-managing teams, and the dual conflict settlement procedure prevalent in three American unionized plants contrast with the practices found in three Japanese unionized plants, where integrated skills, middle-up-down decision making led by assistant and first-line supervisors, and an informal and one-channel conflict settlement procedure are used.     

Union Presence and Corporate Productivity Practices: Evidence from Singapore

This paper explores the influences that unionisation may have on managerial processes to improve productivity. Unionisation is cast as a contextual variable, along with sector, size and culture. A recently established Singapore data base of employees' perceptions of corporate productivity practices is used to detect such possible influences. Regression analysis, with productivity practice as a dependent variable, suggests that unionisation explains some of the variations in such practices.     

Product Development as Core Competence: How Formal Product Development Practices Differ for Radical,More Innovative,and Incremental Product Innovations

Although universally recognized as an important consideration in building product development (PD) competency, the effect of a firm's ability to vary its PD practices to develop winning products has been given scant attention in large‐scale, multiorganizational, quantitative studies. This research explores differences in formal new PD practices among three project types—incremental, more innovative, and radical. Using a sample of 380 business units, this research investigates how development practices differ across these three classes of innovation with respect to the formal PD process, project organization, PD strategy, organizational culture, and senior management commitment. Our results diverge from several commonly held beliefs about formal PD processes and the management of radical versus incremental innovations. Our results indicate that radical projects are managed less flexibly than incremental projects. Instead of being an offshoot of less strategic planning, radical projects are just as strategically aligned as incremental projects. Instead of being informally introduced entrepreneurial adventures, radical projects are often the result of more formal ideation methods. While these results may be counterintuitive to suppositional models of how to radical innovation happens, it is the central theme of this research to show how radical innovation actually happens. Our findings also provide a foundation for reexamining the role of control in the management of innovation. As the level of innovativeness increased, so too did the amount of controls imposed—e.g., less flexibility in the development process, more professional, full‐time project leadership, centralized executive oversight for new products, and formal financial assessments of expected NP performance.     

Developing Technician Skills for Innovative Industries: Theory,Evidence from the UK Life Sciences Industry,and Policy Implications

This article explores how innovative firms attempt to acquire the skilled technicians needed to deploy new technologies. Interviews with 40 employers from the UK life sciences sector reveal that shortages of technicians, an awareness of the importance of practical skills best acquired through work-based learning, and increasing dissatisfaction with the use of graduates, are encouraging employers to turn towards apprenticeship training. However, the rules governing the funding of various kinds of education and training discourage providers from offering the kinds of apprenticeships increasingly sought by employers, giving rise to a ‘system failure’ that manifests itself in shortages of technicians and the use of over-qualified graduates in technician roles.     

Contested Resources: Unions,Employers, and the Adoption of New Work Practices in US and UK Telecommunications

The pattern of adoption of high‐performance work practices has been explained in terms of strategic contingency and in terms of union presence. We compare the post‐deregulation/privatization changes in work practice at AT&T, Bell Atlantic and British Telecom. On the basis of these cases, we argue that the choice of new work practices should be understood as a consequence not only of the company's resources or changes in its environment, nor of a simple union presence, but also as a consequence of the practices' effects on union power, the nature of the union's engagement, and the union's strategic choices.     

Collective and Individual Conflicts in the Workplace: Evidence from France

This article investigates whether collective disputes and individual disputes are substitutes in French workplaces. Using a nationally representative dataset, this article focuses on two prominent and distinct individual disputes in France, that is, employee applications to Employment Tribunals and employer disciplinary action, and considers alternately strikes and non‐strike disputes at the collective level. Our results suggest that collective disputes, with or without a strike, are substitutes only for Employment Tribunal claims, due to a significant negative relationship between them. In contrast, collective disputes are found to heighten disciplinary action in French workplaces.     

Informal Work and Protest: Undocumented Immigrant Activism in France, 1996–2000

Nominally, the wave of protests by undocumented immigrants that swept through France in the late 1990s successfully challenged the restrictive Pasqua immigration laws. However, despite appearances, the mass movement was at base a labour protest: undocumented workers demonstrated against immigration laws that undermined the way they navigated informal labour markets and, in particular, truncated their opportunities for skill development. Furthermore, it is proposed in this article that examining social movements for their labour content can reveal erosions of working conditions and worker power in informal sector employment. A case study of the Paris garment district is presented to demonstrate how the spread of ‘hybrid‐informality’ made legal work permits a prerequisite for working informally and relegated undocumented immigrants to lower quality jobs outside the cluster.     

Public-Private Partnerships and Prices: Evidence from Water Distribution in France

We use an original database of 5000 French local public authorities to explore the impact of organizational choice and performance as measured by consumer prices. In quantifying the impact of the choice of public-private partnerships (PPPs) on performance, we consider the related issue of the determinants of organizational choice. We estimate a switching regressions model to account for the endogeneity of organizational choice, and find that in our sample, (i) the choice by local public authorities to engage in a PPP is not random, and (ii) conditional on the choice of a PPP, consumer prices are significantly higher on average.     

Information,Promotion, and the Adoption of Innovative Consumer Durables*

The diffusion of innovative new products is critically dependent on the transmission of relevant information to potential adopters. Existing research indicates that the relative effectiveness of different communication tools depends on the type of information being communicated. Written and verbal communication tools can be effective when consumers make adoption decisions based on search attributes. However, when adoption depends on experience attributes, marketers must find ways to effectively expose consumers to these attributes. In this paper the authors explore the effectiveness of promotional incentives in motivating consumers to engage in behaviors that should increase their understanding of an innovation's experience attributes. To the authors' knowledge, the research described here is the first published study of the relative effectiveness of different promotional vehicles in stimulating adoption of a consumer durable. The empirical analysis is based on data collected in a real‐world experiment involving 614 households. Just over half of these households received a free DVD movie disc as an incentive to participate in the study. The authors assigned the participating households to four treatment groups of 100 households each and a control group of 214 households. The households in the treatment groups received one of four promotional offers that featured some form of a $50 monetary incentive. These promotional offers differed in the degree to which they encouraged behavior that exposed consumers to the experience attributes of a DVD player. After one month the authors surveyed these households again to determine how many purchased a DVD player in the preceding month. An analysis of this experimental data reveals that all four monetary promotions significantly enhanced the probability of adoption. In particular, the average adoption rate among the households receiving one of the monetary incentives was 41%. In contrast, none of the households in the control group reported purchasing a DVD player. Promotions that paid consumers for specific behaviors that precede purchase were no less effective than a coupon that reduces the purchase price by an equivalent amount. In addition, promotions that directly exposed consumers to experience attributes were more effective than promotions that simply provided consumers with the opportunity to learn about experience attributes. Finally, the gift of a free complementary product (a DVD movie) enhanced the effectiveness of three of the four monetary promotions. The authors close with a discussion of managerial implications and directions for future search.     

Globalization,Human Resource Practices and Innovation: Recent Evidence from the Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey

This study examines the triangular relationship that connects the degree to which a workplace is internationally engaged, the extent to which it innovates, and the human resource practices it adopts. By pooling various years of data from the Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey, a nationally representative data set, we found that certain practices, such as variable pay and autonomy training, are more likely to be used in international workplaces. We subsequently found that for an international workplace, the use of variable pay contributes very little to workplace innovation while autonomy training has a positive relationship with innovation.     

Unbundling the incumbent and deployment of high-speed internet: Evidence from France

In this paper, we study the impact of competition on the legacy copper network on the deployment of high-speed broadband. We first develop a theoretical model, which shows that the relation between the number of competitors and investment in a quality-improving technology can be positive if the quality of the new technology is high enough, and is negative otherwise. We test these theoretical predictions using data on broadband deployments in France in more than 36,000 local municipalities. First, using panel data over the period 2011–2014, we estimate a model of entry into local markets by alternative operators using local loop unbundling (LLU). Second, using cross-sectional data for the year 2015, we estimate how the number of LLU entrants impacts the deployment of high-speed broadband with speed of 30 Mbps or more by means of VDSL, cable and fiber technologies, controlling for the endogeneity of LLU entry. We find that a higher number of LLU competitors in a municipality implies lower incentives to deploy and expand coverage of high-speed broadband with speed of 30 Mbps or more.     

Editors' Introduction: The Effects of New Work Practices on Workers

The effects of employee involvement have been widely studied, including a special issue of this journal ( Ichniowski et al. 1996 ). This issue examines the effects of involvement and related programs on employees. This introduction examines several relevant theories and describes the methodological challenges. Of the many outcomes of interest ranging from employee satisfaction to health and safety, we focus our literature review on one: wages. The results of the studies we review vary widely, as do the programs those studies examine. Our reading is that many programs have no effect on wages, while on average, the effect is a small increase in wages after companies introduce new work systems with higher employee involvement.     

Best Practices for New Product Pricing: Impact on Market Performance and Price Level under Different Conditions

To date, research on new product pricing has predominantly been approached as a choice between market skimming and penetration pricing. Despite calls for research that addresses other complexities in new product pricing, empirical research responding to these calls remains scarce. This paper examines three managerial price‐setting practices for new products, i.e., value‐informed, competition‐informed, and cost‐informed pricing. By engaging in these practices, managers can develop and compare quantifications in order to attain an introduction price for the product. The authors draw on consumer price perception literature, Monroe's pricing discretion model, and numerical cognition literature to develop hypotheses about the impact of price‐setting practices on new product market performance and price level. By studying the effects on market performance and price level, the paper provides insights that may help explain the growth of new products and address the problems of underpricing. The hypotheses are tested in a management survey of 144 production and service companies. The results indicate which pricing practices are superior for the achievement of either higher market performance or higher prices in specific product and market conditions. Whereas value‐informed pricing has an unambiguous positive impact on relative price level and market performance, the results also suggest that in many cases engaging in value‐informed pricing is not enough. The effects of cost‐informed and competition‐informed pricing may differ depending upon the objective (market performance or higher prices), product conditions (product advantage and relative product costs), and market condition (competitive intensity). Engaging in inappropriate pricing practices leads to a decline in new product performance. Moreover, bad pricing practices make the positive effect of product advantage on the outcome variables disappear. The latter finding suggests that companies can jeopardize their efforts and investments in the new product development process if they engage in the wrong price‐setting practices. The findings imply that managers should consider different factors in new product pricing. First, when launching a new product, they should determine their explicit pricing objective, either stressing market performance or a higher price level. To determine the most appropriate pricing practices, however, they should next assess their situation in terms of product advantage, relative product costs, and competitive intensity. Together with the pricing objective, these conditions determine the best pricing practice. On a higher level, the findings imply that companies should invest in knowledge development in order to engage in the appropriate pricing practices for each product launch.