Supply and demand of policy indicators

The aim of this article is to question the idea that all professional service organizations are undergoing a process of inter-archetype transformation. This idea, originating in organizational archetype theory, is now being used to interpret contemporary processes of change in British and other public sector services. Drawing on an example of management UK restructuring in social services during the 1990s – that of local authority social services in the UK – two main problems with this thesis are identified. First, this service demonstrates that ‘radical’ change has not occurred and that older professional values and working practices persist. Second, it reveals how, in at least one part of the public sector in the UK, management reforms have been partly undermined by a specific constellation of institutions and practices. These observations call for questioning the proposition that inter-archetype change is what has occurred and that current reforms will inevitably have this sort of transformational effect.     

Competitive strategy and skills: working out the fit in the fitness industry

It is widely accepted that creating quality products and services requires a well‐trained and skilled workforce. This article seeks to contribute to unpicking the relationship between business strategy and skills in the service sector by presenting research findings from the UK fitness industry. This sector has grown quickly and includes companies that compete on the basis of high‐quality services, alongside those competing largely on cost. If the route to a high‐skills economy is to shift more firms towards the higher‐quality end of the market, we would expect to find employers in these companies making use of a workforce with higher levels of skill. The research from the fitness industry questions this simple relationship, finding that there is no clear link between competitive strategy and skills. As market position is not necessarily the impetus for improving the skills of the workforce, the article then briefly explores what other factors may also be required.     

Corporate Governance,Strategy and Survival in a Declining Industry: A Study of UK Cotton Textile Companies*

ABSTRACT Building on the strategic flexibility perspective, this paper examines the influences of organizational diversity, ownership structure and board characteristics on strategic responses to industrial decline in firms from the UK textile industry. Using samples of exiting and surviving companies it shows that, in line with the predictions of the strategic flexibility framework, the surviving companies tended to have a higher level of organizational diversity. They also tended to have larger institutional ownership and more diverse boards. These factors are associated with higher investment, financial performance, and growth. The results are consistent with the resource and service roles of the corporate governance factors.     

Servicing De-industrialisation

Government figures have recently revealed that, while investment in manufacturing industry has fallen by 25% since 1979, the service sector now accounts for 70% of all investment in the UK. Russell Lewis finds that attitudes in Whitehall lag behind this startling change in economic activity.     

Improving the Sustainable Development of Firms: The Role of Employees

Stakeholders have been found to be an important driver of organizations' sustainable development. In particular, customers, governments and non‐governmental organizations push firms towards sustainability. But to what extent is sustainability really and deeply embedded within an organization's structures and processes? And what is the role of an important, but frequently neglected, stakeholder group for successful sustainability implementation: employees? The objective of this research is to better understand the impact that organizational change for sustainability has on firm performance. Also, this study seeks to understand how the consideration of employees into the process of organizational change for sustainability moderates the organizational change and performance relationship. Using data from 92 German companies from the manufacturing and services sector, the study finds that the structural implementation of sustainability is positively related to firm performance and that employee integration moderates this relationship to some extent. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

论我国金融控股公司的模式选择

在全球金融混业浪潮中,金融控股公司成为混业经营首选的组织模式.同时,入世后我国金融业将面临着前所未有的挑战.文中结合美日等国金融业发展状况,提出构建以银行为主体的金融控股公司模式.     

The role of entry barriers in the development of the offshore supply sector in scotland

This paper examines the offshore oil supply sector and shows how the entry barriers experienced by new supply firms are imposed not by other supply firms but by the oil companies. This is done to ensure product quality and reliability of service rather than the more general attention to price considerations. The range of entry barriers are discussed in relation to key characteristics of the oil industry. As a spin-off this experience appears to have generated a more responsive attitude towards technological and commercial change throughout Scottish industry.     

New Public Management

The paper presents an assessment and evaluation of what is termed ‘new public management’ at the end of the 1990s. In order to provide this assessment, new public management is defined in several ways: as a movement, as an academic commentary, and as reformed organizational practice in the public sector. The paper uses the UK health sector to examine some of the assumed relationships between ideology, actions and consequences implied within a broad understanding of new public management. Developments in the UK health sector are used to address assumptions focusing on different aspects of the ideology (private sector practices and markets can increase efficiency in the public sector), actions (introduction of market mechanisms and business-like, practices) and consequences (operational performance, strategic direction, governance and values). Drawing on developments in the UK health sector, an assessment of new public management at the end of the 1990s sees it much diversified and expanded from original conceptions, which are ensuring its contested survival as a movement, as an academic commentary, and as reformed organizational practice in the UK despite a change of government in 1997.     

Explicit reforms,implicit theories and public service improvement

A framework for the explication of the theoretical basis of public management reforms is developed. The framework is applied to the Best Value regime in UK local government. The implicit assumptions of policy makers are that the Best Value regime will generate service improvements through changes in organizational structures, processes, culture and strategy content. Empirical evidence on the relationship between these variables and organizational performance is critically reviewed, and policy makers' implicit ‘theories in use’ are made explicit in the form of a simple additive model of public service improvement. In practice the actual pattern of change is likely to be mediative, reciprocal and contingent on local organizational circumstances. However, theorizing public management reforms in this way is valuable because it provides a basis for evaluating the logic of programme design, predicting effectiveness and generating testable models of the relationship between public policies, organizational changes and public service improvement.     

The decision to finance account receivables: the factoring option

Factoring is a financial service enabling enterprises to sell their accounts receivable to a factoring company in exchange for cash. The market for factoring in the UK has been growing at substantial rates and most banking institutions are now actively involved in providing this service. Little research on the factoring market currently exists and so this paper'seeks to profile the determinants influencing decision making in the UK factoring industry. Using data from an interview‐based survey, this paper establishes that the decision to purchase an enterprise's accounts receivable is influenced by the enterprise's size, type of product or service it offers, industry, sector, age, type of customers, financial statement, the management team, operational suitability, collectability and credit notes. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What happened when the Americans took over Britain's electricity industry? Exploring trans-national sector effects on employment relations

Pressures stemming from the country of origin are seen increasingly as the single most important influence on multinational companies, and American managements are famed particularly for their marked preferences for non-unionism and for pay systems linked to performance. The dramatic inflow of American investment into the British electricity industry from 1996 onwards provides an opportunity to observe the development of these influences. In fact, employment relations reform was not driven by the concerns of American owners to any significant degree, but tended to follow patterns already very well established in the utilities sector in the UK. This can only be understood in the context of similar developments in sector-level governance in both countries, and the processes through which this drove international strategies at higher levels, affecting investment and organizational structure.     

Sustainability assessment of food chain logistics

Food chain logistics plays an important role in the sustainability performance of the food sector. Therefore, project SCALE (Step Change in Agri-food Logistics Ecosystems) started as a collaborative international project, aiming for tools and frameworks for the food sector to make a step change in operational practices. A sustainability framework is introduced to propose a structured and rational method for assessing sustainability. Next, we empirically apply the framework, based upon explorative web-based research and semi-structured interviews with the best practice players in the field in the Netherlands, the UK and France. Findings provide clear insights into the current state of the art regarding the use of sustainability performance indicators, companies’ sustainability strategies, supply chain redesign strategies currently applied in practice and experienced barriers to sustainability improvement. Overall, logistics service providers seem to have a wait-and-see attitude towards sustainability where food companies are more proactive following market demands for more sustainable products.     

Human resource management in the public sector

This article charts the currents in public sector reform and examines how contemporary HRM articulates to the change agenda pursued in the public sector. It notes the differences between the traditional bureaucratic model and the new management approach of public sector operation and activity. It explores how the institutional, policy and organizational changes delivered a new paradigm of managing members of public service organizations.     

Managing Challenging Organizational Change: Introducing active labour market policies in Italian public employment agencies

Abstract

Managing organizational change in the public sector is extremely challenging when adverse conditions hamper the introduction of novel organizational practices. This study builds on the case of the implementation of active labour market policies in in Italy, in an attempt to help explain the process of managing organizational change in the public sector. The case study shows how, despite contrary conditions that originate from the political context, the interplay between designed policy interventions, initial conditions, and features of the policy process can result in effective change of employment service practices.     

Combinative Effects of Innovation Types and Organizational Performance: A Longitudinal Study of Service Organizations

Innovation research suggests that innovation types have different attributes, determinants, and effects. This study focuses on consequences of adoption of three types of innovation (service, technological process, and administrative process) in service organizations. Its main thesis is that the impact of innovation on organizational performance depends on compositions of innovation types over time. We examine this proposition by analysing innovative activity in a panel of 428 public service organizations in the UK over four years. Our findings suggest that focus on adopting a specific type of innovation every year is detrimental, consistency in adopting the same composition of innovation types over the years has no effect, and divergence from the industry norm in adopting innovation types could possibly be beneficial to organizational performance. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and research on innovation types.     

An agency theory perspective of the Israeli labor market segmentation: Past,present, and future

In this paper we use agency theory to present a process of the dichotomization of the Israeli workforce into two structures, each representing distinct organizational cultures. The first structure is the private sector, led by the high-tech industry; a model where the principal has strong control over the activities of the agent. The second is the public sector, an opposing model in which the principal has virtually no control over the activities of the agents and as a result, the effectiveness within this sector deteriorates. We argue that such conflicting systems cannot exist side by side without affecting each other and we suggest a role for human resource management (HRM) in future developments. Within the public sector it is the responsibility of the principal, the Israeli government, to gain more control over the agent and employ professional HRM systems for this purpose.     

Outsourcing a satisfied and committed workforce: a trucking industry case study

The steady growth of R&;D costs and the increasingly widespread dissemination of information and communication technology over the past decade have resulted in the affirmation of the paradigm of open innovation, which consists in the continual expansion of access to sources of technological innovation outside the firm itself. Industrial companies are, in fact, turning more frequently to collaboration with university departments and other public and private research centers, and there is a notable increase in agreements regarding technological cooperation and the exchange of know-how between companies. In addition, recourse to highly specialized small research companies is on the rise. This is common, for example in the pharmaceutical sector and, more generally, in the area of biotechnological research. Furthermore, we are witnessing the development of the new role of innovation broker. These factors alter the traditional profile of company R&;D structures, within which the role of researchers and technologists often changes. In particular, matrix and network organizational models are on the increase, and the professional figures of ‘integrators of knowledge and expertise’ (T-men) are assuming major importance at the expense of traditional scientists. As a consequence, the model for training and managing scientific personnel tends to change. This model, as it moves away from the prevailing pattern adopted by firms in Anglophone countries, is continually drawing closer, even from a cultural standpoint, to the R&;D management approach found in the Japanese and German companies. The aim of this article is to investigate how the adoption of open innovation has changed the organizational structures of R&;D and altered the methods used in managing its personnel. The results of the study are based on the analysis of four case studies of Italian multinational firms operating in the pharmaceutical, food, specialty chemical, and aerospace industries.     

Intra‐ and intersectoral effects in environmental disclosures: evidence for legitimacy theory?

Environmental disclosures were recorded from the annual reports of a sample of ten UK FTSE 100 companies in five sectors between 1974 and 2000. ‘Environmental sensitivity’ was employed as a proxy for corporate vulnerability to environmental concern, and intra‐ and intersectoral differences were tested for in the belief that difference in industry response will signify differing perceptions on the need to provide voluntary disclosure and hence restore or maintain legitimacy. Intrasectoral agreements at given points in time were also taken to be evidence for legitimacy theory in that more than one company in a sector perceived a need to change disclosure behaviour at the same time. Legitimacy theory as an explicator for variability in environmental disclosure is supported. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

石家庄市服务业发展的经济环境评价研究

服务业的发展状况和水平取决于当地的经济发展水平。改革开放以来,石家庄市的经济发展突飞猛进,经济规模不断壮大,服务业亦处于迅速发展的态势之中。从1978年改革开放至今,石家庄市GDP平均增长速度为16．64％,而服务业的年平均增长速度为16．82％,已超过了当地GDP的增长速度,然而其发展水平与其他一些城市相比较还存在一定的差距。文章利用因子分析法等手段对石家庄市服务业赖以发展的经济基础进行评价,力求为石家庄市服务业的发展找准方向。     

Strategic Positioning And Organizational Adaptation In Social Enterprise Subsidiaries Of Voluntary Organizations

Abstract

This article examines a new organizational form, the community interest company (CIC), as a means for voluntary and charitable organizations to embark on formalized social enterprise activities in the UK. A combination of social, economic, legal and strategic positioning factors has influenced charities to set up CICs as social enterprise subsidiaries to complement their public service work. CICs with charitable origins have relatively weak strategic positions, which are distinct from those of their parent charities. This difference creates tensions in the relationship between the CICs and their parent charities, which have implications for the management of third sector social enterprises.