Organising non‐standard workers: union recruitment in the Irish care sector

In 2004, Ireland's largest union initiated its most comprehensive organising campaign to date, resulting in 12,000 care workers being organised. This article explores how unions can sustain campaigns among a dispersed workforce, and how public support and worker commitment can be leveraged to achieve structural changes in an emerging sector.     

Cheap Labor Strategies and Export-Oriented Industrialization: Some Lessons from the Los Angeles/East Asia Apparel Connection

In today's global manufacturing system, production is increasingly dispersed across borders. Particularly noteworthy is the rapid expansion of industrial exports from third world countries, especially the NICs of East Asia. With the entry of the formerly socialist countries of eastern Europe into the global capitalist economy, the dynamics of global economic restructuring are likely to change. This paper focuses on the lessons that can be learned from studying trans-Pacific global commodity chains, drawing out implications for East-Central Europe. In particular, we explore the role of flexibilization, subcontracting and state policy.     

Age,employability and the role of learning activities and their motivational antecedents: a conceptual model

In today's time of demographic change and rapid innovation, age and employability as well as the role of learning and development are high on the agenda of human resource managers and chief learning officers. However, existing research has failed to integrate these concepts in a clear model and offers little explanation of how the concepts may be linked exactly. In this conceptual paper we show how chronological age, despite its poor characteristics as a predictor, might still affect employability indirectly. Specifically, we propose that employees' motivation – in terms of future time perspective and goal orientation – and formal and informal learning activities need to be considered. Since an individual's chronological age cannot be changed, it is important to recognize these mediating variables, which may be targeted more easily by human resource development or age management initiatives.     

Emerging issues and challenges in global staffing: a North American perspective

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) recognize that human resources play an important role in gaining a competitive advantage in today's highly competitive global business environment. While all aspects of managing human resources are important, staffing, continues to be an essential IHRM activity that helps MNEs in their need for coordination and control across widely dispersed units. As such, researchers and practitioners alike are interested in addressing the key issues and challenges in staffing the several types of employees that comprise the global or multinational workforce. We focus on three issues that have emerged in recent years regarding how MNEs staff their multinational workforce including: 1) managing different types of employee groups; 2) selection and management of employees posted to international assignments; and, 3) receptivity to international careers among early career individuals. We review these and then describe an empirical study conducted on the third issue.     

The role of performance appraisals in motivating employees

Workers' rewards and career perspectives often depend on how their supervisors perceive their performance. However, evaluating a worker's performance is often difficult. We develop a model in which a worker is uncertain about his own performance and about his supervisor's ability to assess him. The supervisor gives the worker a performance appraisal aiming to affect both the worker's self‐perception and his own credibility in assessing the performance. We examine how performance appraisals affect the worker's future performance. Our model's predictions are consistent with empirical findings. Supervisors give, on average, “too” positive appraisals, and both positive and negative feedback can (de)motivate workers.     

Creating sustainable corporations

Corporate industrial activities of the past are environmentally unsustainable. Many of today's environmental crises are rooted in an unsustainable pattern of industrialization. Sustainable economic development can be ushered in only if corporations, the main economic engines of the future, are made environmentally sound. This can be facilitated through ‘total environmental management,’ and ‘sustainable organizational design’. Although many companies have embraced the practice of environmental management, few have seriously engaged the idea of sustainability. Those that do might reap competitive and financial benefits.     

Generation green: understanding the motivations and mechanisms influencing young adults' environmental volunteering

Environmental issues are particularly salient for today's generation of young adults. Indeed, many have suggested that it will be this generation that will lead the environmental movement forward. Therefore, this study examines the motivations and mechanisms that influence proclivity and intensity of young adults' environmental volunteerism. Using a survey of environmental attitudes and behaviors of college students at a large urban Canadian university (n = 1 372), we assess why today's young adults volunteer for the environment and the factors that motivate their commitment. Our findings suggest that young adults who engage in pro-environmental behaviors in general, as well as those who volunteer for other types of nonprofit organizations, are more likely to volunteer for environmental nonprofit organizations. Moreover, we find that social aspects of volunteering are the strongest positive predictor of the intensity of volunteerism in environmental groups. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Improving productivity and firm performance with enterprise resource planning

Productivity is generally considered to be the efficient utilisation of organisational resources and is measured in terms of the efficiency of a worker, company or nation. Focusing on efficiency alone, however, can be harmful to the organisation's long-term success and competitiveness. The full benefits of productivity improvement measures are realised when productivity is examined from two perspectives: operational efficiency (output/input) of an individual worker or a business unit as well as performance (effectiveness) with regard to end user or customer satisfaction. Over the years, corporations have adopted new technology to integrate business activities in order to achieve both effectiveness and efficiency in their operations. In recent years, many firms have invested in enterprise resource planning (ERP) in order to integrate all business activities into a uniform system. The implementation of ERP enables the firm to reduce the transaction costs of the business and improve its productivity, customer satisfaction and profitability.     

Management Women in the Corporate Workplace: Possibilities for the Year 2000

This article considers what corporations' attitudes toward women will be in the year 2000, and what women's attitudes toward corporations will be at that time. Women's current position in the workforce is characterized. Consideration is given to the direction today's workplace is taking as it transitions to the start of a new century. Based on current observations and trends, the article explores the needs and desires of the twenty-first century woman. Four major tools available to U.S. corporations preparing to enter the next century are discussed, including family issues, a commitment to innovation, training, and women's contributions to the management of transition.     

Achieving supply chain ‘Leagility’ through a project management orientation

Many forces have combined to make today's supply chains more complex than ever before. These forces include the significant trend to out-sourcing; the growth of offshore manufacturing and procurement; the rising demand for customer-specific solutions and the globalisation of markets. The paper highlights the challenges that organisations must address in order to gain and retain competitiveness in today's markets – in particular, the need to achieve ever lower costs while simultaneously enhancing responsiveness. In other words, the need is to develop hybrid supply chains that are both ‘lean’ and ‘agile’. Using a single case study of a global telecommunications company as an example, the authors demonstrate how supply chain complexity can effectively be mastered by adopting a project management orientation and in the process enabling outcomes that are ‘leagile’, that is, both lean and agile.     

The Logical Framework Approach–Millennium

The Logical Framework Approach (LFA) has proved to be a valuable tool for project approval, design, and evaluation. However, a few pitfalls make it hard to use within today's project management framework and to integrate with other project management tools. This article proposes an updated version of the LFA to improve its compatibility with today's corporate culture, project management framework, and tools. We propose to call the updated tool the Logical Framework Approach–Millennium (LFA‐M). The LFA‐M is a seven‐step approach leading to the development of the Logframe‐Millennium (LF‐M), a five‐column and four‐line matrix describing major project commitments and providing an overall understanding of the project. It was successfully implemented at the Canadian Space Agency and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. The LFA‐M fits well within today's project management framework and corporate culture and leads easily to other project management tools.     

Strategic management of worker health,safety, and environmental issues in Mexico's Maquiladora industry

Conflict arising from differences in business practices, standards, values, and norms guiding behavior are inherent in international business. These conflicts are evident in Mexico's maquiladora industry, particularly relating to issues of worker health, safety, and environment. This article extends a model of conflict management; illustrates the model's dimensions with case study examples; discusses strategic human resource management implications of the model's various outcomes; offers recommendations for managing worker health, safety, and environment issues; and identifies directions for future research. © 1993 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Innovations in job analysis: Development and application of metrics to analyze job data

Job analysis is an integral part of any human resource function. Recent advancements in technology and changing worker environments have drastically altered the means by which job analysis data are collected and stored. These changes have led to an increase in the amount of data that is collected and the potential for the data to inform complex decision making. However, due to a lack of tools available for configuring and analyzing data, human resource professionals are often unable to keep themselves abreast of changes in their workforce, make complex decisions using job data, and facilitate communication across jobs, job families or departments in their organization. As a result, advanced methods for analysis of job data are needed. Metrics are quantitative algorithms applied to job data that aid in decision making in areas such as recruitment, selection, transferability, promotion, training, and development. Metrics are a sophisticated, user-friendly approach to analyzing job data that have the potential to meet the needs of human resource professionals in today's dynamic workplace. The development of metrics, their application and benefit to human resource professionals, and their use of O^⁎NET are discussed.     

The functions and norms that drive university student volunteering

• Young adult volunteers are vital to the current and future operations of nonprofit organizations yet many countries report low and declining volunteer participation by this group. Moreover, university students are a particularly under‐utilized and under‐researched segment of potential young adult volunteers. As such, the current study examines the functions and norms that drive university students to volunteer. A survey of 282 students indicates that the Volunteer Functions Inventory (VFI) does not adequately explain the volunteering of today's university students. For instance, t‐tests reveal that the importance of the VFI functions among current students differs significantly to the importance of the functions among the previous generation of students. Also, factor analysis shows that the structure of the VFI model is unstable for the current sample while multiple regression reveals that the VFI explains only 11% of university student volunteering. In contrast, χ²‐tests indicate that volunteering by university students is dependent on the observed volunteering of primary reference group members (i.e., parents, siblings, close friends). The results suggest that nonprofit organizations may need to revise their recruitment strategies for today's university students: rather than appealing to the functional benefits of volunteering, positioning volunteering as the ‘normal’ thing to do may be more successful. Further research is needed to develop a richer understanding of reference group influences on the volunteering behavior of today's young adults.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Is There Any Ethical and Moral Consideration in the Theory and Practice of Global Business Social Darwinism?

Abstract

This article has revisited the interchangeable meanings of morality and ethics in today's global business practices. This article argues that in the theory and practice of the global business Social Darwinism, there is no room for ethics and morality because the competitive international business ideology promotes the “survival of the fittest.” Furthermore, the purpose of this article is to first define the distinction between morality and ethics and their application in the real world of today's business; second, to analyze the ideological foundation of the international business practices of Social Darwinism in relation to global production, consumption, profitability, and efficacy.     

The impact of implicit collective leadership theories on the emergence and effectiveness of leadership networks in teams

Leadership in today's high-performing teams is a relational process best understood from a multilevel emergent perspective. Implicit theories of leadership and followership play an important role in predicting leader emergence in more traditional hierarchical structures, but are inadequate for understanding and predicting leadership as networks in teams, as they do not consider the complex dynamics of leading and following activities inherent in such structures. To address this theoretical gap, we propose the concept of Implicit Leadership Network Theories (ILNTs) that integrates implicit leadership and followership theories with contemporary social network perspectives of leadership in teams to predict the shape and structure of leadership network emergence and subsequent team outcomes. More specifically, we propose that the combination of team member self-ILNTs (i.e., expectations regarding one's own role within a leadership network) and network-ILNTs (i.e., expectations regarding the prototypical team leadership structure) will shape the emergence and effectiveness of leadership in teams. We describe several prototypical team configurations of ILNTs and discuss implications for future research and human resource management.     

Followership and the Samurai

Japan's samurai were a class of followers—their very name samurai originally meant those who served. The current study examines the colorful nature and significance of followership in the unique cultural setting of Japan's Edo or Tokugawa period (1603–1868), and how the relationship between samurai and their lords was affected by bushido—the way of the warrior. It also considers the relevance of samurai‐style followership to today's world.     

Implementation of an integrated accounting and cost management system using the SAP system: a field study

Not only are in-depth (theoretically informed) longitudinal (reflexive) field studies few and far between, it has been argued in those studies that little is known about the design and implementation of accounting and information systems that operate in today's world-class organizations. Using such an approach this study seeks to illustrate and analyse the implementation processes of an integrated accounting and cost management system using the SAP system at a major steel producer in Australia. It is demonstrated that the technical design of the system is only a part of the implementation process. Keeping 'actor-networks' in line and managing change including behavioural implications on the implementation are also seen as crucial issues, which are outcomes of a continuous translation process.     

Assessing the impact of green supply chain practices on firm performance in the Korean manufacturing industry

As a growing number of customers tend to view corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a key purchase decision criterion, demands for CSR including environmental sustainability have accelerated in today's business world. To meet such demands, many firms consider embracing environment-friendly business practices. However, many firms are still hesitant to implement those practices due to sceptical views about their real managerial benefits. Although the previous literature confirms the positive link between a firm's commitment to environmental sustainability and its performance, the varying degree of impact of different kinds of environment-friendly supply chain practices on the firm's operational performance is still unknown. To fill the void left by prior research, this paper aims to classify various types of green supply chain management (GSCM) practices and then assess the impact of each of these distinct types on the firm's operational performances (especially manufacturing and marketing performance). Also, this paper examines how the firm's organisational profiles such as firm size affect the particular firm's choice of GSCM practices. Our experimental results reveal that the chosen type of GSCM practices influences the firm's performance differently.     

Bringing along the young employee

The value systems of different generations is bound to be at variance, so if a job is to be redesigned to attract young men, it must be redesigned on the basis of what the young man needs, not on the basis of what today's mature manager needed at that age.