Team Rewards: How Far Have We Come?

Although many organizations find teams to be important to their success, few have implemented reward systems that encourage team effort. This study examines the practices of 35 firms using team‐based reward programs and identifies some features of these programs that improve their effectiveness. The results indicate that the most valued programs were those associated with (1) high levels of communication to employees about the specifics of the plan, (2) strong worker involvement in the plan's design and implementation, and (3) team members' perceptions that the pay system was fair. HR managers considered more complex plans more beneficial than simple plans. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The ‘demographic timebomb’ and how some hospitality employers are responding to the challenge

The phrase ‘demographic timebomb’ has taken on the aura of a shibbholeth and that everyone knows they ought to be fearful about. But is it really understood and what needs to be done? This article seeks to answer these questions and to shed some light on the employment strategies being developed by some British hospitality employers to counteract the demographic changes of the 1990s. As a result, some of the myth that the hospitality industry is lagging behind other industries can be dispelled but other findings support popular testimony that the industry faces special problems.     

Demand‐side housing policy in Costa Rica: a response to the housing deficit

The purpose of this study was to establish what the housing needs of Costa Rica are and to assess what policies have been implemented to respond to their housing deficit. In order to answer these questions, a combined methodology consisting of primary and secondary data was used. Using open‐ended questions and a topic schedule, face‐to‐face interviews with Costa Rican housing authorities were conducted at the interviewee's work place in Costa Rica in May 2003. The most recent secondary data available in the country was used to compute the housing deficit and to study the effects of demographics on current housing needs. Sources of the secondary data were the Costa Rica Ministry of Housing and Human Settlements, and the National Institute of Statistics and Census. The Costa Rican government has made great progress in reforming the housing finance system in order to meet the housing demand of its citizens. In 2002, Costa Rica had a 75.6% home ownership rate. Yet, even in light of the housing system's current success, many social, economic and political barriers threaten to undermine its accomplishments and the peoples’ ability to obtain safe and affordable housing. The paper considers the strengths and weaknesses of the current housing finance system as well as the government strategies for addressing difficulties.     

Crossing Disciplines: A Constraint‐Based Model of the Creative/Innovative Process

This paper argues that artistic creativity and organizational innovation share a common problem‐solving process. The process per se is presented as a complement to the jazz metaphor for understanding organizational innovation. As modeled, it involves paired constraints that limit and direct search for a solution path. One of each pair identifies something to be precluded; the other specifies its substitute. The process can be initiated by necessity or by design. Once begun, the process is iterative: one substitution pair necessitates another. The creation/innovation is the novel solution path created by the substitution series. In‐depth analyses of two artistic creators are accompanied by allusions to parallel examples in organizational innovation.     

Green moms: the social construction of a green mothering identity via environmental advertising appeals

This study explores emerging green motherhood discourse as framed by green advertising in pregnancy magazines. It takes an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on reflexive modernization, feminist studies and critical discourse analysis and reveals how advertising represents a double bind for mothers. Textual analysis of a sample of green ads in FitPregnancy indicates ads present expectant mothers with solutions for resolving the challenges of parenting in an age of widespread environmental threat, while simultaneously reinforcing those same lifestyle choices that are thought to exacerbate the environmental crisis. This green mothering discourse appears to empower mothers and offer solutions to the risks of pregnancy, while in reality relegating the mother to the sidelines, rendering her nearly invisible while the child is promoted as the primary subject and brands as sources of expert knowledge. These results speak to the broader ways in which seemingly neutral texts work to frame and reinforce certain ideologies.     

Corporate social responsibility: The disclosure–performance gap

As increased stakeholder pressure requires companies to be transparent about their CSR practices, it is essential to know how reliable corporate disclosure mechanisms are, testing the gap between corporate social responsibility claims and actual practice. This study benchmarks corporate social responsibility policies and practices of ten international hotel groups of particular importance to the European leisure market. We found that corporate systems are not necessarily reflective of actual operations, environmental performance is eco-savings driven, labour policies aim to comply with local legislation, socio-economic policies are inward looking with little acceptance of impacts on the destination, and customer engagement is limited. Generally larger hotel groups have more comprehensive policies but also greater gaps in implementation, while the smaller hotel groups focus only on environmental management and deliver what they promised. As the first survey of its kind in tourism, both the methodology and the findings have implications for further research.     

Market Structure and the Value of Agricultural Contingent Claims

In this paper, we evaluate the proposition that market structure, including supply and demand elasticities, plays a significant role in influencing equilibrium price dynamics. We show that the more inelastic the demand and/or supply of a commodity is, the more price risk will be faced by producers of that commodity. In general one can expect greater volatility from commodities with both demand and supply being inelastic, and the least when they are both elastic. We illustrate how the elasticities of supply and demand can impact the prices of contingent claims on agricultural commodities including revenue insurance.
Dans le présent article, nous évaluons la proposition selon laquelle la structure de marché, y compris l'élasticité de l'offre et de la demande, influence la dynamique du prix d'équilibre. Nous montrons que plus la demande et/ou l'offre d'un produit de base est inélastique, plus les producteurs de ce produit de base sont confrontés au risque de prix. En général, on peut s'attendre à une forte volatilité des produits de base pour lesquels l'offre et la demande sont à la fois inélastiques, et à une faible volatilité lorsqu'elles sont élastiques. Nous faisons ressortir de quelle façon l'inélasticité de l'offre et de la demande peut influencer les réclamations éventuelles concernant des produits agricoles de base, y compris l'assurance−revenu.     

Anti-leisure in dystopian fiction: the literature of leisure in the worst of all possible worlds

Literary utopias, i.e. designs for the theoretically perfect society, have been common in Western literature since Plato's The Republic . A variation on this genre which emerged in the nineteenth century is the anti-utopia, or dystopia, in which an author depicts the worst of all possible societies. Dystopias usually exaggerate contemporary social trends and in doing so, offer serious social criticism. This essay examines the treatment of leisure in four widely-read dystopian novels. The leisure described in these novels we call anti-leisure. It is not leisure's opposite, work, but leisure perverted to achieve the perpetuation of tyranny. Such leisure regulates identity, prevents individual thought, impedes self-sufficiency, encourages immoderation, and distracts citizens from social injustice through various compulsory activities. Such novels encourage the re-examination of theories of leisure from a humanistic standpoint.     

Brand Name Audit Pricing,Industry Specialization,and Leadership Premiums post‐Big 8 and Big 6 Mergers*

This paper investigates brand name, industry specialization, and leadership audit pricing in the wake of the mergers that created the Big 6 and the Big 5 accounting firms. For samples of Australian listed public companies in each of the postmerger years 1990, 1992, 1994, and 1998, we estimate national audit fee premiums for the Big 6/5 auditors and the industry specialists and leaders. We find limited support for the ability of the Big 6/5 to obtain fee premiums over non‐Big 6/5 for those industries not having specialist auditors. Nonspecialist Big 6/5 auditors are able to obtain fee premiums over nonspecialist non‐Big 6/5 auditors for those industries having specialist auditors. However, this result only holds among the smaller half of our sample. We do not find strong support for the presence of industry specialist premiums in the postmerger years, especially after 1990, using various definitions of industry specialist. We find, at best, limited support for the presence of industry leadership premiums. The evidence suggests that after the Big 8/6 audit firm mergers, some caution is required in generalizing the Craswell, Francis, and Taylor 1995 finding of national market industry specialist premiums. More generally, the study raises questions about the tenuous link between the concept of specialization and national market‐share statistics.