Training in service – importing and imparting customer service culture as an interactive process

Customer service culture initiatives have received renewed academic attention. Recent surveys of employee responses have highlighted the importance of training. However, its precise nature and how messages and various responses are mediated through an interactive and dynamic process have been largely neglected. In addition, employees' experience of customer service as consumers and of its contradictions has yet to be fully explored in accounting for employee responses. In an effort to develop existing knowledge and models of customer service culture, these issues are addressed by drawing on observational research. Four training programmes are examined in varied contexts, including a UK call centre and a Malaysian bank. They reveal a dynamic whereby trainers' anticipation of employee attitudes such as cynicism and the immediate reactions and dialogue of trainees help shape both the service message and subsequent responses.     

Are batteries ready for plug-in hybrid buyers?

The notion persists that battery technology and cost remain as barriers to commercialization of electric-drive passenger vehicles. Within the context of starting a market for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), we explore two aspects of the purported problem: (1) PHEV performance goals and (2) the abilities of present and near-term battery chemistries to meet the resulting technological requirements. We summarize evidence stating that battery technologies do not meet the requirements that flow from three sets of influential PHEV goals due to inherent trade-offs among power, energy, longevity, cost, and safety. However, we also show that part of this battery problem is that those influential goals are overly ambitious compared to goals derived from consumers’ PHEV designs. We elicited PHEV designs from potential early buyers among U.S. new car buyers; most of those who are interested in a PHEV are interested in less technologically advanced PHEVs than assumed by experts. Using respondents’ PHEV designs, we derive peak power density and energy density requirements and show that current battery chemistries can meet them. By assuming too aggressive PHEV goals, existing policy initiatives, battery research, and vehicle development programs mischaracterize the batteries needed to start commercializing PHEVs. To answer the question whether batteries are ready for PHEVs, we must first answer the question, “whose PHEVs?”     

External Imbalances and Fiscal Fragility in the Euro Area

This paper presents two views of the European sovereign debt crisis. The first is that countries in the South of the Eurozone were fiscally irresponsible and failed to implement pro-competitive supply side policies. The second view holds that the crisis reflects a deep divide between the external surpluses of the North and external deficits of the South. Basic stylized facts cast doubt on the explanation based on the first thesis alone. A relatively simple model shows how poor fundamentals can create a debt problem independently of fiscal responsibility. The empirical analysis of the determinants of government bond yield spreads relative to Germany suggests that both views in fact provide useful insights into the roots of the current sovereign crisis. However, differences in growth and competitiveness and capital flows between North and South have assumed a much more dominant role since the onset of the global crisis.     

Field Experiment Tests for Discrimination against Hispanics in the U.S. Rental Housing Market

This article tests for discrimination against Hispanics in the U.S. rental housing market using e‐mail correspondence with landlords advertising units online. We divide Hispanics into two groups: those that appear assimilated into American culture and recent immigrants. We find little difference in the treatment of assimilated Hispanics and whites; however, Hispanics we portray as recent immigrants receive less favorable treatment with margins of net discrimination as large as 6.89% of landlords. We also find discrimination varies significantly at the region level and by the ethnic composition of neighborhoods.     

Employee involvement and participation: developing the concept of institutional embeddedness using WERS2004

It is widely accepted that employee involvement and participation (EIP) is a key component of the high commitment bundle of HRM, but that it can take a range of forms in practice. Much of the analysis to date has either treated different forms of EIP as a single construct or has measured EIP by virtue of its presence or absence alone. Drawing on earlier work based on the data from WERS1998 examining the link between various forms of EIP and employee outcomes such as job satisfaction and organisational commitment, the authors re-apply and extend these ideas to data from WERS2004. In particular they develop the concept of institutional embeddedness, in order argue that both the depth and breadth of EIP have important associations with commitment though not with satisfaction.

This association held for workplaces employing 25 or more workers, and here it was apparent that the more that employees are involved at workplace level – through a wider number of EIP practices that are held more frequently and include opportunities for workers to have their say – the more likely it is that investments in EIP will reap the reward of organisational commitment. For smaller establishments, given that they tend to operate with relatively few formal schemes, it is likely that managers in these workplaces find alternative ways in which to engage the workforce, and that informal EIP offer similar levels of embeddedness in these situations. A clear implication to be drawn from the findings is that, in a context of lower levels of formality within organisations (large and small), line managers are more than ever the key link between HR policy and the embodiment of actual practice at the workplace.