The Extent of Collective Bargaining and Workplace Representation: Transitions between States and their Determinants. A Comparative Analysis of Germany and Great Britain

The institutions of collective bargaining and worker representation are eroding in many nations, not least in Germany and Britain. This is the first article to explore transitions into and out of these arrangements. Using successive waves of the German IAB Establishment Panel and both cross‐sectional and panel components of the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey for the period 1998–2004, we find industrial relations are in flux, with many workplaces switching into and out of collective bargaining and other agencies of worker representation, respectively, works councils in Germany and joint consultative committees in Britain. Yet although there are some commonalities in behaviour, the driving forces behind the decline in collective bargaining differ markedly in the two countries.     

Ein Rollenmodell zur Einbindung der Endkunden in eine smarte Energiewelt

The successful expansion of renewable energies requires a phase of change in the energy supply system. On the one hand solutions have to be found to ensure the system dependability in spite of the high volatility of the feeding-in from renewable sources. On the other hand the differences between feeding-in and demand, which also occurs on the regional level evermore, have to be equalized on the regional level, too. For this purpose, it is necessary to develop new control and modified market mechanisms. The role definition of the involved actors gets an increasing relevance because of the politically predetermined unbundling. However, only a slight attention was paid to the role of the final consumers in the past. For a successful rebuilding of the energy supply system it is nevertheless important to involve the consumers in this process. It could be demonstrated within the research project “MeRegio”, that the integration of the consumers into an incentive based demand side management can tap significant potentials to equalize differences between feeding-in and demand. Therefore, the focusing on the final consumers can have an important contribution to rebuild the energy supply system.     

Internationalization processes of small- and medium-sized enterprises—a matter of attitude?

Scholars suggest that when it comes to the role owner-managers of SME play in terms of their companies’ internationalization, their attitudes have a major impact. However, little is known on how exactly they lead to international entrepreneurial behavior. This paper sheds light on this relationship by making use of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). Besides attitudes, other cognitive factors are examined for relevance. The study is based on empirical data which have been gathered from owner-managers from Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Germany. The study yielded several interesting results. First, TPB clearly is applicable to investigate the cognitive antecedents of SME owner-managers’ international business activities. More specifically, the understanding of how decision-makers’ motivation to do business abroad is determined has been deepened. Second, some extensions proved to be useful in order to increase the approach’s predictive strength. From these results several conclusions can be drawn. Cognitive aspects are a promising starting point for increasing the knowledge on decision-making in the context of SME internationalization. Thus, the intersection of international entrepreneurship (IE) and entrepreneurial cognition deserves further attention. On the other hand, traits-based research seems to contribute little to a better understanding of IE. Policies supporting SME should be extended: pure resource-based approaches seem to be insufficient. Furthermore, entrepreneurship courses should reflect the relevance of attitudinal and other cognitive influences.     

Shifting comparative advantage,the nics,and the developing countries

It has been suggested that there have been shifts in comparative advantage for labor-intensive manufactures from the Newly Industrializing Countires (NICs) to other developing countries, permitting these latter states to export these products to the world market. An analysis of changes in exports for selected three-digit product categories for manufactures for sixteen countries from 1968 to 1976 and from 1976 to 1982, however, indicated that such shifts have not occurred. Many of the other developing countries that have expanded such exports have done so in the same product categories as the NICs, not different ones. In other cases, export gains of some developing countries were matched by losses by other developing states.     

Innovation and skills from a sectoral perspective: a linked employer–employee analysis

Science and engineering skills as well as management and leadership skills are often referred to as sources of innovative activities within companies. Broken down into sectoral innovation patterns, this article examines the role of formal education, actual occupation and work experience in the innovation performance in manufacturing firms within a probit model. It uses unique micro data for Germany (LIAB) that contain information about corporate innovation activities and the qualification of employees in terms of formal education, actual professional status and work experience. We find clear differences in the human capital endowment between sectors according to the Pavitt classification. Sectors with a high share of highly skilled employees engage in above average product innovation (specialised suppliers and science-based industries). However, according to our estimation results, across as well as within these sectors a large share of highly skilled employees does not substantially increase the probability of a firm being innovative.     

Stagflation as an Institutional Problem

The existence of nonprofit firms has been traditionally explained by two types of theories emphasizing the market failures that these firms address and the individual motivations to found these firms. To date, these theorizing strands have been mainly disconnected from each other. To fill this gap, this paper develops an integrative theoretical understanding of nonprofit organization by demonstrating the way market failures addressed by nonprofit firms are interrelated with the motivations of nonprofit entrepreneurs. Building on the arguments of Thorstein Veblen and the theory of the division of labor, it is argued that nonprofit organization embodies partial collective self-sufficiency necessitated by the limitations of the ability of market exchange to satisfy human needs.     

DEBIASING STRATEGIES IN SUPPLY MANAGEMENT DECISION‐MAKING

Human judgment and decision making under uncertainty are vulnerable to decision biases leading to deviations from the standard assumptions of the rational paradigm in economics. This fact is currently not widely reflected by research on decision making in sourcing contexts. However, supply managers are aware of the judgment and decision challenges that result from existing and increasing levels of uncertainty in the external, upstream supply chain, and deploy decision supporting strategies for debiasing their judgments. The analysis of supply management decisions using 441 data units from 133 embedded cases from 15 buying organizations revealed high levels of such debiasing strategies. However, the seemingly most effective mitigation strategy recommended in the general debiasing literature ‐ creating awareness of the underlying mechanics causing decision biases ‐ was only employed by one buying organization, indicating a need to further investigate debiasing strategies specifically in supply management contexts.     

One optional observation inflates α by $${100/\sqrt{n}}$$ per cent

For one-sample level α tests ψ _m based on independent observations X ₁, . . . , X _m , we prove an asymptotic formula for the actual level of the test rejecting if at least one of the tests ψ _n , . . . , ψ _n+k would reject. For k = 1 and usual tests at usual levels α, the result is approximately summarized by the title of this paper. Our method of proof, relying on some second order asymptotic statistics as developed by Pfanzagl and Wefelmeyer, might also be useful for proper sequential analysis. A simple and elementary alternative proof is given for k = 1 in the special case of the Gauss test.