The meanings and purpose of employee voice

In this paper we present and assess an analytical framework for examining the different ‘meanings, purposes and practices’ of employee voice. The data were collected from eighteen organizations in England, Scotland and Ireland. Managers defined voice very much in terms of the perceived contribution to efficiency and tended to downplay notions of rights; however, the linkages between voice and performance outcomes remain problematic. Overall, employee voice is best understood as a complex and uneven set of meanings and purposes with a dialectic shaped by external regulation, on the one hand, and internal management choice, on the other. The evidence suggests that the degree to which voice practices are embedded in an organization is much more important than reporting the extent of any particular individual or collective schemes for employee voice.     

Chained,exact and superlative hedonic price changes: estimates from microdata

Scanner data are used to calculate chained, exact (and superlative) hedonic price indexes for television sets. The data source is available for a wide range of goods, the application providing an example of how this method can be more widely applied. The indexes correspond to constant utility, hedonic cost-of-living indexes. The approach improves on the existing direct method, which takes its estimates directly from the coefficients on time dummies in a hedonic regression. It also improves on the matched model method used by statistical agencies. The differences between actual price changes and exact hedonic quality-adjusted price changes are found to be substantial. Base-period and current-period weighted exact hedonic indexes are similar, thus providing good approximations to a superlative index. Estimates from the direct, dummy variable approach were compared to the superlative indexes. The disparities between the results argue for caution in the use of the direct, dummy variable approach to estimating quality-adjusted price changes.     

AN EVALUATION OF THE USE OF HEDONIC REGRESSIONS FOR BASIC COMPONENTS OF CONSUMER PRICE INDICES

The importance of adjusting for quality changes in the measurement of consumer prices, and the role hedonic regressions can play in achieving this, is well recognised. However, the use of such regressions can take different forms, including (i) adjustments by statistical offices for non-comparable substitutions via the matched models method , (ii) direct estimates from the coefficients on dummy variables for time, and (iii) exact hedonic and superlative indices corresponding to a constant utility formulation from an economic theoretic approach. The literature on these approaches generally deals with each in isolation; the purpose of this paper is to outline and evaluate them in order to draw conclusions as to their practical suitability for the compilation of quality-adjusted consumer prices indexes. The case is argued for a move towards the last of these approaches, which developments in electronic data retrieval (scanner data) now make feasible. The paper concludes with the results of some empirical work comparing the results of the direct method with those from the exact, superlative, approach.     

Managing people across hospital networks in the UK: multiple employers and the shaping of HRM

Building on the insights from a growing number of studies on the HRM implications of inter-organisational relations, this article investigates the HR issues in two case studies of ‘best practice’, long-term collaborative working. It identifies three common challenges for HRM: (a) how to build employee commitment and identity to the partnership without putting at risk the employing organisation's goals; (b) how to establish attractive career pathways in a partnership context requiring some degree of sharing of skill standards and coordination of training provision; and (c) how to sustain partnerships in a changing policy and organisational context. The data point to inherent problems in managing employment when there is more than one employing organisation exercising influence. Differences in organisational goals and HRM approaches in hospital networks are an obstacle to long-term integration – especially in public–private arrangements where integration of goals and HRM is more difficult.     

Future UK land use policy and the risk of infectious disease in humans,livestock and wild animals

We explore the degree to which the consideration of infectious diseases may be of importance in the formulation of land use policy. We look at the diseases of humans, domestic livestock and wild vertebrates, and distinguish two types of human disease: those which form epidemics involving transmission from person to person, and those which are contracted from non-human sources and spread very little through the population. Land use affects the density and distribution of people, and urbanisation typically increases the risk of an epidemic and the speed with which it spreads. More subtle effects may occur through changes in the network of contacts between individuals. Land use policy that affects the distribution of breeding sites for disease vectors (e.g. mosquitoes) or the passage of potential pathogenic microorganisms through the environment from farm animals to humans can also influence non-epidemic disease risk.Livestock disease is critically affected by stocking density and the network of contacts between individuals and herds. Land use and agricultural policy can be very important in reducing the risks of disease outbreaks. We explore the complex relationship between intensification and disease risks. We suspect that land use policy may affect the viability of threatened species of vertebrates, though our relatively poor knowledge of disease epidemiology in wild animals makes policy formation difficult. Though climate change may act together with land use policy to determine disease risk, we consider this interaction to less important than that between land use and the socioeconomic drivers of global change. We conclude by assessing the importance of disease in the three types of host to land use policy. We suggest that the consideration of wildlife diseases is a low to medium priority for land use policy, though we attach high uncertainty to our conclusion; the consideration of human diseases we think a low priority (with medium uncertainty); while that of livestock diseases we argue is a high priority (with low uncertainty).     

Are leaders portable?

Does management talent transfer from one company to another? The market certainly seems to think so. Stock prices spike when companies announce new CEOs from a talent generator like General Electric. But how do these executives perform over the long term? The authors studied the careers of 20 former GE executives who went on to lead other major organizations, with strikingly uneven results. Even the best management talent, the authors found, is transferable only if it maps to the challenges of the new environment. More specifically, the authors identified five types of skills that may or may not transfer to a new job: general management human capital, or the skills to gather, cultivate, and deploy financial, technical, and human resources; strategic human capital, or individuals' expertise in cost cutting, growth, or cyclical markets; industry human capital, meaning the technical and regulatory knowledge unique to an industry; relationship human capital, or the extent to which a manager's effectiveness can be attributed to his or her experience working with colleagues or as part of a team; and company-specific human capital, or the knowledge about routines and procedures, corporate culture and informal structures, and systems and processes that are unique to a company. The GE executives' performance as CEOs depended on whether their new organizations were able to leverage each type of skill. The authors'findings challenge the conventional wisdom on human capital, which holds that there are two types of skill: general management, which is readily transferable, and company specific, which is not. In fact, they argue, other types of management capabilities can make a significant contribution to performance, and company-specific skills can be an asset in a new job.     

The influence of inflation on differential price changes across European markets

This paper provides the results of an empirical study of the dispersion of consumer price inflation for each of 19 product groups across 11 European countries using monthly data covering the 1980s. The study relates the degree of inflation dispersion in a market to the mean inflation rate. Thus, we show how differential price changes across European markets are influenced by inflation. A model of asymmetric response of relative inflation variability to inflation is tested. Hypotheses are also tested regarding broad categories of traded, nontraded, and regulated products, and results are provided for individual product groups.