An Ethical Work Climate and its Consequences among Food-service Franchise Employees

This study was conducted to examine the effect of ethical values and an ethical work climate (EWC) (responsibility, unethical peer behaviors, and selling orientation) on organizational trust, and organizational commitment (affective and continuance commitment), which in turn influence turnover intentions to acquire a competitive edge in a competitive world. Data were obtained from 276 employees of food-service franchised companies in Korea. The results suggest that an EWC mediates the relationship between ethical values and organizational trust, which in turn has a positive influence on organizational commitment and turnover intention. Contributions and directions for future study are discussed.     

Risk Pooling, Precautionary Saving and Consumption Growth

In this paper we model the evolution of income risk and consumption growth. We decompose the time series innovation of the income process into its common and cohort-specific components. From these we compute conditional variances which are used as separate risk terms in a consumption growth equation. Using a long series of British household data we exploit the time-series variation to identify precautionary saving effects and find strong evidence of their importance. Specifically, after allowing for demographic and labour market status, there is an independent role for income risk in explaining consumption growth. Rather than the component that is common across cohorts, however, it is the cohort-specific element that is important in determining changes in consumption growth. This result points to a failure of between-cohort insurance mechanisms.     

Oil,debt, banking and the world recession

The threat of a major debt crisis is presently hanging over the international financial community like Damocles' sword. Behind the crisis lies the flood of petrodollars into the financial institutions of the industrial world since the mid 1970s and the consequent large-scale lending to “doubtful customers”. A simple solution to the problem is not in sight.     

DEPTH – Developing Professional Thinking for Technology Teachers: An International Study

The tools to help teachers reflect on their professional knowledge are few in number, and often difficult to utilise. This paper reports on a study conducted with both primary and secondary technology initial teacher education students in a number of different countries who were given the same teacher-knowledge graphical framework as a tool to support reflection on their own professional knowledge. We wanted to investigate if, despite the different country contexts, student teachers of technology could take advantage of their experience with graphic visualisation to help them articulate abstract notions such as aspects of their developing teacher knowledge. We discovered that the graphical tool acted as a framework that enabled them to set out their subject knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and `school' knowledge and was useful in helping them become more self-aware. In this paper, the framework itself is introduced, the way it was presented to the novice teachers is outlined and the relative impact of such `self awareness' on their understandings, enabled by the framework, is then discussed. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Swedish economic policy: Some current problems

During recent years sharp increases in unemployment have given rise to questions concerning the traditional way of managing the Swedish economy. Various aspects of the resulting discussion are reviewed in the following article.