Putting skills to work: learning and employment at the start of the century

Skills are central to employment, yet they are often poorly understood in theory and underdeveloped in practice. The articles in this issue of HRMJ were originally presented at an ESRC‐funded seminar in Manchester in 2001 and show how working practices, control systems and regulation can have an impact on skills. This article introduces the special issue by considering the interrelationship between the individual expertise, job design and discretion that constitute skill. Drawing on data from the 2001 Skills Survery, it notes that developments in these areas are not necessarily compatible with one another, and reviews the implications for policymakers and practitioners.     

Reform economics and western economic theory: Unexploited opportunities

The theory of economic reforms in Soviet Union and Eastern Europe did not follow the development of western economic theory. Although the fundamental economic issues are different in the West and in the East (employment and inflation versus shortages and lack of technological progress) the reform economics is concerned with the optimal mix of centralisation and decentralisation, of market and hierarchy, of autonomy and control, and-more recently-of public and private. All these issues have been extensively treated in western economic literature.This paper overviews those fields in contemporary economics which could offer the East European reformers an enlightening perspective and useful tools in their search for a new institutional solution. Four such fields are presented: comparative economic systems, theory of incentives, literature stressing relative costs and benefits of different institutional solutions and comparing market and nonmarket failures, and the theory of property rights.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference Plan and/or Market. A Comparative Study of Reform Economics in Soviet-Type Societies, organized by the Institut für die Wissenschaften von Menschen in Vienna in December 1988. Useful comments by Pierre-André Chiappori, Ellen Comisso, Roger Guesnerie, Pavel Pelikan, Richard Portes, Kazimierz Poznanski and Gérard Roland are gratefully acknowledged.     

How Much Do Corporate Defendants Really Lose? A New Verdict on the Reputation Loss Induced by Corporate Litigation

Using a novel sample of 83,260 lawsuits filed in US Federal District courts, we extend the results of prior studies investigating market value and reputational losses due to corporate misconduct. We examine alternative explanations for the loss in market value, such as media coverage, the expectation of subsequent litigation, and the defendant's willingness to settle, in addition to previously documented factors. Our results suggest that with the exception of securities litigation, this loss in market value can be attributed to these alternative explanations rather than to reputational consequences. This finding is confirmed by several indirect measures of reputation loss.     

Human Resource Management and the Permeable Organization: The Case of the Multi‐Client Call Centre*

ABSTRACT Despite the interest over recent years in the fragmentation of organizations and the development of contracting, little attention has been paid to the impact of the associated inter‐organizational relationships on the internal organization of employment. Inter‐organizational relations have been introduced primarily as a means of externalizing – and potentially rendering invisible – employment issues and employment relations. In a context where inter‐organizational relationships appear to be growing in volume and diversity, this constitutes a significant gap in the literature that this paper in part aims to fill. The purpose of the paper is two‐fold: to develop a framework for considering the internal and external organizational influences on employment and to apply this framework within a case study of a multi‐client outsourcing call centre. We explore the interactions between internal objectives, client demands and the use of external contracting in relation to three dimensions of employment policy: managing the wage‐effort bargain, managing flexibility and managing commitment and performance. It is the interplay between these factors in a dynamic context that provides, we suggest, the basis for a more general framework for considering human resource policy in permeable organizations.     

Competition and ownership structure: Substitutes or complements? Evidence from the Warsaw Stock Exchange

In this paper we analyse the impact of product market competition and ownership structure on firm performance. Our results show that product market competition has a positive and significant impact on performance. Concerning the effect of ownership concentration, we find a U–shaped relationship with performance. Firms with relatively dispersed and relatively concentrated ownership have higher productivity growth than firms with an intermediate level of ownership concentration. This correlation between concentration of ownership and productivity growth is not explained by the type of the controlling shareholder. Finally, product market competition and good governance tend to reinforce each other rather than to be substitutes. Competition has no significant effect on performance for the firms with ‘poor’ governance; on the contrary, it has a significant positive effect in the case of firms with ‘good’ corporate governance. JEL classification: D24, G32, L1, P2.