Investigating a potential hazard of carbonated drinks bottles

In response to concern over the risk of injury from caps missiling from carbonated drinks bottles during opening, a multi-disciplinary study was undertaken to identify the technical and ergonomic factors involved in this potential hazard. The specific conditions causing missiling were identified and an ergonomics approach was used to assess the likelihood of this combination of mainly behavioural factors. It was found that under ‘normal’ conditions, caps are unlikely to missile, suggesting that the risk from this product is low. Strength data collected in this study suggested that caps were applied with too great a torque for some users – particularly children and the elderly – to be able to open carbonated drinks bottles easily. User trials and a field study of naturalistic behaviour suggested that ‘tools’ are used to open bottles and some users may turn the caps the wrong way during opening, which together with an increase in temperature were the main factors likely to cause missiling.     

Rural and Regional Australian Public Accounting Firm Services: Service Provision,Concerns and Tensions

Public accounting firms provide a necessary and important service for rural and regional areas. However, the provision of high‐quality services is hindered by a number of factors. This paper reports the findings from a large‐scale survey of professional accounting firm practitioners located in rural and regional Australia, identifying factors causing concerns and tensions and quantifying their scope and importance. Prominent concerns and tensions identified include adverse effects arising from the employment market, communications technology developments and legislation such as the Corporate Law Economic Reform Program (Audit Reform and Corporate Disclosure) Act 2004 and the Financial Services Reform Act 2001.     

A Note on the Ultimatum Paradox, Bounded Rationality, and Uncertainty

The ultimatum game is a sequential-move bargaining game in which a giver offers a taker a share of a monetary pie. The predicted subgame perfect equilibrium in the ultimatum game is for purely rational givers who act in their own narrow self-interest to offer the smallest possible share of a monetary price, and for purely rational takers to accept. Experimental trials suggest, however, that givers make generous offers because they have a taste for fairness. The analysis presented in this paper argues that it is in the best interest of givers of any type to make offers that will not be rejected, and that offers become more generous as a giver’s uncertainty about the taker’s reservation offer increases.     

The consumption of gambling in everyday life

This paper is concerned with the escalation of gambling in the UK and the consequences this has for the consumer. Reasons why people consume risk through the medium of gambling are provided with social factors, presented here, as important variables that have influenced this consumption. The National Lottery in the UK is highlighted as the most recent example that provides the context for this escalation in the consumption of gambling. The paper then presents research data obtained from reformed problem gamblers and describes the social ills associated with their compulsive gambling behaviour traits and their worries over the impact that gambling has on the individual and the community. The paper suggests that there will be an increase in the number of problem gamblers as a result of the increasing exposure of the consumer towards many forms of gambling.     

An Early Global Business in a Colonial Context: The Strategies, Management, and Failure of John Palmer and Company of Calcutta, 1780-1830

This article explores the business and managerial strategiesof Palmer and Company, a Calcutta agency house, as it stroveto develop its global business in an era of limited communicationstechnology. The article considers the reasons for the eventualdemise of the firm and the consequences for business in India.It examines the principles that governed the operations of thebusiness and considers the extent to which these contributedto the demise of the firm. More generally, it considers thefactors that contributed not only to the failure of Palmer andCompany but also to the collapse of all the agency houses by1833.     

The geographical concentration of labour-market disadvantage

This paper argues that British 'welfare to work' policies areinadequate, given the geographical concentration of worklessnessin northern regions and in cities and former coalfields. Whileunemployment has been converging geographically, inactivityhas not. All the 'welfare to work' target groups - youth unemployed,long-term unemployed, lone parents, the long-term sick, andpartners of the unemployed - have closely similar geographicaldistributions. Official arguments that there are adequate jobvacancies everywhere are shown to be flawed. The geography ofworklessness is largely explained by the weakness of adjustmentthrough migration and commuting to the loss of jobs in manufacturingand mining, the cities being particularly affected by 'urbanrural manufacturing shift'. Policy needs to promote more relevantemployment in high unemployment areas, through increased spendingon derelict land reclamation and on transport and other infrastructure.The case for more supportive policies towards manufacturingshould also be considered.     

Customer's angry voice: Targeting employees or the organization?

Poor service encounters have the potential to leave customers feeling angry at the frontline service employee who serves them, angry at the organization, or angry at both parties. The 25 in-depth interviews (Study 1) and experimental work (Study 2) demonstrate how distributive (outcome fairness), procedural (response time) and interactional (treatment received) justice dimensions differentially affect where the customer targets her or his anger, either at the frontline employee or at the organization as a whole. Further investigation reveals sins-of-omission (when the service provider failed to act) and interactional justice mediate the effect of response time on anger at the employee. Interactional justice also partially mediates the effect of outcome fairness on anger at the organization whereas sins-of-omission do not.     

Long-term unemployment, the invention of 'hysteresis' and the misdiagnosis of structural unemployment in the UK

This paper investigates the empirical basis for the belief thatunemployment makes people less ‘employable’, andthat the existence of a pool of long-term unemployed peopleis therefore in itself a barrier to full employment. Drawingon data for Great Britain from the 1940s to the present day,it shows that this idea has arisen through misinterpretationsof the statistical evidence. The resulting policies, besidesdiverting resources from the demand-side programmes appropriateto the true situation of structural unemployment, appear tohave created a problem of the kind they were intended to address,by encouraging unemployed people to move onto sickness benefits.