Research issues for employee empowerment in hospitality organisations

Employee empowerment is said to have much to offer hospitality organisations. Empowered employees will respond to customer needs as they arise, they will react appropriately to customer complaints, and they will develop a sense of ownership taking personal pride in ensuring that service encounters are a success. A more considered approach suggests that claims for employee empowerment need to take account of different definitions and meanings used by managers. They fail to recognise the initiatives which are called empowering take different forms which result in different working arrangements and boundaries for what the empowered can do, and represent different benefits to employees and employers. Whatever the intentions of managers, the effects of empowerment will be mediated by the experiences of the empowered. There are likely to be tensions between managerial intentions and employee experiences of empowerment. This paper suggests that there is unlikely to be a simple trade-off between empowering employees and improved organisational performance. A framework of analysis is needed which both examines each step in the process and the effects created.     

Stereotypes, Asian Americans, and Wages: An Empirical Strategy Applied to Computer Use at Work

This article examines the effect on wages of the Asian-American stereotype as mathematically and technically adept, and the role this stereotype may play in explaining racial wage differences. We propose an empirical strategy to examine the influence of stereotypes on labor market outcomes, with a specific application to the wage premium associated with computer use at work. Using Current Population Survey data, ordinary least squares estimates do not provide compelling evidence that a positive stereotype affects wages for Asian Americans.     

Restructuring the electricity distribution industry: An analysis of the proposed ownership and governance structures of regional electricity distributors

The electricity distribution industry is currently fragmented and in a financial crisis. The government proposes restructuring the industry into a number of regional electricity distributors (REDs) that will take over the electricity distribution function from municipalities and Eskom, who will be given shares in the REDs in exchange for their distribution assets. It is also proposed that REDs be controlled by boards consisting of customers, trade unions, national and provincial governments, municipalities and Eskom. This article critically examines these and other restructuring options relating to the ownership and governance of REDs. It is argued that these proposals would perpetuate the inequalities that exist between historically advantaged and disadvantaged local governments; that they would extend Eskom's monopoly of the electricity industry, and that they would obstruct good governance and private investment in the sector. To conclude, the article makes a number of recommendations that would mitigate these negative consequences.     

Die Grundannahmen der Gleichgewichtstheorie

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Modelling the Link Between US Inflation and Output: The Importance of the Uncertainty Channel

This article employs an augmented version of the UECCC GARCH specification proposed in Conrad and Karanasos (2010) which allows for lagged in‐mean effects, level effects as well as asymmetries in the conditional variances. In this unified framework, we examine the twelve potential intertemporal relationships among inflation, growth and their respective uncertainties using US data. We find that high inflation is detrimental to output growth both directly and indirectly via the nominal uncertainty. Output growth boosts inflation but mainly indirectly through a reduction in real uncertainty. Our findings highlight how macroeconomic performance affects nominal and real uncertainty in many ways and that the bidirectional relation between inflation and growth works to a large extent indirectly via the uncertainty channel.     

The Impact of Macroeconomic Fluctuations on the Likelihood of African American Female Homeownership

Homeownership, a primary component of household wealth, confers benefits not just in terms of the value of home equity itself, but also the tax benefits and inflation protection associated with owning property. The 1990s represented a booming time in the economy and record low interest rates which allowed homeownership to become more available to more people than ever. As a result, the US housing market experienced significant growth and home values began to soar in part due to rising incomes. However, this period of rapid expansion in the housing market was followed by a rapid decline, precipitated by the recession, as home values began to plummet and foreclosures steadily increased. This study examines the impact that recent macroeconomic fluctuations had on the likelihood of homeownership for African American women compared to their white counterparts. Using data from the American Housing Survey (1997–2009), this tenure spatial analysis used a logistic regression model to examine the odds in favor of homeownership during economic fluctuations along with taking into consideration other important determinants. The empirical results show that there are significant differences in the likelihood of homeownership between African American women and white females.     

A franchise: a resource-rich small service firm?

Internationally, the small firm community has been the focus of attention from academics and policy makers for several decades. On the other hand, franchising of services is a relative newcomer, particularly in the United Kingdom, and has not received the attention that this form of business organisation warrants. This article investigates the extent to which franchising represents the intelligent leverage of resources by ‘small firm’ owner-operator franchisees, focusing on one major ‘benchmark’ franchisor in the UK – McDonald's Restaurants Ltd. The article enables the exploration of the profile of individuals attracted to franchising and the associated resources, costs, tensions and contradictions, and moves discussion towards conclusions based on a resource scarcity/efficiency thesis from the dual perspectives of the franchisee and franchisor.     

Value versus Glamour

The fragility of the CAPM has led to a resurgence of research that frequently uses trading strategies based on sorting procedures to uncover relations between firm characteristics (such as “value” or “glamour”) and equity returns. We examine the propensity of these strategies to generate statistically and economically significant profits due to our familiarity with the data. Under plausible assumptions, data snooping can account for up to 50 percent of the in‐sample relations between firm characteristics and returns uncovered using single (one‐way) sorts. The biases can be much larger if we simultaneously condition returns on two (or more) characteristics.     

A test for strategic excess capacity

It is shown how, using data at the firm level, it may be possible to test for the existence of excess capacity as a strategic weapon to protect market share against competitors and potential entrants. If excess capacity has been found, it is also possible to test the extent of the threat, for example whether sufficient excess capacity is held to drive the firm's own profits to zero if all were employed. Yearly data for a brewery have been used as an example of the tests.