Teacher union responses to education reforms: job regulation and the enforced growth of informality

This article examines the school teacher union responses to education reforms. The removal of formal collective bargaining arrangements is strengthening the significance of the traditional union structures, and the responses reflect both the pressures of the reforms and the traditions of the three main unions     

Festival Tourism: A Contributor to Sustainable Local Economic Development?

Towns, villages and cities are increasingly keen to share their culture, environment and spending opportunities with visitors by the promotion of festivals. The fact that income can be generated by such festivals is clear but the true value of visitor spend is more complex to calculate with accuracy. This paper considers the contribution of festival tourism to sustainable local economic development. A festival typology is created that broadly identifies three festival types termed 'home-grown', 'tourist-tempter' and 'big-bang'. Here three festivals matching the typology are analysed against the model of sustainable local economic development activity created by the environment charity Forum for the Future. Results suggest that although festivals may have the potential to provide opportunities for sustainable local economic development such opportunities frequently remain unexploited. Nevertheless, some festival scenarios do indicate a closer match to the model of sustainable local economic development activity than others. This paper analyses why this should be and suggests ways in which festival tourism's contribution to local economies might begin to be better understood, and consequently, improved.     

Power Structure – Ownership,Integration, and Competition in the U.S. Electric Utility Industry. John E. Kwoka,Jr.

Review of Industrial Organization -     

Economics and the Supreme Court: The Case of the Minimum Wage

In the United States, laissez-faire has been the policy advocated in good times, while social legislation has been called for during crises. One instance of this dichotomy concerns the transformation of the American understanding of minimum wage laws during the early 20^th century. During this time, the view of minimum wage laws changed from one that viewed such laws as theft, to one that saw such laws as being required for distributional justness. We examine the legal-historical debate concerning whether the Supreme Court renounced its policy of laissez-faire individualism in its 1937 ruling finding the minimum wage law constitutional, arguing that it did not. We investigate the free market standard that the Court used to find minimum wage laws unconstitutional in 1923. We demonstrate how the economic conditions of the Depression, coupled with the development of economic theory, explain how the Court eventually found the minimum wage law constitutional.     

It Investment and its Productivity Effects: An Organizational Sociologist's Perspective on Directions for Future Research

The paper reviews the empirical evidence on the contribution of IT investments to economic growth and discusses the need for further research to explain the chain of causation linking the cumulative effects of IT expenditures on vertical and horizontal market structures within specific industries and the factors which influence or mediate the direction and magnitude of these effects. Two hypotheses are discussed as polar explanations for why IT capital productivity increased significantly after such a long period of stagnant and, in some industries negative, growth prior to 1987.