Non‐Standard “Contingent” Employment and Job Satisfaction: A Panel Data Analysis

Contingent forms of employment are usually associated with low‐quality jobs and, by inference, jobs that workers find relatively unsatisfying. This assumption is tested using data from a representative household panel survey covering a country (Australia) with a high incidence of nonstandard employment. Results from the estimation of ordered logit regression models reveal that among males, both casual employees and labor‐hire (agency) workers (but not fixed‐term contract workers) report noticeably lower levels of job satisfaction, though this association diminishes with job tenure. Negative effects for women are mainly restricted to labor‐hire workers.     

Fits,misfits and interactions: learning at work,job satisfaction and job‐related well‐being

The resource‐based view (RBV) of the firm has focused attention on the importance of aligning employees' needs with the requirements of the jobs they do. This article focuses on how these needs and requirements interact in terms of learning. It does so in two ways. First, it develops new survey instruments to capture the learning demands of jobs and the learning dispositions of workers and uses them for the first time in a survey of 2,810 employees. Second, it examines how these person and job characteristics correlate with specific aspects of job satisfaction and job‐related well‐being. The results show that although learning alignment is associated with high levels of satisfaction and well‐being, not all learning misalignments are associated with the reverse.     

Hierarchical Bayesian conjoint models incorporating measurement uncertainty

The authors explore situations where consumers supplement their judgments with a measurement of uncertainty about their own preferences, either implicitly or explicitly, and develop two sets of hierarchical Bayesian conjoint models incorporating such measurements. The first set of models uses the relative location of a rating to determine the importance or weight given to the rating, in a regression setting. The second set uses interval judgment as a dependent variable in a regression setting. After specifying the models, the authors perform a theoretical comparison with a basic Bayesian regression model. They show that, under different conditions, the proposed models will yield more precise individual-level partworth estimates. Two simulated data examples and data from a conjoint study are used to illustrate the gains that could be obtained from modeling uncertainty. In the empirical application, the authors show that model fit improves when ratings for items that respondents do not like are given more weight compared to ratings for items that they do like. Electronic Supplementary Material  The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Employer Policies and Organizational Commitment in Britain 1992–97

An important current of thinking in the last decade has emphasized the need for a shift from control to commitment as the central objective of management employment policies. This paper is concerned to assess whether there was a significant increase in British employees' commitment to their organizations in the 1990s, using comparative data from two large-scale and nationally representative surveys carried out in 1992 and 1997. It finds that there was no evidence of an increase in commitment over the period. As in the early part of the decade, employees had only a weak level of attachment to their organizations. The analysis examines a number of factors that have been seen as important determinants of such commitment: changes in the level of skill, task discretion, controls over work performance, and forms of employee involvement. While there were changes in some of these factors that encouraged higher commitment, these were largely cancelled out by a notable decline in the discretion that employees were allowed to exercise over their work.     

The transfer of Tax Increment Financing (TIF) as an urban policy for spatially targeted economic development

Urban policy transfer between the US and UK has long been of interest to researchers and practitioners. Given the recent wider context of reduced direct funding and the absence of a coherent regeneration policy, this paper considers the introduction of Tax Increment Financing (TIF) to the UK as a method of stimulating spatially targeted economic development initiatives. The paper explores whether TIF could be considered a form of policy transfer, and in doing so uncovers whether the transfer of TIF could – (a) be successful and unsuccessful under certain circumstances; (b) require the actions of certain stakeholders; and (c) be enabled via prescribed frameworks and negotiation. The results are evidenced using qualitative approaches and find that TIF is more of a modified policy ‘idea’ rather than transfer. Further discussion argues that TIF can be successful, if it considers flexible but local elements and has the capacity to balance stakeholders for development brokerage.     

Reward strategy: Time for a more realistic reconceptualization and reinterpretation?

This article focuses on organizations' continued struggles to design and implement successful and credible reward strategies. We argue that a major and neglected factor that accounts for this is how reward strategies are designed and executed with insufficient attention given to employee preferences for different types of reward. We argue that this is both a problem of process in the way reward systems are designed and a problem of how models of reward strategy are built. Developing more effective reward strategies requires a better understanding of holistic rewards and greater attention to line management roles in their implementation. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Understanding the Decline of China's State Sector

MOCT-MOST: Economic Policy in Transitional Economies -     

The renewed Lisbon Strategy and social exclusion policy

In the light of its manifest mid‐term failure to make progress towards its key objectives, the EU introduced in 2005 a major ‘relaunch’ of its Lisbon Strategy for economic, employment and social development. The core aspect of this was ‘prioritisation’, involving an increased focus on growth and jobs. This raised the issue of whether the pursuit of greater competitiveness would lead to a downgrading of the importance of the original social objectives of the programme. In its focal concern on the fight against social exclusion, the EU's strategy involved both employment and social objectives. These emphasised in particular the creation not only of more but of ‘better jobs’ and the pursuit of actions to reinforce ‘social inclusion’ and ‘social cohesion’. This article considers whether a significant shift did occur in policy emphasis and the implications of the Lisbon reform for progress in reducing the risks of social exclusion. It reviews first the basic changes in the formulation of the strategy and then examines in turn the effectiveness of its policy initiatives with respect to employment, the quality of work and social inclusion.     

ECONOMIC BURDENS OF MARITAL DISRUPTIONS: A COMPARISON OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY

Longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the German Socio-Economic Panel are used to show that women and children are worse off following a marital split than are men in both the United States and Germany. The size of the difference is sensitive to the equivalence scale used, but despite its far more extensive tax and transfer system the disparate impact of divorce or separation on women and children persisted in Germany at a level at least as high as in the United States.