Protecting Employee Entitlements

Corporate failure exposes employees to the possible loss of sums due as deferred benefits such as arise from annual leave entitlements. Through such deferred benefits, employees are significant, often involuntary, providers of working capital to their employer. They are not necessarily adequately compensated for the risk involved, nor able to influence corporate governance in the ways available to other creditors. These issues have been largely neglected in the debate to date, and they provide the focus for an evaluation of alternative policies which have been proposed (or implemented) for protecting employee entitlements.     

A framework for understanding individual response to regulation

Regulations to encourage behaviour change are often used by governments to achieve policy objectives. The success of regulations depends on the commitment of individuals to change behaviour in ways that comply with regulatory obligations. Understanding and predicting the motivation of individuals to change their behaviour is critical in assessing the likely effectiveness of proposed regulations. In this paper we present a novel framework for understanding and predicting the motivation of an individual to comply with regulations. The framework is based on two central ideas. The first idea uses the involvement construct to predict the motivation of individuals to comply. The second idea separates the influence of the regulation on individuals’ motivation to comply from the influence of the underlying policy issue on the motivation of individuals to comply. Through application to a case study we show the framework’s merit in predicting an individual’s possible behavioural responses to a regulation and how it assists regulatory agencies develop strategies to enhance compliance.     

Temporality in business networks: The role of narratives and management technologies

This paper addresses the nature of temporality in business networks. Approaches to temporality generally employ a dualistic approach: time can be understood as social and natural, tensed and untensed, subjective and objective, kairos or chronos, agency and structure. We examine these two approaches and suggest that the problem for situated actors is how to cope with and negotiate with these dualities. This is particularly salient in cases of innovation, when actors attempt to bring about their particular versions of the future facing acute problems of uncertainty. The innovation literature highlights the role of narrative in helping actors to negotiate uncertainty and construct spaces for action in a world of continuous flow. The emphasis on narrative tends to obscure the role of management technologies in anchoring narratives into existing routines and procedures as well as relate these technologies to the untensed world of chronos. Management technologies help stabilise entities and relationship amongst entities in what otherwise is a chaotic world of events and flux.     

The neoliberal project—Local taxation intervention in Scotland

This paper is concerned with one of the central economic aspects of neoliberalism namely taxation. The shifting of the burden of taxation from the rich to the poor has been one of the raft of neoliberal economic reform policies. However, there has been a growing social movement in the UK against such a regressive form of taxation. This was led by a socialist political party in Scotland.¹ This party devised a new taxation system which was specifically designed to reverse some of the economic inequalities brought about by the neoliberal turn. The new form of taxation, the Scottish Service Tax formed a bill (the Council Tax Abolition and Service Tax Introduction (Scotland) Bill) which was put before the Scottish Parliament in February 2006. This paper, taking a political-economy perspective, sets the possibilities presented by the bill within the context of neoliberalism.     

TOWARDS A COMPARISON OF CHEMICAL-FREE AND CONVENTIONAL FARMING IN AUSTRALIA

The classes of benefits and costs, private and external, arising from a partial movement from conventional to chemical-free farming are considered, a report is provided on a comparison of physical and financial characteristics of chemical-free and conventional cereal/livestock farming in southeastern Australia, a key finding is that private net returns were similar for the two types of farmers, A favourable change in net externalities could be expected from a movement towards chemical-free farming, policy implications relating to the taxation of chemical use in agriculture, and to research, extension and marketing are discussed.     

中国启动新循环

对许多发展中国家而言,中国经济繁荣的冲击正形成一个完整的循环。去年,中国超越美国,成为巴西最大的贸易伙伴。这两大发展中国家或许正在开辟一条全新道路,有可能成为未来十年规模最大的全球经济结构调整之一。