The Americanisation of the European business system?

This article examines the impact of contemporary business practices within the American business system on established patterns of industrial relations (IR) management in European subsidiaries of US multinationals, specifically how established firm‐level settlements for the management of IR may or may not combine with host‐country effects to constrain such innovations. The empirical material leads us to evaluate subsidiaries of US multinationals as a contingent factor indicating that institutional effects at the level of the national business system are likely to be more embedded than the effects of ownership on employment and IR at firm level.     

Supplier involvement through certification: a case study

The Clarkson Company is located in the Reno-Sparks area of Nevada. We are a manufacturer of slurry valves for mining, pulp and paper, power generation, and various other industries. Because of the diverse nature of the applications for which the valves are used, the product can be configured a vast number of ways. Therefore, we use the assemble-to-order methodology for our master production scheduling. It became apparent over a decade ago that the use of materiel requirements planning (MRP) would aid us in controlling our low volume, high option mix environment. That journey led to The Clarkson Company becoming a Class A user of MRPII in June of 1990.     

Sustainable Design: Beyond the Innovation‐Driven Business Model

This essay discusses an evolving business model, the sustainability‐driven business model, that designers are especially well suited to implement and promote. Designers have a responsibility to connect and coordinate human needs and dreams with new opportunities and inspirations from science, technology, and business in order for products and their usage to be culturally relevant, economically productive, politically beneficial, and ecologically sustainable.     

Assessing the Comprehensiveness of Supply Chain Environmental Strategies

As environmental awareness grows, firms are expected to expand the scope of their environmental strategies beyond organisational boundaries and to address more comprehensively environmental issues in their supply chains and product life cycles. Drawing on different literature streams, international standards and corporate disclosure, this paper presents a conceptual framework for the quantitative assessment of the comprehensiveness of firms' environmental strategies. This framework allows us to capture: (i) the environmental inputs and outputs addressed, (ii) the firm versus supply chain orientation of environmental strategies, and (iii) the environmental management practices adopted by companies. We illustrate the application of this framework with a content analysis of corporate sustainability reports for a cross‐sectoral sample of sustainability leaders. Our results indicate that there is a need for greater specificity in environmental reporting and that, overall, companies remain firm‐oriented. It is also observed that supply chain orientation can generally be associated with stakeholder pressure. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Race discrimination at work: the moderating role of trade unionism in English local government

Workplace racism remains a serious issue despite over forty years of legislation alongside a raft of HRM policies. There remains limited research on the differences in employment experiences of British Black and Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) staff and their white colleagues. There is a power imbalance at work as between individual employees and management, and this lack of equity has been traditionally counterbalanced by strong workplace trade unionism. In particular, we know little about the role of trade unionism on the perception of workplace equality among BAME employees. Using more than 2,580 valid responses from full‐time employees in highly unionised local councils, this study shows that BAME employees have a significantly lower evaluation than their white colleague of fair pay and equal work environment. The latter fully mediates the negative perception between BAME staff and fair pay; and furthermore, the perception of union commitment to equality strengthened their views of a management‐supported equal work environment.     

The impact of trade on employment,welfare, and income distribution in unionized general oligopolistic equilibrium

This paper sets up a multi-sector general oligopolistic equilibrium trade model in which all firms face wage claims of firm-level unions. By accounting for productivity differences across industries, the model features income inequality along multiple lines, including inequality between firm owners and workers as well as within these two groups of agents, and involuntary unemployment. We use this setting to study the impact of trade liberalization on key macroeconomic performance measures. In particular, we show that a movement from autarky to free trade with a fully symmetric partner country lowers union wage claims and therefore stimulates employment and raises welfare. Whether firms can extract a larger share of rents in the open economy depends on the competitive environment in the product market. Furthermore, the distribution of profit income across firm owners remains unaffected, while the distribution of wage income becomes more equal when a country opens up to trade with a fully symmetric trading partner. We also analyze how country size differences and technological dissimilarity of trading partners affect the results from our analysis.     

Modelling jumps in electricity prices: theory and empirical evidence

Objective of this paper is to enhance the understanding of modelling jumps and to analyse the model risk based on the jump component in electricity markets. We provide a common modelling framework that allows to incorporate the main jump patterns observed in electricity spot prices and compare the effectiveness of different jump specifications. To this end, we calibrate the models to daily European Energy Exchange (EEX) market data through Markov Chain Monte Carlo based methods. To assess the quality of the estimated jump processes, we analyse their trajectorial and statistical properties. Moreover, even when the models are calibrated to a cross-section of derivative prices substantial model risk remains.