Menopause and the workplace: New directions in HRM research and HR practice

This paper offers two key arguments. The first is that HRM scholars and HR practitioners need to pay a good deal more attention to the bi‐directional relationship between menopause and the workplace—how menopausal symptoms can affect women's experience of work and how work can exacerbate a woman's symptoms. We outline the social responsibility, demographic, legal and business cases which explain the urgency of more research and more concerted practice in this area. Our second argument concerns the importance of future research and practice adopting an intersectional political economy approach, in order to better understand the considerable differences between how women going through menopause transition experience work. Here, we offer arguments ranging from the macro‐ through the meso‐ down to the micro‐level of these differences, in so doing setting an agenda for the work to come on this very significant issue.     

International income-shifting regulations: Empirical evidence from Australia and Canada

This study examines market reactions to two different approaches to reduce income shifting in an international setting. The two methods are described and event studies are performed using stock market data from Canada and Australia. Samples of companies from both countries are partitioned into firms predicted to be affected versus unaffected by each country's event. Australia's regulation taxes profits arising in low-tax subsidiaries at Australian rates. Canada's method defines acceptable transfer prices (arm's-length transactions) and describes enforcement and audit policies. We find evidence of stock market reactions on some of the event dates for Australian and Canadian firms affected by these two approaches.     

Legislated Ethics: From Enron to Sarbanes-Oxley,the Impact on Corporate America

This paper explores the financial reporting scandals of the past decade and the resulting U.S. legislative attempts to impose ethical behavior and control the incidence of new reporting problems via the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. We begin with a brief historical perspective followed by assertions of ethical consequences of legislation with discussions of key recent corporate scandals, the motives for the frauds, and the consequences. Ethics related provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act are discussed with the potential impact of the legislation on the likelihood of similar future frauds and accompanying prognosis for future corporate ethical behavior.     

CSR, Co-optation and Resistance: The Emergence of New Agonistic Relations Between Business and Civil Society

This article examines the theoretical implications of the changing relationships between NGOs and businesses that have emerged as a response to the evolving agenda around CSR and sustainable development. In particular, it focuses upon examining whether greater engagement from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in this area reflects a process of appropriation and co-optation of protest by the business community. To examine this process, the article considers two forms of appropriation—appropriation of language and appropriation via participation—as a basis for discussion. While co-optation pressures are identified within both areas, the article argues that co-optation is identified almost as an inevitable outcome of engagement without significant consideration of the ability of movements to identify and respond to these processes. In identifying an alternative approach, the article utilises Mouffe’s framework of agonistic pluralism. Mouffe’s framework, it is argued, provides an understanding of the way in which agonistic relationships are emerging between NGOs and businesses while highlighting the continuance of conflict between parties struggling to influence the contested interpretations of responsible business.     

Explaining ethnic unemployment and activity rates: evidence from the QLFS in the 1990s and 2000s

This article uses data from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey for 1992–95 and 2000–03 to examine changes in ethnic unemployment and economic activity. The intention was to compare the relatively high unemployment era of the 1990s with the lower unemployment era of the 2000s. Although the ethnic minority unemployment situation has improved, only half of the difference between white and non‐white unemployment can be attributed to differences in observed characteristics. This suggests that a large unexplained discriminatory element still exists for most ethnic minorities. This has become larger for Pakistani/Bangladeshi men, implying a widening of the unexplained ethnic differential.     

Sustainable procurement practice

Procurement has a key role in sustainability as policies and practices need to extend beyond organisations' boundaries incorporating their whole supply chains. Guidelines on sustainability encourage procurement to make decisions that encompass the environmental, economic and social elements of the Triple Bottom Line (TBL). Taking a supply chain perspective, procurement also need to analyse how decisions impact on the TBL in respect of suppliers. The results of a survey of sustainable procurement practices in 44 English‐based UK Housing Associations (HAs), who are responsible for the provision of social housing, confirms prior research of other sectors that suggests 1) a failure to overcome inertia in relation to sustainable procurement; and 2) in the few examples where practices have been established, only the environmental element of the TBL is considered. The organisations surveyed have sustainability‐related issues in their missions and external and internal pressures to embed sustainability, yet this has not translated into widespread establishment of sustainable procurement. Recommendations to neutralise inertia are: firstly, take the experiences from other areas, e.g. innovation management, which stress the importance of inter‐organisational relationships; secondly, develop a small number of sustainable development indicators for procurement and, to take advantage of the relatively more‐advanced environmental practices to show how these elements have socio‐economic impacts; and finally, rather than focus on just the pressures and drivers of sustainability (as suggested in strategic models of sustainability), emphasise the triggers that overcome inertia and lead to changes in behaviour amongst procurement staff i.e. the establishment of ethical pricing models. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Assessing the adoption of HRM by small and medium-sized manufacturing organizations

This paper reports on exploratory research which uses a comparative case-study approach with sixteen organizations to study the extent to which HRM has been adopted in traditional brownfield-site, small and medium-sized UK manufacturing organizations. The paper begins with a comparison of HRM practices across the sixteen organizations. It is argued that the most common HRM practices in these firms appeared to relate more to a traditional small firm approach than to any proactive attempt to adopt HRM. The analysis shows that very few of the organizations adopted a strategic approach towards HRM with an integrated set of policies related to corporate strategy being put forward. Instead, the dominant approach seemed to be one of reactive, opportunistic pragmatism, showing little development from the standard modern approach identified as most common in the early 1980s. On the other hand, three organizations are shown to approximate quite closely to the model of strategic HRM and contextual analysis is undertaken to attempt to differentiate these from the other organizations. A comparison is also made between the findings of this research and a telephone survey that was conducted to assess the use of HRM in Leicestershire. The results of this show that a certain degree of caution should be exercised when accepting reports of organizational practices which do not involve researchers actually entering the organizations. Finally, the paper concludes that in order to get a better understanding of the situation facing these and other organizations we need to broaden our scope and consider the impact of changing economic, social and political conditions on management worker relations.