Opportunities to work at home in the context of work‐life balance

Discussion of ‘work‐life balance’ and ‘family‐friendly’ employment is much in vogue among politicians and business leaders. Often, but not always, working at home is included within such practices. However, the concepts of work‐life balance and family‐friendly are commonly left ill‐defined by researchers and policymakers alike. In this article we outline formal definitions of these terms, which place spatial issues ‐ and hence working at home ‐ at the heart of the debate. This leads us on to examine working at home through the theoretical lens offered by attempts to explain the rise of work‐life balance arrangements. Twelve hypotheses emerge from the literature and are tested on the management data contained in the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey or WERS98. Many of these hypotheses pass weak statistical tests but fail on stronger logistic regression tests. The article shows that the option to work at home is more likely to be available in the public sector, large establishments and work environments in which individuals are responsible for the quality of their own output. These workplaces are typically less unionised but not especially feminised.     

Review of Truth or Profit: The Ethics and Business of Public Accounting by Dean Neu and Duncan Green

Truth or Profit: The Ethics and Business of Public Accounting, by Dean Neu and Duncan Green, addresses timely issues from an original and creative perspective. The subtitle of the book describes its theme ‐ namely, the tension between the business and professional “calling” of the public accounting profession in Canada. It tracks the history of the public accounting profession in Canada from its inception until 2006, often through the eyes of the editor of the principal contemporary professional accounting magazine/journal. A subplot is that of the “normal accident", a term that is used to describe both the inevitability of this tension and the crises it produces from time to time. This work, slim (164 pages) and affordable, would be a useful resource for an upper‐level course that considers accounting ethics. Dans leur ouvrage Truth or Profit: The Ethics and Business of Public Accounting, Dean Neu et Duncan Green se penchent sur les questions de l'heure sous un angle original et créatif. Le sous‐titre du volume en indique le thème: celui de la tension entre les exigences commerciales de l'expertise comptable et ses exigences professionnelles, au Canada. Les auteurs relatent l'histoire de la profession d'expertise comptable au Canada, de sa création jusqu'en 2006, souvent à travers les yeux de l'éditeur du principal magazine contemporain sur la profession comptable. L'ouvrage traite, au second plan, de l'«accident normal», expression utilisée pour décrire à la fois le caractère inévitable de cette tension et les crises qu'elle provoque, à intervalle. L'ouvrage, succinct (164 pages) et abordable, peut être une ressource utile dans le cadre d'un cours de niveau supérieur portant sur l'éthique de la comptabilité.     

Warning Lights on the Dashboard

Many businesses operate legally while pushing the ethical values of society. This case follows the actions of a manager who uses particular metrics to improve his business at the cost of increasing the community's ethical concerns. The objectives of the case are to have students recognize ethical concerns arising from the metrics, assess how these impact business strategy, propose improvements while understanding the ethically sensitive environment in which the business operates, and devise an effective approach to persuade others to implement proposed changes. This case demonstrates to students the complexity of many ethical issues in business and challenges them to consider the interaction between ethical boundaries and a profitable corporate strategy. It highlights the importance of ensuring that both qualitative—here, ethical—and quantitative considerations are incorporated in any management accounting decision‐making tool.     

Trust in financial services: Impact of institutional trust and dispositional trust on trusting belief

Trust is important in strengthening the relationship bond between firms (trustees) and customers (trustors) generally and has been identified as having a particularly crucial role to play in the financial services sector given the damaging impact of recent turbulence and uncertainty on consumer confidence. This article reports on the findings of a study, which draws from the interdisciplinary convergent theories of trust to examine how two key constructs from this literature (that is, institutional trust and dispositional trust) influence consumers’ trusting belief about their main bank. Data was gathered through a survey distributed to a convenience sample of UK-based employees working for a large corporation. The findings highlight the importance of structural assurance and to a lesser extent situation normality on trust. Nevertheless consumers remain unconvinced that their main banks share the same values as their own and that their communications are absolutely transparent.     

The process of assisted negotiations: A network analysis

This article introduces network analysis as a supplement to current research on the process of negotiations. We briefly review the literature on negotiations involving third parties, and argue that to understand fully the dynamics of dispute resolution, it is important to examine processes in addition to outcomes. We propose social network methods as a way to examine systematically the step-by-step process through which self-interested third parties influence negotiated outcomes. To illustrate, we analyze process data from triads in an agent-assisted negotiation. We describe three classes of results. First, we describe the basic properties of the third-party-assisted negotiation process (e.g., we found agents to be the most active players in the negotiation process—they initiate interactions significantly more frequently than buyers or sellers). Second, we study the changes in the process characteristics due to experimental conditions (i.e., we found the interactive patterns to vary depending on the information made available to the third party). Finally, we examine the relationships between the systematic process measures and standard outcome measures. We argue that these measures are complementary, and that the process should be informative with respect to interpreting, predicting, and managing outcomes.This research was supported in part by a grant from the Dispute Resolution Research Center.     

Contents of Volume 5

Volume Contents

Contents of Volume 5     

When consumers become project backers: The psychological consequences of participation in crowdfunding

Crowdfunding involves financing new ventures by relying on a large number of individual project backers who typically receive the venture's new product as a reward for their financial support. In three experimental studies, it is revealed that crowdfunding participation increases the extent to which consumers can personally connect to and identify with the focal venture compared to customers who merely buy the product in a classic market exchange setting (the baseline in our analysis). This identification process, which is rooted in the insight that one's financial contribution is perceived to be more meaningful to the focal venture, is also shown to trigger behavioral effects on important outcome variables such as increased subsequent consumption of the venture's products and more positive word-of-mouth behavior. The studies thus validate the idea that crowdfunding may be an effective tool to build strong(er) relationships with the venture's initial customer base. Hence, crowdfunding might not only answer the question “Where could I get funding from?” but also another: “Where can I effectively connect with my future customers?” The findings further point to interesting consequences for participating consumers: because the venture is more strongly perceived as theirs, this means that also the associations linked to it may rub off more strongly on their sense of self compared to customers who merely buy the same venture's product in a classic market exchange setting. Crowdfunding participation may thus more strongly effect a qualitative change in the consumer's self-concept.     

Developing pre-service primary teachers’ understanding of engineering through engineering habits of mind and engagement with engineers

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - This paper explores how primary teachers might be prepared through their pre-service training to feel more confident to include...