Worker representation and health and safety in small enterprises in Europe

The aim of this paper is to review the role that representative worker participation can play in contributing to better health and safety performance in small enterprises. The relevance of representative participation to health and safety in small enterprises is addressed and the challenges that the sector poses are discussed. Using a number of examples, including legislative approaches, trade union initiatives and joint trade union employer schemes in various countries, the paper explores some of the ways in which such challenges have been tackled.     

Unemployment: Subsidies and Minimum Wages

The author outlines the 1981 'Youth Workers Scheme' he devised, and contends it was both successful and cheap. Minimum wages and wages councils are pernicious, the first ensuring that young people are priced out of hobs and the second leading to the suppression of competition.     

Road pricing

Summary Under conditions of congestion, the social costs of motoring will exceed the private costs. The formula is: Social Cost=Private Cost (1+the elasticity of cost with respect to traffic flow). Thus the optimum tax under these conditions is equal to this elasticity coefficient×100 per cent of the private cost. A fluid-dynamic model, borrowed from physics, is used to develop a simple formula for the elasticity ofvelocity with respect to traffic flow. By postulating a relationship between cost and speed, this elasticity is convertedinto an estimate of the elasticity coefficient. And so one can obtain, for any specified speed, a value of this coefficient and cost; the product of these two then gives an estimate of the difference between social and private cost. In practice one cannot determine the speed independently; it emerges from the demand-supply interactions and so one must also postulate a demand function; but data problems are severe on the demand side. Lastly, some developments are considered — including network models and dynamic demand models. Lecture delivered in the Faculty of Economics of the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, on 21st May 1968. The author is Professor of Econometrics and Social Statistics at the University of Birmingham, and Advisor on Research, Graduate Centre for Management Studies.     

Transnational networking and business performance: Ethnic entrepreneurs in Canada

It is generally acknowledged that transnational networking plays an important role in promoting the performance of ethnic entrepreneurial firms. Yet distinctions between the different types of transnational networking and their effects on business performance have received scant attention in the literature, probably because ethnicity has been considered to be the main actor in the networking–performance relationship. This paper argues that one of the reasons why business performance differs across ethnic entrepreneurial firms is that ethnic entrepreneurs engage in dissimilar types of transnational networking. Analyses of the data generated by 720 ethnic entrepreneurs in Canada revealed that ethnicity, along with human capital and push/pull factors, both of which are part of our conceptual framework, plays a central role in the engagement of different types of transnational networking and that the different types of transnational networking affect business turnover (sales) and business survival (age). Push/pull factors were found to play a marginal role in business performance. These results highlight the competitive market that immigrants and members of ethnic minority groups encounter in the hosting economy and stress the value of transnational networking.     

Attention All Shoppers,Queer Customers in Aisle Two: Investigating Lesbian and Gay Discrimination in the Marketplace

In this paper, drawing on epistemologies in social and behavioral sciences, we discuss the tenuous social-cultural climate of sexual minorities within markets. Discourses across disciplines address the socio-political and cultural evolution of sexual minorities, most notably self-identified and out lesbians and gay men. Yet, consumptive and marketing spheres offer mixed metaphors about the value and desirability of lesbians and gays, and often work to enact the homophobic at an institutional level. We review research on homonegative bias and heteronormativity within psychological and sociological domains, and then illustrate how homonegativity toward perceived lesbians and gays is structurally enacted within the marketplace. We posit four methodological strategies that may be used to further research queries in these domains, and comment on the ethical parameters of using deception to investigate discriminatory behavior against (perceived) lesbians and gay men.