Remuneration practices in the UK hospitality industry in the age of the national minimum wage

This article examines why the introduction of the National Minimum Wage has been less disruptive in hospitality than had been anticipated. It shows that in hospitality establishments pay rates are not the outcome of managerial decision making alone, but are influenced by broader economic and social processes. Furthermore, key aspects of the ‘total reward system’ held to exist in hospitality, the provision of live-in accommodation for workers and the practice of tipping, on which there are specific National Minimum Wage regulations, are generally not treated as remuneration. This highlights the need for a reconsideration of how remuneration practices in hospitality operate.     

Trusting and Monitoring Business Partners throughout the Relationship Life Cycle

Purpose: The goal of this research is to understand the theoretical and empirical confluence of multi-dimensional trust with the role of monitoring as business partnerships unfold and evolve dynamically throughout the course of the relationship life cycle.

Methodology: A pilot study is run in which in-depth interviews are conducted with managers to glean their insights regarding the theoretical questions and to verify terminology for survey items. A large-scale survey study is then conducted to test hypotheses about the relationships among the focal constructs. The participants in both studies are real procurement professionals reporting on their primary supplier relationships. The qualitative study and the samples of real world managers enhance the external validity of this research.

Findings: In early stages of business relationships, monitoring and benevolence trust interact to positively impact business performance. Continued monitoring in later stages interact with benevolence trust to performance detriment. Conversely, monitoring and competence aspects of trust hurt business performance in earlier life stages.

Research Implications: Theoretical frameworks that include the constructs of multidimensional trust, monitoring, and relationship life cycle stages can build on the nuanced 3-dimensional contingencies established in this research. In particular, this research furthers the concepts of monitoring and the relationship life cycle.

Practical Implications: There is a time and a place to trust one's business partners, and a time and a place to verify their trustworthiness. As business partnerships are forged, monitoring and benevolence trust can be particularly fruitful.

Contribution: In this research, the authors build on the business marketing literature that has begun to delineate the benevolence and competence dimensions of trust in business relationships; they demonstrate the role that partner monitoring has in maintaining business commitments; and establish how these effects are modified over the stages of the relationship life cycle; i.e., from exploration, to build-up, maturity, and decline.     

The price of corporate professionalisation: analysing the corporate capture of professions in the UK

Recent debates on the organisation of expert labour focus upon either the growing dominance of managerialism over traditional professions or the unwillingness/inability of new expert occupations to professionalise. Such arguments frequently disregard expert occupations that continue to deliberately pursue professionalisation to improve their status and influence in organisations and wider society, and therefore overlook the consequences of contemporary professionalisation for expert labour. Here we critically examine one ‘corporate profession’, project management in the UK, which has pursued ‘corporate professionalisation’ by renegotiating relationships with the state, individual members and private corporations, with some degree of success. Combining documentary analysis and interviews with professional association officials and practising project managers, this article analyses the pressures behind the corporate professionalisation strategies of this expert occupation, assessing the impact of moves towards a new model of corporate professionalism that marginalises the interests of professionals while embracing employer agendas.     

PRICE-LEVEL TARGETING AND STABILISATION POLICY: A SURVEY

Abstract.  This paper surveys recent articles on the costs and benefits of price-level targeting, focusing its use as a tool for stabilisation policy. It discusses how price-level targeting can affect the short-run trade-off between output and inflation variability by influencing inflation expectations. It reviews how assigning an explicit price-level target to a central bank that is unable to commit to its future policies can improve economic performance. It surveys other potential benefits and costs. Among the costs, it underlines the importance of perfectly rational expectations for the optimality of price-level targeting, and an exacerbation of the time inconsistency problem.     

“变绿”仅仅是一个起点

越来越多的企业领导人开始从伦理和社会的视角对可持续课题进行严肃的思考，他们相信做正确的事是公司实现基业长青的前提。     

他们拥有道路——车辆图形吸引公众的注意

创业格言:“当处于顺境时,一个企业应当进行宣传;当经济不景气时它也承担不起不做广告的后果。而今这个格言带来了特别的共鸣。企业家和首席财务官可能感到恐慌以致于整肃营销预算,但企业和消费者仍然在购买货物和服务,不做广告只会让品牌的知名度处于危险     

Ubiquitous interactive visualization of 3D mantle convection using a web-portal with Java and Ajax framework

We have developed a new strategy and espouse a novel paradigm for large-scale computing and real-time interactive visualization. This philosophy calls for intense interactive sessions for a couple of hours at a time at the expense of storing data on many disk drives during regular or heroic runs on massively parallel systems. We have already carried out successfully real-time volume-rendering visualization by employing hundreds of processors for a grid with over 25 million unknowns. Both Cartesian and spherical 3D mantle convection are visualized. The volume-rendered images are viewed on a large display device, with many panels holding around 13 million pixels. We will employ a software strategy involving an hierarchical rendering service, which will have as software an Ajax interface for interactive visualization of large data sets on many different platforms from desktop PC’s to hand-held devices, such as the OQO and the Nokia N-800. An option for stereo viewing is also implemented. We have installed a user interface as web application, using Java and Ajax framework in order to achieve over the Internet reasonable accessibility to our ongoing runs. Our goal is to expand the array of interactive devices, which will make it feasible to carry out ubiquitous visualization and monitoring of large-scale simulations or onsite events and to allow for collaborations across oceans.     

Impact of an audit reporting expert system on learning performance: A teaching note

Audit reporting is a complex process, requiring knowledge of various reporting issues and corresponding report formats. To address the difficulty of presenting audit reporting concepts to students, the authors constructed and used an audit reporting system, named AUDPORT, in their first-level auditing classes at two major state universities. This paper reports the use of AUDPORT as a teaching aid and its impact on students' performance.     

Follow my leader? Lookalike retailer brands in non-manufacturer-dominated product markets in the UK

Retailer brands are a common feature of most retail sectors today, and have made an important contribution to the financial performance of Britain's retailers. Over the past two decades, as retailers have adopted the marketing approach in their business activities, the nature and role of retailer brands in marketing strategies has changed. This paper reviews the development of retailer brands in the grocery market, from their original position as product alternatives to leading manufacturer brands, to brand alternatives in their own right. Part of this transformation has involved a revision of the packaging and presentation of these product ranges and this has led to accusations of copy-catting and theft of brand identity. The paper then explores the lookalike debate and reports on an exploratory study of retail brand recognition and the lookalike situation in those product markets which are not dominated by established manufacturer brands.