Trade Unions and Work‐life Balance: Changing Times in France and the UK?

The mixed empirical findings to date have indicated that some, but not all, unions in industrialized countries are actively involved in campaigning and bargaining around work–life balance (WLB) issues, as part of a modernization agenda linked to feminization and to 'positive flexibility'. This article seeks to identify factors that might encourage or inhibit trade unions from involvement in WLB issues, within a cross-national comparative perspective focusing on two countries (France and the UK) that have contrasting working time regimes and approaches to WLB. It draws on original research carried out in two sectors — insurance and social work — in these two countries. The article links the emergence of union WLB programmes and bargaining agendas to gender-equality concerns within the union and to the gender composition of the sector, as well as to the working time regime, including the mode of action, partnership being a significant corollary of WLB campaigning in the UK. We find support for the modernization thesis in the UK, particularly in the public sector, but within severe constraints defined by employer initiative.     

Does income inequality increase charitable giving?

Do households react to changes in the distribution of income in their localities by changing their charitable giving? The theoretical prediction of the effects of income inequality on giving is unclear. We study how changes in income inequality measured at the neighbourhood and municipality levels affect charitable giving by households in Canada between 1991 and 2006. We find that increases in inequality increase giving. Results are sensitive to the geographic dispersion of low‐ and high‐income households in neighbourhoods within a municipality. The effect on donations is smaller in areas with high levels of inequality at both neighbourhood and municipality levels.     

The empire strikes back: Adam Smith,John Stuart Mill,and the Robust Political Economy of empire

Recent scholarship regarding the idea of a U.S. Empire has raised serious questions as to the feasibility and desirability of imperial ambitions. This paper traces the debate over the net-benefit of empire back to the Classical economists. Adam Smith argued that the British Empire was a net cost while John Stuart Mill concluded the same empire was a net benefit. Contemporary arguments about a U.S. Empire map neatly to the divergent views of Smith and Mill. In addition to engaging in an exercise in history of thought, we use Smith’s political economy as a means of adjudicating between the different claims regarding the feasibility of empire. In doing so, we subject the claims of proponents of American Empire against the standard of robust political economy, which holds that intervention must generate desirable outcomes where less than ideal incentive and epistemic conditions hold. In doing so, we conclude that many of the claims made by proponents are fragile under less than ideal conditions.     

Learning from cost analyses: an illustration from the UK's New Deal for Disabled People (NDDP)

This article describes a cost analysis of an employment programme available to people claiming incapacity benefits in the UK. The NDDP was delivered locally by contracted providers called ‘job brokers’. The cost analysis found great variation among job brokers' costs and profitability, much of which seems attributable to differences in job broker size. The methods described here will be useful in evaluations wherever multiple institutions are contracted by governments to deliver services, especially when these institutions are involved in several different programmes.     

The Impact of Size,Stock Market Listing and Industry Type on Disclosure in the Annual Reports of Japanese Listed Corporations

This paper represents a contribution to rigorous testing of Japanese financial reporting and specifically reports on the impact of size, stock market listing and industry type on disclosure, both voluntary and mandatory, in the annual reports of Japanese listed corporations. The topic is of interest because findings in one country may not be applicable to Japan because of its so-called unique business environment and unique culture. It is found that size and listing status are important explanatory variables. In addition, manufacturing corporations were found to disclose significantly more information than other types of Japanese corporations. The interaction between industry type and quotation status was also found to be significant.     

Cheap Imports and the Loss of US Manufacturing Jobs

This study examines the role of international trade and specifically imports from low‐wage countries, in determining patterns of job loss in U.S. manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2007. Motivated by intuitions from factor‐proportions‐inspired work on offshoring and heterogeneous firms in trade, we build industry‐level measures of import competition. Combining worker data from the Longitudinal Employer‐Household Dynamics data set, detailed establishment information from the Census of Manufactures and transaction‐level trade data, we find that rising import competition from China and other developing economies increases the likelihood of job loss among manufacturing workers with less than a high school degree; it is not significantly related to job losses for workers with at least a college degree.     

Who are ‘managing’ the lawyers in China? Control and commitment in an evolving institutional and cultural context and gendered implications

National legal systems are distinctive with strong institutional legacies and societal contexts. Research on the lawyers' work and their operating environment in China has been limited. This study fills part of this gap by investigating the nature of work and career prospect, with gendered implications, in six Chinese law firms. We argue that the lack of commitment to each other between the employer and the lawyers is a result of the governance structure, culture and business process of the law firms, societal norms, market pressure and the active involvement of other stakeholders. The political, economic, social and physical insecurity that engulfs lawyers' work environment undermines their ability to uphold justice for the weak, standards of the profession and ethical values of the society. The study has implications for western law firms operating in China as well as for Chinese law firms that intend to internationalize as part of an emerging trend of Chinese professional services firms. It also has broader implications for human resource management of professional services organizations in China.     

Measuring the Effect of Federal Research Funding on Private Donations at Research Universities: Is Federal Research Funding More than a Substitute for Private Donations?

The nature of federal research funding has changed in the United States over the last 30 years. In part, federal research funding has changed in the distribution of funding across disciplines and across universities. Federal funding to universities with historically low levels of funding has also experienced greater growth than those universities with historically high levels of funding. In addition, universities have become more involved in the political process with respect to the allocation of funding for higher education. As the nature of government funding changes, this paper questions its effect on private donations to research and non-research universities. The general presumption of much of the existing theoretical work is that government and private funding for charitable goods are substitutes. Limited evidence exists to suggest, in some circumstances, there may be a positive correlation between these two sources of funding. Potentially, because the government undertakes the expense to gather information about the research universities, and engages in such activities as peer-review of research proposals, the government through its grant awards may provide a signal of quality of research or other information to donors that is less noisy than that available to private donors. Similarly, there may be other types of spillover effects from research funding to private donations. In this case, a change in government grants has both a positive and negative effect on private donations, suggesting a positive correlation between private and public donations if the effect from the dissemination of information is greater than the substitution effect of government grants. I examine data for private and public universities in the United States to measure the relationship between private and public donations under a fixed-effects OLS regression. I explore issues of bias from endogeneity or omitted variables and report the results from a two stage least squares regression in which I use a set of measures that affect federal research funding but not private donations. Regardless of the specification, the results suggest private and public donations are positively correlated for research universities and negatively correlated for non-research institutions. On average, increasing federal research funding by one dollar increases private donations by 65 cents at research universities, decreases private donations by 9 cents at universities whose highest degree granted is a masters, and decreases private donations by 45 cents at liberal arts colleges.     

Reviews

TECs UNDER SCRUTINY.

Finn, D. 1994: A New Partnership? Training and Enterprise Councils and the Voluntary Sector. London: Unemployment Unit, no price given, paper.

Boddy, M. 1995: TECs and Racial Equality: Training, Work Experience and Ethnic Minorities. Bristol: SAUS Publications, £11.50 paper.

REINVENTING A REGION.

Haughton, G. and Whitney, D. (eds) 1994: Reinventing a Region: Restructuring in West Yorkshire. Aldershot: Avebury, £37.50 cased.