The supply of qualified nurses: a classical model of labour supply

The need to ensure adequate numbers of nurses is a key requirement of the current modernization of the UK NHS. However, it is unclear how effective wages are as an instrument to maintain or increase the nursing workforce, both in terms of absolute numbers and in the number of whole time equivalents. This study sets out to estimate a classical model of labour supply for British qualified married or cohabiting nurses and midwives, looking at both the participation decision and the hours of work supplied. Data are from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey over the years 1999–2000. Participation and hours of work are found to be inelastic with respect to own wage. These results suggest that increasing the wage would only have a moderate effect on labour supply. Interestingly, there is no significant statistical difference between having a child of nursery age (3–4) and having a child of school age (5–15) on participation and hours supplied. This suggests that recent policy initiatives to increase female labour force participation, through the provision of free nursery places, has been successful. Preliminary analysis of a split private and public sector sample suggests that hours supplied are completely inelastic with respect to wages in the public sector.     

Homeworking: negotiating the psychological contract

This article explores the psychological contract of female clerical homeworkers who work from home full‐time and are employed at a local authority. Qualitative interviews were carried out with homeworkers and their supervisors. Temporal flexibility was desired by all the homeworkers in order to achieve a better work–life balance, and was deemed important by women without children as well as those with childcare responsibilities. Our findings highlight that homeworkers were able to negotiate their own idiosyncratic deals with line managers in order to attain their desired levels of temporal flexibility. However, the issue of flexibility remains ambiguous with some supervisory staff being more comfortable with the concept than others, leading to some homeworkers enjoying different levels of temporal flexibility than their co‐workers. Our findings suggest that employees perceive flexibility idiosyncratic deals of co‐workers as fair as long as they achieve their own personal levels of temporal flexibility. The potential implications for organisations are discussed.     

Project failure from corporate entrepreneurship: Managing the grief process

In this paper, we complement social cognitive theory with psychological theories on grief in our discussion of two approaches to grief management – grief regulation and grief normalization – that hold promise for enabling corporate entrepreneurs to cope with negative emotions induced by project failure. We propose that to the extent that organizational members have high self-efficacy for recovering from grief over project failure, or this coping self-efficacy can be built through the social support offered by the organizational environment, regulating rather than eliminating, grief via normalization processes will explain superior learning and motivational outcomes.     

Domestic and Trade Equivalences of State Trading Importers

Market intermediaries in importing countries in the form of state trading enterprises (STEs) involve government manipulation of market structure that can be designated a nontariff measure because they are perceived to affect market access. However, the trade effect may be only an unintended consequence of the pursuit of the domestic concerns towards which the objectives of the STE are targeted as well as the extent of the exclusive rights that it is given. These objectives may reflect concerns about domestic distortions or, where these do not exist, redistribution towards producers or consumers. To this end, identifying the domestic effects of STEs through the use of producer and consumer subsidy equivalents that complement measures of the trade distorting effect is important in gauging the overall impact of STEs. In this paper, we outline a method to measure these policy equivalences which can be readily applied to aid transparency in trade negotiations.