Friend or Foe? The effects of contingent employees on standard employees' work attitudes

Using data from a large-scale national survey of employers and employees in Britain, we examine the impact of the presence of contingent employees on work attitudes of standard (full-time, indefinite-term) employees. Drawing on differing explanations for the increased use of contingent employment arrangements, we derive competing hypotheses about how this use affects standard employees' work perceptions and attitudes, and explore the impact of a number of potentially intervening factors. We find that contingent employees have little effect on standard employees' perceptions of work overload, but strongly reduce perceived job security, which in turn, mediates the negative effects of contingent employees on job satisfaction and organizational loyalty.     

Gendering and Gender in Public Service Organizations: Changing Professional Identities Under New Public Management

This article examines the enactment of new public management (NPM) in public service professional organizations, the nature of professional/managerial subjectivities promoted within the NPM discourse, and the implications for male and female professionals/managers. The article has two aims. First, taking a gender ing organization perspective, it explores the gendered meanings of NPM and the promotion of new professional/managerial subjectivities. Second, focusing on gender in organizations, the article then considers the implications of the enactment of NPM for male and female professionals/managers. The article illustrates the complex, manifold and fluid nature of both the meanings ascribed to NPM and individual responses. It is argued that a gender lens offers a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of NPM enactment and the implications of this for public service professionals/managers are considered.     

The Quest for Economic Stability: Roosevelt to Reagan

We investigate whether positional concerns (Veblen [1899] 1970; Hirsch, 1976) vary along several dimensions and domains, namely goods vs. bads, private vs. public, oneself vs. oneself s children, socially visible vs. nonsocially visible. Using a hypothetical survey in France, we replicate the empirical strategy of Solnick and Hemenway (1998; 2005) and test a larger set of socio-demographic variables that can be related to positional concerns. Despite some differences, our results are mostly consistent with those of Solnick and Hemenway (1998; 2005). We emphasize some policy implications.     

The Search for a Good Measure of Magazine Readership: The TGI-Simmons Controversy

Magazine readership has been important to the advertising field for a long time. Interested parties have included agencies, clients and the magazines. With the introduction of Target Group Index (TGI) the routine use of W. R. Simmons and Associates syndicated services has been questioned as well as what “readership” really means.

This project attempts to accomplish three objectives: (1) develop a few normative standards for measuring magazine readership. (2) compare TGI and Simmons in terms of their performance against these standards, (3) develop some reasoning for where there are, in some cases, substantial discrepancies between results that are designed to measure the same construct. The authors wish to thank Dr. Alan D. Fletcher of the Department of Advertising, University of Tennessee, for his helpful comments.