An analysis of duration of unemployment: 1967–1979

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the duration of unemployment during the period 1967 – 1979 using the concept of a stationary register. The estimate of duration is obtained usingU=iD whereU is stock of unemployed,i is total inflows entering the pool of unemployed andD is duration of unemployment. Both ratio and regression estimates suggest that duration of unemployment has increased from 1.90 months to 4.5 months and this increase cannot be explained entirely by search-turnover views.     

Competitiveness, partnership — and democracy? Putting the “local” back into London government

The division of the powers and responsibilities of government in London has been a constant source of friction and debate between central and local government. In the wake of the abolition of the Greater London Council, the Conservative government waited for the corporate sector to take the lead. When this failed to materialise, a complicated array of unelected agencies and partnerships were constructed to promote London, deliver services and allocate expenditure. This paper reviews the nature and function of these organisations and examines proposals for regional development agencies and an elected strategic authority for the capital arising from the election of a Labour government in May 1997. While pointing to considerable organisational innovation, for instance in the setting up of the Government Office for London, it is argued that, during 18 years of Conservative government, the emphasis on policy delivery through a variety of discrete partnership agencies deliberately overlooked issues of subsidiarity and local accountability. Thus the debate about the relationship between central and local government in London reflects substantial philosophical differences between the two parties. The Labour government's proposals for a strategic authority and regional development agency will require a substantial reallocation of powers and functions between a number of overlapping and competing agencies and a redefinition of what are legitimately local and central functions.     

Why H does not measure information: the role of the “special case” legerdemain solution in the maintenance of anomalies in normal science

Anomalies or contradictions threaten a paradigm, and if they cannot be ignored, they must be either shown to be false, or must be resolved. Two common anomalies in the systems literature are examined: the contention that H measures information; and the contention that heat increase leads to entropy increase. It is shown that when faced with such anomalies, paradigm adherents often resort to legerdemain solutions, which appear to resolve the anomaly, either verbally or mathematically. Legerdemain solutions generally utilize special cases such as maximum or minimum values or equilibrium conditions, and will not hold for the general case. Thus they do not resolve the anomaly, but only appear to (hence the name legerdemain). It is shown further that legerdemain solutions are often responses to anomalies which are not major contradictions, but are rather the result of confusion in second-order or meta-paradigms. The satisfactory solution lies not in an appeal to a legerdemain solution, but in adherence to the consistent general principles of the primary paradigm, even if this necessitates some revision of terminology or principles in the secondary paradigm.     

Perceived human resource system strength and employee reactions toward change: Revisiting human resource's remit as change agent

Although scholars have highlighted human resource's (HR's) important role as a change agent, we know little about the extent to which HR influences the change context to foster positive employee responses and support organizational changes. This study positions perceived HR system strength as an important internal context factor that influences employees' reactions toward change. Drawing on emotion theory and social exchange theory, we analyze the mechanisms through which employees' perceptions of HR system strength lead to positive employee responses to organizational change. Data from 704 employees in a UK police force showed that employees' perceptions of HR system strength were positively related to their ability to cope with organizational change and that this relationship was simultaneously mediated by state positive affect and perceived organizational support. Moreover, our findings demonstrated that coping with organizational change was positively related to employees' change‐supportive behavior. This study is important because it broadens the remit of HR's role as change agent and provides valuable insight into how HR positively influences employee outcomes during organizational change.     

Demands or Resources? The Relationship Between HR Practices,Employee Engagement,and Emotional Exhaustion Within a Hybrid Model of Employment Relations

This article explores the ways in which employees may experience and respond to tensions inherent in the mix of potentially conflicting human resource (HR) practices that compose hybrid models of employment relations. By drawing on the job demands–resources (JD‐R) literature and viewing HR practices as “demands” and “resources,” we explore the impact of performance management and employee voice practices on employee well‐being, as exemplified by engagement and emotional exhaustion, in a large public‐sector organization in Ireland. Our findings suggest that employee voice mechanisms may act as a resource in both enhancing engagement and in counterbalancing the demands presented by a performance management system, thus reducing the deleterious effects of emotional exhaustion. Our study extends understanding of hybrid models of human resource management (HRM) and of the ways in which employees manage the contradictory signals that such models may send in terms of performance expectations. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Health,height, and the household at the turn of the twentieth century

This article examines the health and height of men born in England and Wales in the 1890s who enlisted in the army at the time of the First World War, using a sample of recruits from the army service records. These are linked to their childhood circumstances as observed in the 1901 census. Econometric results indicate that height on enlistment was positively related to socio‐economic class, and negatively to the number of children in the household in 1901 and the proportion of household members who were earners, as well as to the degree of crowding. Adding the characteristics of the locality has little effect on the household‐level effects. However local conditions were important; in particular the industrial character of the district, local housing conditions, and the female illiteracy rate. These are interpreted as representing the negative effect on height of the local disease environment. The results suggest that changing conditions at both household and locality levels contributed to the increase in height and health in the following decades.     

Assessing editorial preferences towards Industrial Organization articles

In light of widespread specialization of research and teaching, it seems appropriate to supplement the existing general rankings of economics journals with subdiscipline-specific rankings. That is the primary objective of this paper. The availability of subdiscipline-specific rankings also permits both (i) alternative journal ranking methods for the general discipline that account for the breadth of a journal's impact across specialized fields, and (ii) estimation of the relative weights implicitly associated with each field in traditional disciplinary journal rankings. The results are robust to the exclusion of self-citations.