Collectivism versus individualism in Dutch employment relations

From a very centralistic and collectivistic tradition after World War Two, Dutch employment relations now show a trend towards radical decentralisation and individualisation. What might be the consequences of this trend for labour relations? Do developments still fit within a movement towards ‘organised decentralisation’ or will the existing system of labour relations be hollowed out and destroyed? And what will be the consequences for ER management at company level? We present empirical data on how companies deal with their decentralised and individualised employment relations. It appears that, in the main areas such as labour contracts, working time arrangements, reward systems and development plans, decentralisation and individualisation are taking place. It has also become clear that management as well as workers support this and that a new form of negotiation between them is developing at workplace level, resulting in what we call ‘third contracts’ that are additional to the initial labour contract and the collective agreement. Our results also highlight the pragmatic way in which companies deal with these decentralised and individualised employment relations, which, nevertheless, remain linked to the national and collective levels of bargaining. Within the multilevel system of Dutch employment relations a new balance between collectivism and individualism is emerging.     

What Governance Roles do Municipalities use in Dutch Local Social Support Networks?

Abstract

Until now, there is no consensus about variations in governance roles. This consensus is necessary to enable researchers to examine how network are governed well. In this article, the governance roles are considered to be clusters of consistent choices on a top-down versus bottom-up continuum, regarding nine governance activities. Our results reveal that three governance roles can be discerned: top-down, intermediate and bottom-up governance roles. Furthermore, these roles are applied by municipalities with specific (network) characteristics. Our results open the black box of network governance and might facilitate municipalities to make choices regarding their role in the new network era.     

Service Satisfaction: An Empirical Analysis of Consumer Satisfaction in Financial Services

Does the widely accepted espectancy-disconfirmation model apply to situations within a financial services context? Or could it be, due to specific characteristics of services, that a different model applies? This paper addresses these questions and tests the relationships between consumer expectations, performance, disconfirmation, .satisfaction and repeat purchase in a lisrel model. The results would suggest that the relevancy of disconfirmation is fairly apparent and that expectations have only an indirect influence on satisfaction where financial services are concerned. The performance level of financial services however has a strong positive direct effect on satisfaction.     

The Profits of the Dutch East India Company's Japan Trade

This article analyses the eighteenth-century accounting practices of the Japanese trading station or factory of the Dutch East India Company ( Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC). The factory's trade and its reported profits declined during the eighteenth century, but because of the complexity of the accounting issues involved, contemporaries held different views on whether the accounting data supported a continuation of the factory's operations. For similar reasons, some historians have argued that the maintenance of the factory in the face of declining profits illustrates the poor quality of the VOC's management, while others have argued in favour of the economic viability of the factory. The purpose of this article is to a more comprehensive analysis of the accounting issues facing the Japanese factory present in the eighteenth century than offered to date, in order to propose a way in which the accounting records may be approached as a source of data for historical research.
The conclusions are twofold. First, there were three main accounting issues facing the factory that should be considered when interpreting the accounting records. These issues can be summarized as transfer pricing, currency translation and overhead allocation. While all these issues have been recognized in the literature at some stage, they have never been considered in combination. Second, we tentatively conclude that if the recorded accounting figures are adjusted as proposed, they support the view that keeping the factory open was a correct decision from a commercial point of view.     

Inflation Dynamics and Monetary Strategies: Evidence from Six Industrialized Countries

In this paper we address the issue whether a switch to inflation targeting can help build monetary policy credibility and can substitute for a track record of low inflation. To this end, we empirically evaluate the success of inflation targeting in Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom and investigate to what extent the joint dynamic processes of inflation and nominal interest rates in these three countries have experienced a structural break at the time of the regime switch to inflation targeting. The experience of Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom is matched with the United States, Australia and Germany. We find that the effectiveness of the direct inflation targeting approach to quickly increase low-inflation credibility so far is ambiguous and that this strategy is not clearly superior to intermediate monetary strategies.     

Exploring e-government futures through the application of scenario planning

In this paper, we examine the impact of information and communications technologies (ICT) on government departments/agencies and the contribution of external agents to change and development programs. We present empirical evidence of externally facilitated change to mindsets and patterns of behavior within local government through use of a scenario planning-based approach. Our aim was to facilitate the organizational actors' conduct of investigation of the ‘limits of the possible’ for a range of plausible futures and determination of strategic responses to these. Participants used their own current knowledge and understanding as a basis for development, with the introduction of external ‘expertise’ to challenge their thinking and to expand their understanding. Following this, we facilitated the participants' elucidation of key uncertainties on the future, exploration of the relationships between them and possible outcomes. The participants then constructed scenarios that outlined four possible and plausible futures. These held explicit meaning for the participants, enabled them to identify implications of each possible future in relation to structure and service requirements and informed analysis of current structure, service, etc. We compare and contrast the process and outcomes of our scenario-planning intervention (based on intuitive logics) with both those of other futures methodologies (decision analysis, Delphi and environmental scanning) and with other scenario methodologies (trend-impact analysis and cross-impact analysis). We argue that the external facilitation of internal generation of knowledge, understanding and meaning, and of exploration of the limits of the possible for the future, is a valuable tool for comprehending strategic choices. We conclude that our scenario approach, utilizing intuitive logics, enables organizational actors to make sense of the complexities and ambiguities that they face and so facilitates strategic change.     

Future inflation and the information in international term structures

This paper extends previous work on the information content of the term structure of interest rates using a newly constructed dataset for the United States, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands (1982–1991). Results significantly differ from Jorion and Mishkin (1991). Apparently, the relation between the term structure of interest rates and future inflation is highly period- and country-dependent. We provide new evidence that these results may be due to the inability of financial markets to accurately predict a term structure of inflation in combination with the conduct of monetary policy. This probably accounts for large variation in ex post real interest rate levels and the term structure of real interest rates. Consequently, it is unlikely that the term structure of nominal interest rates will serve as a good indicator of future inflationary developments.     

Towards a framework to understand purpose in Futures Studies: The role of Vickers' Appreciative System

There have been comments recently about the efficacy of Futures Studies (and scenario planning) projects, relating to confusion on knowledge aggregation and methodology, which can be summarised in the question: “how to determine the purpose of such projects”. The lack of a purpose framework makes it difficult for ‘clients’ initiating such projects to determine if outcomes meet their original expectations. This paper proposes a framework to help understand the nature, objective and purpose of Futures Studies (and scenario planning) projects, which we will argue helps to overcome these concerns. The proposed framework is based on Vickers' definition of an Appreciative System, highlighting how decision making involves three areas of judgment — reality judgment, value judgment, and instrumental judgment. It will be argued that decision-makers and policymakers call for Futures Studies projects when they become aware of an organizational deficiency in one or more of these areas.Each element, alone or in combination, could form the basis of a purpose definition for a Futures Studies project, and, therefore, needs to be considered to ensure that the project meets client expectations and is experienced as purposeful and rewarding. The paper elaborates on each of the three elements, and then discusses their integrated nature. This is followed by a discussion of the implications of Appreciative System theory for three key players in the decision making process, the organizational leadership, the professionals and the organization at large involved in the practice of Futures Studies (and scenario planning) projects.