The changing job skills of female part‐time workers in Britain 1992–2006

The work situation of female part‐time workers has been a central focus of diverse interpretations of labour market disadvantage. While providing rather different accounts of why this should be the case, these share a view that part‐timers are largely confined to jobs with lower levels of skill than full‐timers. This article, drawing on nationally representative surveys, shows that the skill requirements of female part‐time jobs have improved significantly since the early 1990s relative to male full‐timers. While some sectors of part‐time work have benefited more than others, there is evidence of polarisation only with respect to part‐timers with different working hours. The overall rise in the relative skills of part‐timers poses significant issues about employer practice with respect to the wider involvement of part‐timers in the organisations for which they work.     

Effective global regularity and empirical modelling of direct, inverse, and mixed demand systems

Abstract .  This paper utilizes the notion of 'effective global regularity' and the intuition stemming from Cooper and McLaren (1996)'s General Exponential Form to develop a family of 'composite' (product and ratio) direct, inverse and mixed demand systems. Apart from having larger regularity regions, the resulting specifications are also of potentially arbitrary rank, which can better approximate non-linear Engel curves. We also make extensive use of duality theory and a numerical inversion estimation method to rectify the endogeneity problem encountered in the estimation of the mixed demand systems. We illustrate the techniques by estimating different types of demand systems for Japanese quarterly meat and fish consumption.     

GROWTH,EMPLOYMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT IN SOUTH AFRICA

The high rate of unemployment in South Africa stands out in an otherwise vastly improved set of macroeconomic fundamentals compared with the situation in the early 1990s. One might be tempted to argue that by this single indicator alone, the government's macroeconomic policies have been a failure. This paper explains why jumping to such a conclusion would be a mistake. Annual time series data on total formal sector employment is constructed dating back to 1946. The relationship between economic growth and formal sector employment is then measured and changes in the employment coefficient over time are described. The employment coefficient was found to be relatively stable, with a long‐term average value of 0.5. It returned to this value after a short‐lived collapse in the mid‐1990s. It is concluded that the main reason for the persistently high and rising rates of unemployment in South Africa since the mid 1990s was the very large increase in the labour force and not a historically deficient growth or employment performance of the economy.     

Utility of gambling II: risk,paradoxes, and data

We specialize our results on entropy-modified representations of event-based gambles to representations of probability-based gambles by assuming an implicit event structure underlying the probabilities, and adding assumptions linking the qualitative properties of the former and the latter. Under segregation and under duplex decomposition, we obtain numerical representations consisting of a linear weighted utility term plus a term corresponding to information-theoretical entropies. These representations accommodate the Allais paradox and most of the data due to Birnbaum and associates. A representation of mixed event-and probability-based gambles accommodates the Ellsberg paradox. We suggest possible extensions to handle the data not accommodated.      

HOW WELL HAS THE NEW DEAL FOR YOUNG PEOPLE WORKED IN THE UK REGIONS?

The UK New Deal for Young People (NDYP) is a mandatory active labour market programme aimed at helping unemployed young people into jobs. This paper examines how the programme affected hazard rates for unemployment exits across the UK regions in its first few years. The regional focus is motivated by the belief that differences between regional labour markets, between claimants, and differences in implementation may have led to differences in programme outcomes. The paper shows that NDYP increased outflows from unemployment in all regions but that its impact was larger in some regions than in others. The paper also shows differential NDYP impacts across the regions on destination-specific hazard rates from unemployment to employment, to education/training, to inactivity and to 'other'. Possible explanations for these results are then discussed.     

The Implementation of Saudization in the Hotel Industry

Saudi Arabia's localization policy, “Saudization,” aims to decrease reliance on expatriate workers, but it has been more successful in the public sector than in the private sector. This study explores the issues involved in effectively implementing the policy in the hotel industry in Saudi Arabia, specifically four- and five-star hotels. Tourism professionals, HR professionals, and hotel managers were interviewed and hotel managers and employees surveyed. The research specifies criteria for the effective implementation of Saudization and identifies the issues involved in implementing this policy in four- and five-star hotels. It makes recommendations, which could assist in implementing the policy effectively in the hotel industry.     

Stratography: The art of conceptualizing and communicating strategy

Representations of strategy tend to either be so generalized as to have little real meaning for employees, or go into such detail that people struggle to understand what is really required. The problem is this: a strategy not understood by those charged with implementing it is as bad as, or even worse than, not having a strategy at all. In 1983, a classic Business Horizons article by Karl Weick highlighted the importance of using graphical approaches to overcome strategy relation challenges; however, since then, little has been written regarding how managers might accomplish this successfully. Our article argues that individualized drawings of strategy, or what we term ‘stratography,’ could enable more effective conceptualization and communication of the strategic complexity that organizations face and the paths they are seeking to follow. Herein, we employ the latest thinking in cartography, educational philosophy, optics, graphic design, and military protocol to outline seven good practices of effective stratography.